The Reader Travels

One of my best friends gave me the latest John Irving novel for Christmas, while I’m actually pondering his first. It’s a motorcycle buddy road trip book called Setting Free the Bears with these two young men riding all over Germany, eating radishes, drinking lots of beer and plotting a jail break at the local zoo.

Honestly, I liked the story, but I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as his later works, mostly because he had not found his “voice” quite yet. The concept of voice in fiction writing is one that fascinates me. I assume that I won’t really have mine defined until I write more than one novel. But I sometimes wonder if I’ll ever finish the first one, much less write the second one.

Of course, my man keeps telling me I need to just write the second one already. I’ve rewritten the first one four times and I need to just bless it and release it until my wisdom catches up with the subject matter. After all, I wrote the first sentence of novel #2 more than ten years ago, and it’s time I wrote the second.

Of course, time is at a premium, and things have to happen in the right order: 1) get my Series 7 at work (though I’m beginning to question this one); 2) finish home improvement projects; 3) ___________; 4) consider new career in teaching to get my summers off; 5) write an entirely new novel.

In the meantime, I’m honing my blog voice. And we won’t even talk about the singing career I’ll never explore.

Yes, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a road trip book.  It’s all about a father and his son on their motorcycle, riding from the lakes of Minnesota to the mountains in North Dakota, to the red woods in California. But I’ll warn you now, if you ever intend to read it, it’s very thin on plot, so you shouldn’t expect a page turner.

The fact is, this journey is not for everyone. Most people who pick it up make it through the first 75 pages or less and then decide they can’t take any more of the trip. I admit, I sometimes had to force myself to turn the pages, but I was glad I made it to the end.

It was kinda like my very first vacation as a married person. We didn’t have a lot of money, so driving was really the only option. Unlike our zen friends, our problem was that we had too much plot in a one week span, but we probably should have packed up and headed home just for our sanity.

We first drove from Dallas to Atlanta to visit a friend who lived in a nice house in the suburbs with his parents and kid sister. We went to a big music festival, several movies and even took a day trip to Chattanooga to see the aquarium.

We came home by way of New Orleans, staying with family while we were there. We went to a Tulane football game in the Super Dome then visited the French Quarter to watch guys in dog collars and assless chaps for Southern Decadence. We visited my grandmother in a nursing home, her head shaved bald after some brain surgery, delusional, though she recognized me for her last time on that visit.

We took another side trip to Carville, Louisiana, to do some research for a novel, and got a tour of the hospital before they closed it down a year later (they’ve since reopened the facility as a museum). I wasn’t afraid of catching a disease, but the stress of the stigma and the exhaustion of the trip made me want to go home right then.

We were so scarred after that trip, we decided we never again wanted to visit friends or family on our vacations. But like the book, I’m really glad we finished that trip. My life will never be the same.

When I first started talking about this road trip tour with my friends, they all had ideas about books I needed to include. When one of them mentioned Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I dusted off my copy and vowed to actually read it this time. The lavendar-colored paperback was hiding in the back room with all the fantasy and sci-fi trilogies, who had been read, but lovingly placed aside for later rediscovery.

Part of the procrastination was the perception that this was one of those “life changing” books like something that Oprah would shove down people’s throats. I expected it to be thought provoking and touchy-feely, and filled with the illusion that the author had some deep wisdom to share with those in the world who were ready to hear it. I’m not opposed to a little eye opening, I just have to be in the mood for it.

But what I found when I read it was that this guy was so far from “together” that it wasn’t really about any wisdom he could share. Instead it was just a look inside his brain. He found his own personal zen in dissecting every thought, every combination of thoughts, every part in the machine of motorcycle and mind. Basically, he was embracing his OCD and sharing it with the world.

So I think about my own tendency to lose myself in compulsive activities like solitaire and Bejeweled, and wallpaper peeling. As I pick and scrape and pull at each tiny little remnant of paper on my bathroom walls, there is peace. I’m going to scrape the popcorn off the ceiling next. Om.