11. Take Me To Your Monument

LOOK AROUND ALL THE great cities of the world, and almost without exception, they will have one thing in common: Water. And lots of it.

Because of the principles of shipping costs, and the obvious need for settlements to have access to water, any group of people looking to establish a permanent civilization will take up shop around water, preferably the fresh, moving variety, what we call rivers.

New York, of course, is fed by the Hudson and East River. (Which isn't so much a river as a tidal strait, but I digress.)

Paris sits on the Seine. London on the Thames. Baghdad sleeps in a nook of the River Tigris.

Delhi feasts on the Yamuna. Cairo has the Nile.

And then there's the great city of St. Louis, sitting right on the Mississippi.


ST LOUIS WAS FOUNDED in 1763 by colonial French fur traders and sold to the United States by Napolean Bonaparte in what we call the Louisiana Purchase.

The young city figured prominently in America's expansion west, an era now commemorated with the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, where the world-famous Gateway Arch now sits.

Jefferson, of course, was the president that bought the territory from Napolean.

The arch was designed by Finnish-American architest Eero Saarinen (who appears regularly in crossword puzzles as either "______ Saarinen," "Architect Saarinen," or "TWA Terminal architect"), and was originally intended to be a perfect parabola.

Unfortunately, the parabola proved too difficult an engineering challenge to be completed, and the monument was modified to a catenary--the shape a chain makes when it hangs according to its own weight.

The Arch's shape can be expressed in a simple mathematical formula, something about the ratio between sines, cosines, tangents, and other ratios of triangles I was too depressed in high school to properly learn.


I FIND MYSELF irresistibly attracted to the Arch. I love its shape. The way sunlight glistens off its base. The way it doesn't look like a building or even a monument--which is bizarre, since it is a monument.

What the Arch feels like to me is math. It's as if we, as a civilization, constructed the Number 1. Not an actual giant Number 1, but the pure, abstraction of the Number 1, and turned it into steel and glass and tiny little elevator carts than can take you up to centrally-placed observation desks.

Christians have the cross. Jews the star of David. Muslims the Crescent.

And we that worship in the halls of Science, that believe in Constants and Forces and Parsimony and Principles, we have this catenary.

If aliens beamed down to a WalMart parking lot, woke me up, and asked me to take me to our leader, I would skip the White House, clean out the back seat of pretzel debris and motor oil stained napkins, and drive them to the Arch.

"There," I would argue, "our leader is science and reasoning and logic and philosophy and law."

"Really?" the aliens would respond, genuinely impressed. "Is that all true?"

"Yes," I would say. "Just look at the arch. We worship math."

They'd nod to each other, and conclude that an intelligent species does inhabit this planet, and I'd hope they'd skip over the civil wars in Eastern Europe, the famines in Africa, the tyranny in North Korea, and the Republicans in America violently opposed to public health care, and deem us worthy of life.


THE GREAT SHAH RUKH, he of Washington University School of Medicine, in the great city of St. Louis, and his young flame, Chevre, took me down to the Arch at night. A bank of high-powered search lights illuminated the bottom edges of the Arch.

The lights are so potent that they cast a shadow of the Arch on low-flying clouds.

We ran up the steps that double as an amphitheater in the summer months when Jimmy Eat World is in town, and catapulted full speed toward the spotlights.

They are strong and blinding. If you look right into their bulbs, your eyes will hurt and soon will your head. Better to stand over them and let the light hit the back of your head, like you do in the shower, when you need to take a second and relax.

You'll be immersed in light and watch the rays stream out to the sky, bouncing off the bottom-facing hull of the Arch, and your head will be a gray shadow on its skin.

Take pictures with your friends while you're at it. All the stupid things you'll do when presented with a giant spotlight beneath a world-famous monument.

All the things you would have done in Paris if they put the lights on the ground and not on the Eiffel Tower itself.

You will run around the legs of the Arch and play in its grasses and laugh about its ways, and then a police office will roll up in his patrol car and announce through his megaphone in a timbre usually reserved for Shakespearean soliloquies: "The park is closed."


"THE PARK CLOSES at 11pm. The park is closed."

So, like any educated, young citizens, we turned and left.

"Where are you going?" asked the voice.

We screamed out that we were leaving the park. We were returning to our cars and heading home. We walked in the opposite direction of the patrol car. The direction of home.

"Come here and tell me where you're going!"

Excuse us?

The voice demanded, "I said come here and tell me where you're going!"

We obeyed. We turned and walked toward the squad car. Our shoulders slumped with the nuisance.

"The park is closed," it barked at us. "The park closes at 11pm."

Yeah, we know, we screamed out. We're leaving.

"The park is closed. The park closes at 11pm."

We turned around. We left the park. It was past 11pm. It was closed.

"The park is closed."

Down the steps, we paused one last time to turn and take another picture of the arch at night. As I framed the catenary, the patrol car rolled in front of us, and barked at a group of teenagers to our right.

"The park is closed. The park closes at 11pm. The park is closed."


IT IS UNFORTUNATE to me that the municipality of St Louis decides to close the Arch at night, when it can be enjoyed with so much delight. Paris never closes the Eiffel Tower's park.

You can sit under it at three in the morning with a bottle of wine and no one will tap you on the shoulder and ask for ID.

What if aliens landed on Earth?

What if we had one chance to prove to them our merit as a modern civilization? What if we had one stroke in the night to take them to our monument of science, if, with their Sonic burgers in one hand, they hopped on the spotlight to make funny shapes and were greeted, in a moment of intergalactic peace, with the gruffy statement: "The park is closed."

Is the last chance of saving mankind then going to be an spaceship parked for the night outside a 24-hour WalMart?

God help us all, St Louis.























Chevre and The Great Shah Rukh strike a pose.





















Wherein the young narrator believes he can fly.
















The Arch at night from the steps after our first encounter with the patrol car but before our second.

10. Drink, Responsibly

ONE PROMISE I MADE to myself at the beginning of this road trip was that under no circumstances would I do any sort of driving under the influence of alcohol.

It's too much of a slippery slope to say to myself, hey, I just had a beer, I'll drive for another hour--and then, I just had two beers, I can make it four hours to West Branch, Iowa, in the dead of night.

Better not to try it all than find myself upside down in a ditch on the lower peninsula of Michigan.

But what I discovered is--much to my surprise, but I guess you learn things about yourself on trips like these --that even if I don't drink alcohol, under these circumstances, I still like bars.

I never thought I would like bars without the context of either alcohol--or, while we're on the topic of celibacy, sex, as I am traveling sans the Panda, and dutifully, and again, kind of surprisingly if you knew me in my younger years, monogamous--but it turns out that I am a creature of habit or maybe I just like dark places with loud music full of lonely people.

Bars, it seems, are my natural habitat.

And when I enter these watering holes now, I stroll right in, take my seat at the bar, and signal for one refreshingly delicious Pink Lemonade. Generous with the ice.

The bartenders tend to look at me a bit cross.

"Pink lemonade?"

Yes, you heard me.

The bartenders may accept that fact that I enjoy pink lemonade. That it's my thing. That I wake up in the morning sweating bullets from pink lemonade withdrawal. But what they can't piece together is why I came to a bar to drink pink lemonade.

They almost want to serve it to me for free.

"Is that all?"

"I don't know, you got wings?"

And invariably they'll think that I'm a recovering alcoholic. (I assure you, there is no recovering aspect to my alcoholism.)

They will accept the fact that, for the sake of my physical and mental health, I have forsaken alcohol. They can respect that.

They just can't understand why I'm abstaining from alcohol by going to a bar to drink pink lemonade.

Be sober at home. Buy a pink lemonade at the deli. But don't sit at my bar to drink that powdered sugar nonsense.

But what choice do they have? They bring it to me. I ask for a straw. And I sit at the bar, sipping my drink, checking the baseball scores, and charting my next stop.

Grand Rapids to Minneapolis. That's like nine and a half hours. Minneapolis to West Branch. Hmmm, I'll need four hours for that. West Branch to Moline? That's a two hour cakewalk.

It's what you do on a road trip.

9. The Will of Sam Walton

MADE IT TO SPRINGFIELD, IL, on a weary Tuesday night and immediately pulled into a local campsite for a night of rest.

The attendant greeted me at her station and I told her that I wanted the most basic package they had--no bells, no whistles--and she described the "primitive" option which was basically a patch of ground to park your car, and another patch to pitch your tent.

"How big is your tent?" she asked.

I replied that I honestly did not know how big my tent was. First of all, it wasn’t my tent. I was borrowing the tent from a friend. Second of all, even if it were my tent, I’ve never pitched a tent in my life. So I don’t know how big tents normally are.

And third of all, I had no intention of learning to pitch a tent in my fading condition in the dark of night. The first two I should have thought about before embarking on the trip, the last one I only should have thought about something that late afternoon or early evening.

"Honestly," I said to her, "considering the hassle, I think I’m just going to sleep in my car."

She rolled her eyes and returned to some paperwork which did not appear to keep her all that busy.

"Well,” she said, ”if you just want to sleep in your car, why don’t go just sleep in the WalMart parking lot? That’s free.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Yeah, Sam Walton left it in his will that anyone can sleep in his parking lots for the night.”

“And people go there and purpose and don’t get eaten by serial killers?”

She looked up at me. “I’m actually just about ready to close up here.”

I DON’T KNOW much about WalMart. We don’t have WalMarts in Queens. All I know comes from what I read about WalMart business practices and the general idea that there is a giant box store run amok across America where you can buy, at big discounts, anything from shaving cream to rifles to pizza.

As far as I know, Queens never said, “There shall be no WalMarts here!” the way Brooklyn has stood up against them and Home Depot.

(Even though Brooklyn has a Lowe’s, Barnes & Noble, and now a gigantic and stylish Ikea. Don’t get me started here, Brooklyn. They think Home Depot will ruin the neighborhood.)

Queens has a Home Depot in College Point. It’s tucked behind the DMV, the New York Times printing plant, and a bowling alley. Guess you can’t say a store will ruin the neighborhood if there is no neighborhood.

The people of Queens seem generally happy to have a place to buy cheap wood and mix paint for them on the spot. I don’t know of anyone who complains about the Home Depot of Queens.

We even a Home Depot on Northern Blvd. But Northern Blvd will accept any business. If boulevards were high school students, Northern would be the kid that would join the Debate Team, sit on the bench for soccer, and coordinate the band’s travels, just to make friends—but no one would talk to him outside of his responsibilities.

“Hey, Jimmy, can you pass me my shin guards?”

“Sure, buddy, here you go. Hey, are you going—”

“Thanks Jimmy.”

That’s what Northern is. The place where you do your business and hope no one sees you doing it there.

You think Northern would protest a WalMart? You could open Soylent Green and Northern wouldn’t protest.

THERE ARE FOUR WALMARTS in Springfield, IL, all more or less located on the outskirts of town where there is enough room to build giant parking lots you could sit your RV in for the night.

The lot I found had three such RVs lurking on their west flank. Not sure exactly what the protocol was, I parked near the entrance and headed inside.

There was a security guard who greeted me as I made it through the automatic doors—a promising sign if I was allowed to sleep there, but a disaster if I wasn’t.

To my left, the deli section. To my right, the cashiers. And before me, thousands of square feet of discount merchandise. Flashlights, blue jeans, softball mitts. You name it.

If zombies ever took over the Earth, I would make a fort of WalMart.

A laminated sheet in the bathroom scrolled the regular cleanings. I suppose this was as good a place as any to brush my teeth.

And wash my face.

And rinse my hair.

Freshened up for the night, I returned to my car, drove it between two RVs. They sat standing over my shoulder like twin older brothers.

Too much junk in the passenger seat to move things around, so I just reclined the driver’s seat all the way back, stuck my cap over my eyes to cover the gleam from the parking lot night lamps, and tried to fall asleep.

AT FIRST I WAS ANXIOUS. Every passing car carried thirteen migrant workers out to carjack and rape me. They had nothing better to do with their time. And in their hierarchy of Carjack-Rape Meat, Greeks from Queens ranked the highest.

We were the stuff of legends. What they told their Carjacking friends about at Carjacking conventions.

“This one time, swear to God, found a Greek sleeping in a Grey Hyundai in get this—Springfield, Illinois! You believe that.”

“No way.”

“Yes way.”

But the sleep did come. And when it came, it fell down on me—as it always does—like a ton of bricks. Toes twinkling approvingly. Drool on my forearm. I slept like a babe, only to be awoken by a vicious thunderstorm. Rain lashed the parking lot and lightning tore strips through the sky.

After initially rousing me, the rain served as a security blanket. A protective cover of discomfort and wetness. “Thank you, Zeus,” I said aloud.

The rain was my bodyguard. Who gets carjacked in the rain? No one.

Carjackers stay home when it rains.

Everyone knows that. The rain. The snow. Any kind of precipitation. Cold, even. All these are carjacker deterrents. Carjackers are the opposite of mailmen. Everything keeps carjackers from their stated goals.

Carjacking is a fair-weather sport. It’s for Florida and Southern California. In New York, all the muggings take place in dark alleys where criminals can keep warm by a burning oil drum.

In Alaska, there are no carjackings. And no muggings.

Except for maybe in July. But I won’t even get there until September. Safety first, after all.

As for that night, I woke in the early morning to the sound of my alarm, returned my seat to its upright position and headed inside to wash up again in their restroom and buy breakfast from their deli section.

Why don’t you just sleep at WalMart? Good call, cranky reception lady, good call.

MY POSITIVE EXPERIENCE IN a WalMart parking lot does not guarantee that, indeed, Sam Walton left such a provision in his will. A quick search on the internet finds plenty of sites that also argue it was his dying wish, with many anecdotes of successful parking there for a night.

But individual results may vary.

Some accounts have people being evicted by WalMart security, mostly in more urbanized areas. I can see Springfield, Illinois, tolerating campers, but Northern Blvd in Queens? Or Valley Stream in Nassau? Somewhat doubtful.

Sleeping in a WalMart parking lot reminds me of my college days when I used to sleep on a floor. Who needs a mattress? People would always ask me, first, if that’s comfortable. It really is. Second, if that was an issue with the femmes. It never was.

And third, why I never really got a mat or something?

I didn’t like to give my boilerplate, the human race has gone two million years without a mattress, what need do we have of one now, speech. What was relevant to a poor student at the time was, if you can sleep without a mattress, the whole world is your mattress.

I feel that way now about WalMart. If you can sleep in a WalMart parking lot. All of America is to me a WalMart parking lot.

Go west, young man, go west, and sleep throughout the country.

8. For the Child Drowning In The Mall's Fountain

SITTING IN THE Mall of America in Bloomington, MN, a suburb of the Twin Cities, the day after the President of the United States of America announced, in reaction to town hall protests, that a public option health insurance is not a critical part of his reform plan.

I now find it only appropriate to take up the example of the great humanist, Peter Singer, in one's moral obligation to help others.

Singer's parable revolves around a child drowning in a mall's fountain. (Or maybe just in a pool in general. I think he said it was a mall fountain. In any case, I'm in the mall now, and I'm using the fountain.)

So sue me.

Here it goes from the Mall with an aquarium in its basement, an amusement park in its living room, and an airport in its backyard.



AS HUMAN BEINGS we would consider it unconscionable to, as we were walking through the mall, see a child drowning in the fountain and do nothing to help them. Of course we should simply reach over, pull the child’s face out of the water and save their life, as the story goes.

The issue or right and wrong is that simple.

But what if, in the process of saving that child’s life, your shoes got wet? For those of us wearing waterproof hiking boots we wouldn’t mind. Even those in sandals or flip-flops could walk it off.

Sneakers would lead to an afternoon of discomfort.

But if you were wearing three-hundred dollar alligator loafers, are you the one jumping in the water to help that child or hoping that barefoot hippie beats you to it?

Hopefully, no matter what shoes you are wearing, you will go out of your way to help that child, because you will, and rightfully so, value that child's life over said shoes.



LET'S UP THE ANTE. Now, the child is still drowning in the mall’s fountain...but there’s a whirlpool!

And, in the process of saving that child’s life, there’s a chance, but not a certainty, that you’d get sucked into that whirlpool, and break your arm.

(It’s not a very deep whirlpool.)

Will you still save that child? And, would you, if you decided not to save that child’s life, commit an ethical wrong?

The answer is, if your health is at risk, according to the tenets, rules, and standard operating procedures of Emergency Medicine, you are neither ethically nor legally required to provide care. You can declare the scene as unsafe, and decide not to proceed. That is your prerogative.

There are those who will risk their own health, safety, and lives to help that child regardless. Those people are heroes. But the opposite is not true. Those people who do not risk their health, safety, and lives to help the child are not monsters.

They're just ordinary people. And that's fine with me. I'm probably one of them too.



SO, IN OUR CASE, the uninsured (and those who are insured but pay too much for coverage) people of America are drowning. And there are those, who we will call "advocates" who want to help. But there are other Americans, who we will call "Lobbyists" who want the American people to continue drowning.

Who have it in their self-interest to let that child drown. (Those bastards.)

They see a man in three-hundred dollar alligator loafers and they scream out, “If you go in there, your shoes will be ruined.” But the man doesn’t listen. The man is the American People. He is the public. He is now, thanks to the prosperity of America, no longer tired, nor poor. He is free and he is brave.

His conscience tells him to save the child. He is a good person and he is doing the right thing.

But wait! The lobbyist screams from above. He cannot reach the fountain. Neither can the advocate. It is for the man to decide.

The lobbyists tells the man with the alligator shoes that if he attempts to save the child’s life, he may be sucked into a whirlpool!

“Where?” asks the man. “Where is this whirlpool?”

“Right behind the child. The second you pull her out, you will get sucked in yourself.”

“Really?” he asks.

“Yes, absolutely.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

So the man backs away for a second. A twinge of fear shoots up his spine. But he looks over at the child kicking its arms, its head in the water, desperate for help, and he says, what the hell, damn the whirlpool, I’ve got to help this kid.

The man is strong. The strongest man in the world. The child would be in good hands.

He runs over to the lip of the pool. Pennies glisten on the pool’s bottom. A soft sunlight leaks in from the open roof. He leans forward. His marble chin carves a path through the air.

He reaches for the child's hand.

“Wait!” screams out the lobbyist. “Stop right there. If you grab that child, you will, for sure, be sucked up in a whirlpool and die.”

The man stops. He looks up.

“Are you sure?”

“I am absolutely sure that saving that child’s life will result in personal harm to you.”



WHAT IS THE MAN TO DO? He thinks about his family. His children. His mother. His father. Himself. He stops. He can’t help that poor child. He hangs his head in shame and turns his attention away.

He can’t bear to look.

But there, from the rafters, is the advocate for the drowning child.

“What are you doing?” asks the advocate. “Aren’t you going to pull that child out of the fountain?”

“No,” says the man.

“Why, because of your shoes?” asks the advocate. The advocate is outraged. “You won’t save the child because of your shoes!? Your shoes!?”

“No,” replies the man. “Because if I save the child, I will be hurt myself.”

“How?” asks the advocate.

“By the whirlpool.”

“What whirlpool?” asks the advocate.

“The whirlpool that is sucking that child and that will suck me if I go to grab that child,”

“There’s no whirlpool,” explains the advocate. “There’s just water. Water, and a child no one is helping.”

The man can’t. He looks away from the advocate. He is sorry.

This only angers the advocate. “Do it,” he screams. “Go save the child!”

“No,” screams back the man.

“You won’t be hurt!” The advocate jumps up and down. "Go help! Go help!" He's beside himself. He can't think straight anymore. "Go help! Go help! You'll be fine! Think of the child!"

“Don’t tell me what to do,” the man replies. He rolls his sleeves up past his elbows.

“All you have to do is step in and take him out of there. That’s all it’ll take. Please.” His eyes water up. "Please, man. Please."

The man shakes his head. “What do you know? There’s a whirlpool back there. You come down and do it!”

But the advocate can’t. The man knows this. The advocate needs the man to pull the child out of the water. But he won’t. He’s afraid of being hurt, and so long as that fear is real, his actions are justified.

The man can become angry and belligerent. He can hate the advocate for expecting him to save the child at the expense of his own life; the advocate is some sort of communist monster for deciding that the child’s life is more important than his.

"Damn you, you son-of-a-bitch!" he screams at the advocate. "What do you know about anything?"

The child’s fate is the child’s fate, he decides. There is nothing that can be done and nothing that should be done, and as far as he is concerned the advocate should just shut his trap and accept this.

With a final flair of his nostrils, he lets the advocate know this. And the advocate sinks to his knees. He thinks there is nothing that can be done.

Maybe the child drowning isn't so bad after all, he negotiates. Maybe we'll get him next time.



SO THIS IS WHERE we now stand in the health care debate. Those who wish to save the child—Proponents of health care reform—are considered by those who have the power to save the child—The American People—to be considered obnoxious idiots because of the wild lies of those whose interest it is to let the child drown—The Private Insurance Lobby and their Right-Wing Yahoo Goons.

The lobby, which because the cost of public health care was not too great a burden--Getting our alligator loafers wet--had to invent a danger of public health care--Losing Your Doctor, Death Panels, and Communist Politics--in order to impede the American people from taking appropriate action--Saving the child.

The advocate is mad at the man for not understanding the lies of the lobbyist. How could the man be so stupid, wonders the advocate. And the man, how can the advocate be so presumptuous as to take away MY right to health and MY right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Meanwhile, while the two who should be allies fight it out, it’s the uninsured who continue to suffer and the lobbyists who continue to profit--the medicine lobby that profits when Americans don't receive medicine, that do well when the child drowns.

That is what we have come to, on this day, in the Mall of America. Those who should be allies, now locked in inane combat, while the predators continue to feast on its prey.

The man is strong. He rolls his sleeves back down. Buttons them at the wrist. And walks away.

What a scene at the mall. What a country.

7. On the Road Again

NOT MUCH TIME to post the last couple of days, but just wanted to let everyone know that I made it out of Stroutsburg, PA, and all the way to Minneapolis, MN.

Funny thing about karma is, on the first night that I set out, Tuesday evening, my dad had warned me that it takes eight hours to get to Buffalo.

Eight hours?

It's 400 miles away on roads where you average 85. It may take him eight hours to get to Buffalo--stopping every hour for a piss and a coffee--but it was not going to take me eight hours to get to Buffalo.

It took me three days.


BUT I AM NOT in Buffalo anymore, not after eating at the Anchor Bar, the origin of the Buffalo wing, and taking The Lorax to both side of Niagara Falls, and even driving east, in the opposite direction, to drop him off at the Rochester airport.

No, now I am in Minnesota, in the land of "wide lawns and friendly trees" hoping to take in the Walker Art Museum and the Mall of America.

I am about 1200 miles from New York, one fifth into the distance I expect to travel on this road trip, and with the exception of those two days in Stroutsburg, PA, and now what appears to be a leak of motor oil, everything is going smooth.

I think.


WHAT I HAVE learned is a road trip can be fun and adventurous and exciting, but none of those qualities make it relaxing. This is not a vacation in any sense of the word (except for the sense of the word that says a vacation is when you do not work).

Traveling across country, especially driving by yourself for thirteen hours, with nothing but local radio stations--country, Christian, classical, some more country, anarchist, Christian--is a physical feat that leaves your butt sore and your ankle tender.

There is only me and the road out there. The dot-dot-dot of the divider spaces. The woosh of a passing car. The hum of a churning engine.

Another mile marker blown off the side of the road. Another interstate gone from one end through the other. Another city and its blinking lights twinkling goodbye.

It is only me as far as I want to go. And good lord, is that not beautiful?

6. Forty-Eight Hours in Stroudsburg, PA

I MEAN THIS as no offense to the greater township of Stroudsburg, PA, but if I have to spend another day in Stroudsburg, PA--this will be my second day here, after having originally planned to spend exactly zero minutes here--then I vow to abandon all my worldly possessions and take to the road as a vagabond and hitchhiker.

There is nothing wrong with Stroudsburg, PA, per se. There is something wrong with my car.

Specifically, its "harmonic balancer", which broke on I-80 the very first night of said road trip, less than two hours into the road trip.

In a scene best described as the five layers of panic, first the speedometer went out, then the dashboard lights, then the power windows, then the headlights, each of which had me pull right, and then right, and then right, until I was parking on the grass off of the shoulder as the car shuddered to a stop.

It was not long before a state trooper was shining his flashlight into my face and asking if I had AAA.

"Yes, officer, I do."

"Would you like me to call them in?"

"Please."

So if you set out on a Tuesday evening, and you get towed by the friendly neighborhood tow truck driver, from New Jersey, seven miles to the Pennsylvania border, and then a couple more miles into the Hyundai dealership in Stroudsburg, and when they finally look at your car the next morning and tell you they have to overnight a harmonic balancer because no one in driving distance carries one for your car...

Well, then, it's Thursday already and you're still in Stroudsburg, PA.

You will not make it to Niagara Falls or the fist in Detroit or Ford's Presidential Library in Ann Arbor or Mackinaw Island in Michigan--the only place in America which has outlawed cars--and not to Mystery Spot or the Northern Star of the US, Minneapolis, Minnesota, where they elect wrestlers for governors, and comedians for senators.

You will not do any of this.

Instead, you will sit in the local cafe on Main St, in Stroudsburg, PA, playing chess with your friend. You will read comic books in the comic book stores for three hours while the owner of said comic book store complains to his patrons that there's never enough people around to get a decent Magic tournament started.

You will eat peanut butter and Nutella sandwiches.

You will bring your own oatmeal to the motel breakfast because they don't even have the decency to serve a single fresh fruit.

And you will read on the cover of USA Today that, in a two-to-one margin, the insane hecklers barnstorming town hall meetings, standing in opposition to the most humane of public measures, health care for all, have swayed independent thinkers to sympathize with their cause.

You will sit impotent in the motel's lobby and throw the paper in the air and know that even if you were granted all the power in the world--

If you, yourself, could go down to Washington, DC, and pull a single level--

The label on that lever being "Universal Health Care for Every Man, Woman, Child, and Dog in This Great Nation"--

If you had this great power in the palm of your hand--

That this measure would still not pass because you are in Stroudsburg, PA, asking the Napa auto parts store if they carry spare alternators for 2001 Hyundai XG 300's.


ON THE WALK TO Main St., yesterday, after the dealership told me it'd be another day, and after I dipped in the motel pool to cool my heels, The Lorax and I encountered, on the side of the road that nobody walks, a groundhog, of all things, here, on our personal little Groundhog's Day.

Punxsutawny Phil.

In the flesh.

We watched him nibble on an acorn or something he had found in someone's backyard. We watched him for a second.

"Is that you Phil?" we called out.

Phil looked up from his nugget. He sniffed left and right.

"Phil," we asked, "how are you?"

He noticed us staring at him and disappeared behind a concrete stairway.

"Is that supposed to mean something?" asked The Lorax.

"What do you mean, like a metaphor. For my trip?"

"Yeah, like a metaphor."

"If it does, it can't be a good one."

We also discussed what it meant for a cross-country road trip if your car breaks down on the first night. No, not the first night, within the first 100 miles.

If your car breaks down and you're still in Jersey. You haven't even made it to Pennsylvania.

"It's ominous, I admit." I wrinkled my nose. "You think I should turn around?"

"Do you think you should turn around?"

"This is America," I said. "We are not a country built by quitters." I shook my fist in the air. "Besides," I asked, "What am I supposed to do? Go back to work?"

He laughed a big choke of a laugh. "Let's not talk crazy here."



THE DEBATE IN Groundhog Day is whether Bill Murray escapes Groundhog Day because he became a good person, or because he learned how to love.

Let us then consider what I have to do, if this is my curse, to escape Stroudsburg, PA.

Do I have to become a good person? This argument assumes that I am a bad person. And while I am certainly no saint, I find it hard to believe that if you reviewed my life, on balance, that I, being some percentile of "goodness" and some percentile of "badness" would fall toward the evil end of the spectrum.

There is malice implied in badness, and I don't believe that I go around doing people harm. And that, in the abstract, if you examined my "badness", it is on the most part self-destructive nonsense, and some rudimentary sexual excess, of which I blame the hormones of my youth.

It's not that I couldn't help myself, it's that I didn't want to.

And if consensual sex is the worst Punxsatawny Phil has against me, then he should just suck it up and let me get on my way.

I've never killed anyone or hit someone with my car and drove away. I never laughed at people who were getting laid off.

(Though, I did laugh at some who were laughable, but I didn't laugh at them because they were laid off. I laughed at them because they couldn't catch a softball which, I guess, is mean in its own respect and I would like to take this opportunity to apologize for that.)

I donate to charities and to Democrats (who are no longer a charity cause).

I give money to the arts and tip well. And I always try to help people out, even strangers, and not just women on the subway who need help carrying their baby strollers.

OK, if you want to nitpick, I'm not perfect, but who are you to judge, Punxsutawny Phil?



NOW, THEN, TO THE question of love. Which is a valid question, and I will say, that I do love.

I love myself with a deep respect, a love for oneself that I encourage all people to have, because John Lennon encouraged all people to have, and he knows, of all people, a thing or two about love.

(And about consensual sex. And about charity and Democrats.)

Lennon sang:

I don't believe in magic/
I don't believe in Elvis/
I don't believe in Beatles/
I just believe in me

I want to comment on this quote further, but Ferris Bueller beat me to it, and it's only appropriate that I quote from Ferris Bueller, here on my two months off:

"Not that I condone fascism, or any -ism for that matter. -Ism's in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon, 'I don't believe in Beatles, I just believe in me.' Good point there. After all, he was the walrus. I could be the walrus. I'd still have to bum rides off people."

And I'd still have to bum rides off of people because my car is sitting in the Hyundai dealership of Stroudsburg, PA, waiting for a harmonic balancer--whatever that means!

Do I have to learn to love? No, I know how to love.

I love life and freedom and letters and books and my mother and air that is clean and skies that are blue and the road and my sisters and fishing and bourbon and chicken crisps from Fay Da bakery in Elmhurst and the Pannda and big, fat, Greek dinners with lamb and lemon potatoes and taramasalata.

I know love, Punxsutawny Phil, so let me go! Let me go, Phil! Let me go!

Phil! Do you hear me? I will hunt you down and squeeze the life out of your body. Let me go, Phil!

Let me go!



















Day 1: Waiting to hear the verdict at the dealership in Stroudsburg, PA.


















Day 2: In which the narrator sits in his bed, reading a book, in Stroudsburg, PA.

5. Tweet-A-Tweet

To handle the little updates along the way, I've decided to open a Twitter feed. If you don't find Twitter annoying, you can follow me here: https://twitter.com/MZannettis

There is some debate as to whether Jack Kerouac would have kept a Twitter while he was On the Road. Frankly, I couldn't give a dump.

I'm taking soap and a toothbrush with me, too, if you want to keep drawing the differences. 

4. The Books I Carry

THERE'S THAT RIDDLE about the One Book You'd Take With You On A Desert Island that I always answer with the infinitely snarky: The Comprehensive Guide to Surviving and Escaping a Desert Island (If You Really, Really Had To): A Memoir.

This is my answer despite the fact that this book does not exist (and if it did, would probably not be a memoir), and not knowing whether this book would do me any good (especially if it were a memoir). 

It'd be nice to have an Ikea-esque schematic of an escape raft--where you follow the pictures without words and make sure not to destroy the packaging--but I doubt, if pressed into service, that I'd be able to build said raft. 

And if I built said raft, that I'd tow into the surf with a bushel of coconuts, my pet volleyball and pray for the best.

No, I believe if you left me on a desert island, I'd probably spend more time climbing to the hierarchy of that island, than launching a dangerous attempt to leave it. 

I would be perfectly happy as King of the Finches. Lord of the Turtles. President of the Palm Trees.

Or something to that effect.

BUT I'M NOT GOING to a desert island. Where I'm going, I can take as many books as I'd like to carry. And so, I've listed here my top choices. The must haves. They sit in the front, even get shoved into the glove compartment, while the stragglers have to hide in the trunk.

Then We Came To The End

Joshua Ferris employs the 1st-person plural perspective (Then we came to the end), to capture the group-think, gossipy world of corporate America. 

Considering this is a book about a series of layoffs at an advertising agency, and I just left my job at an advertising agency after a series of layoffs, it's more a choice of looking back than forward. 

My favorite line (so far): a young copywriter calls his farmer uncle for insight on a pro bono cancer ad. After the young copywriter proves what kind of soulless, dimwit he really is, his uncle is forced to ask: "You folks over there...you say you call yourselves creative...and the work you do, you call that the creative...and I bet you think of yourselves as pretty creative over there, I bet." 

The young copywriter confirmed his uncle's assumptions.

So the old man said, wouldn't that make you "creative creatives creating creative creative."

What was the young copywriter to do but nod yes?

"And right there," concluded the uncle, is a "use of the English language just too absurd to even contemplate."

Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

There's this great passage in Pirsig's philosophical novel where his young son, trained by the boy scout culture, falls behind their hike up a Midwest mountain, and frustrated, sits down to pout. 

Pirsig gets angry at his son, or rather, the culture that teaches him that the hike is only worth it if you can climb the mountain. That the journey has no intrinsic value without a destination. 

It is unclear whether a road trip I have now coined as "from here to Alaska" is immune to said phenomenon. I hope it is, but I have a history of kidding myself. 

Into the Wild

Yeah, I know. Don't eat the berries! In this case, ignorance is my friend. I know enough about wild plants to know that I know nothing about wild plants, and anything I eat in the wild should be accompanied with a 7-11 receipt. 

The Great Gatsby

As an urbanite making his way out to the midwest, I'm taking the opposite route of Fitzgerald, who left the "wide lawns and friendly trees" of Minnesota, to muck himself in the world of New York finance and glitzy summer houses.

There's this great part in Gatsby, where on a lazy summer afternoon, the gang takes a leisurely ride down to Astoria and get excited about driving over the Queensboro Bridge--on purpose! I guess those really were the days. 

Lincoln at Gettysburg

Garry Wills won the Pulitzer Prize for his essay on how Lincoln's most famous speech was modeled after Pericles' funeral orations. I have read this book, a minimum, of four times, but considering that I plan to spend three days in Lincoln's presidential library, like a monk bowing at the seven buddhas, it's prudent to read again.

Between this book, expositing Lincoln's words, and The Complete Speeches of Abraham Lincoln, capturing them all, this canon is my version of the Holy Bible. This should not be considered in any way weird or creepy. 

THERE ARE MORE, like Valencia by Michelle Tea (mmm...lesbian memoir), The Physics of Superheroes by James Kakalios (when is Electro, Magneto? And when is Magneto, Electro?), and Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl (hey, college memoir weaving in the different ideas learned in college classes was my idea!). 

Really, I could go on forever, from Martin Amis to Emile Zola, but I actually have some driving to do. 

 

3. Captain's Log

My sister has made me promise to keep a daily voice memo on my journey. I am to begin this memo with the phrase "Captain's log, Stardate, 8.9.09" or what not.

This brings up the obvious question as to what I am captain of. I would say of my car, since I own it, and that no matter how small a boat is, there is captain of a boat, and so therefore, no matter how beat-up a road trip car is, there is a captain of that car.

As the captain, I should keep a log and fill it with vague, philosophical thoughts about encountering alien civilizations.

"Captain's Log, Stardate, 8.10.09, entered the Fallen Civilization of Detroit. In the post-apocalyptic ruin of the Great Recession, green shoots sprout both financial and spiritual. The Cash-for-Clunkers program offers hope yet for renewed manufacturing; the artists buying up $100 houses to establish bohemian colonies suggest the best of Paris in the 1920s. Woodstock in the 1960s.

"A friend has suggested Greektown. I could use a gyro."

It's unclear whether I should sound more Jean-Luc Picard, bravely positive about the best of humanity, or Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, flailing away at "the horror, the horror."

Probably something more like Meurcault from The Stranger. "Car flat yesterday. Or was it today? It could have been yesterday. In any case, the tire had to be changed."

Shall I be Salinger?

"I'm not going to talk about all this crap about my childhood. This is how I got from New York to Alaska, and all that junk about how I grew up and how it changed my life I'm not going to get into."

Or maybe I should just be me.

"Captain's Log, stardate, 8.6.09, last day of work. Not packed yet. Actually, don't have a car yet either. Nor food. Nor camping supplies. Two days until departure. Maybe I can register my car in Buffalo. Buffalo is still in New York. They should have food in Buffalo too. And a camping store.

"I'll figure it all out on the road. That's what my ancestors did. You think Odysseus stocked up at Costco before heading back to Ithaca? Doubt it. I'll be fine.

"The Pilgrims survived a whole winter without granola. Bite me Trader Joe's!"

2. So Where Exactly Am I Going?

THE EXACT PATH I can't exactly determine. I have an itinerary. It includes Gunnison Beach and Niagara Falls. Detroit and Ann Arbor. Mackinaw Island and Minneapolis. Cedar Rapids and St. Louis.

And more.

It should include five presidential libraries (Ford, Hoover, Lincoln, Truman, Eisenhower), one of which is not an "official" library (Lincoln's is administered by the state of Illinois and the city of Springfield, not the NARA.) Presidential libraries didn't get their start until Hoover.

The Badlands are included, only a few months after the fateful Drunk-Hitchhiker-Stuck-In-A-Snow-Drift Incident. So is Mt. Rushmore, only a few months after the There's-A-Blizzard-In-South-Dakota-Maybe-We-Should-Get-Off-This-Mountain incident.

Yellowstone. That includes the Old Geyser. Then north to Bozeman, where Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance takes place. The parts where he's not on the motorcycle.

The Unabomber's cabin is somewhere up there around Glacier National Park, I've been told.

And more.

I might be doing myself a disservice if I completely stuck to a plan; I will carry a map, but I should not stick to the atlas.

A friend even commented today that my trip, which has a day-to-day plan, in a sense, but no car yet, and no camping gear yet, and no food yet, had a "seat of your pants" feel to it, and that "seat of your pants" might not be the best way to plan for a road trip to Alaska.

But I disagree.

"Seat of your pants" is the ONLY way to plan a road trip to Alaska. You're not supposed to have it all mapped out. There is supposed to be an element of mischief and danger. Of mistakes and adventure.

If you plan to make it to Alaska, then you should plan to feed off of uncertainty.


THE ROAD TRIP had it's beginnings, I realize now, in my teenage years on the Long Island Sound. Back when I had finally gotten over my fear of water--and, more specifically, of putting my head in the water--and became a swimmer.

No one special, just a promotion from a wader or a drowner.

A swimmer that did the front crawl crooked and the butterfly sloppy and the breaststroke whenever he tired.

I liked to go down to the beach in the late afternoon, when the sun was tired, and dip into the ocean, warm in contrast to the cooling breeze, and head out to the deep buoys. I would swim as far as I could, hundreds of meters out there, alone, without a tube or a partner.

I'd swim and swim and swim and swim until I could look back, and see the people dotting the shore like little ants, and turn and swim more.

And I'd swim more. Swim, until the fear arrived.

It wasn't worth it to me to swim without fear. To swim without thinking to myself, in a desperate ramble of a thought, that there was no way, humanly possible, to make it to shore.

The trip wasn't worth it to me without doubt.

So I'd swim, and the fear would tense up my chest, and I'd start losing control of my breaths, and sometimes, out there deep and alone and cold and desperate, I'd even start crying. Crying because there was no one to help me back and I had to do it on my own no matter what.

A sad, pathetic, desperate cry.

And at that point, I'd turn, and I'd swim even further.

Swim until there was no way physically possible I could imagine myself making it back to shore. That the colony would continue on without me, another worker lost to the surf. And then, only then, when the fear shook my arms in front of me, when I couldn't do the front crawl, because I couldn't put my head in the water, lest I choke on the waves--

When I pushed forward with a juvenile frog kick that it mattered--

That the trip was worth it.

To know what it was like, to feel for a second, being completely at the mercy of the elements, and to accept, for whatever it was worth, that no matter how careful you were with your diet, and no matter how smart you were with your time, that in no way, whatsoever, were you meant to live forever.

You were to live for that one afternoon. At the beach. With the sun drooling in the west. Skimming the top of water, a bob, in a pool of glass.


SO THE TRIP starts on Sunday. And it is meant to go west. But west is the safety. West is made of truck stops and motels. Friends and partners. There are hamburgers on the way west and they are served with giant mounds of French fries.

But north. Where I hook a right at Montana. And head to Calgary. And climb Banff. And more north to Edmonton. That is where the dip begins.

When the summer is tired. When there is, between me and Alaska, two-thousand miles of road through the Canadian Rockies, British Columbia, and the Yukon Territory.

North. And I will drive north and north and north and north, and somewhat west, until there is no turning back--the return is equal to the balance--until the wheel shakes with the loneliness, until the sun ducks behind the Earth. The evening and the night.

And I will know, I imagine, and I hope, and I wonder, that is what I was meant to be and do and live. Four wheels on a mountain, curling about the cliff, a glare against the windshield leading me in the direction up.

1. A Drizzly November

What I am going through, and what I am feeling, has already been better described by Melville's narrator, Ishmael, in the intro to Moby Dick.

In the intro, Ishmael explains why he embarked on the Pequod:

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul...then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball… If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, sometime or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.”

And so it is for me. A "drizzly November." And just about "high time to get to sea."

I would like to believe that "almost all men" feel the same as I do, but it's not for me to be presumptuous about how other people feel.

This is the way I feel. This is the road I have chosen, for this brief period of my life, to take. I sincerely hope it will be an adequate "substitute for pistol and ball."