The Reader Travels

Roads flow through towns, barely scraping the surface of the lives that run behind them. Here I am at an oupost on the mighty road that is the World Wide Web. Strangers happen by to pick up a snack or a bottle of pop, and they move along their way. More often it’s the locals who drop in to see how it’s going, the friends who know I’m here and enjoy my company.

The other day, some unknown traveler stopped by after searching for the words, “blow a hole in the fat guy,” and the road took him here. And I think, what kind of individual searches for something like that? So then I suppose, it’s the same sort of individual who might write something like that. Gotta love the synchronicity.

There are so many meandering paths, so many lives out here in the ether. I’m happy just to serve that one like-minded individual who finds himself at my door. And of course, the locals.

You can’t have a hitchhiking jag without talking about Douglas Adams, right? Of course, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy travels an altogether different kind of road. It may be time to revisit these travels because right now, the only rules I halfway remember are carrying a towel and humoring a Vogon about his poetry.

My first encounter with these books was watching my dearest friend laughing hysterically as she read them in 1987. At the time, I was studying hard in college and didn’t have time for recreational reading, so it wasn’t until I met my man in 1992 that I actually read them. And then I understood the answer to life, the universe and everything. Of course, I still don’t know the question.

When Douglas Adams died, I was on a voyage of my own. I recall hearing about his death as I stood at a roulette table on a cruise ship somewhere in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. As is my wont, I paid tribute to Mr. Adams for halloween that year. My Zaphod Beeblebrox costume was even beneath the production value of the BBC television series. But still, I find Zaphod’s second head every October, its one eye staring back at me from the costume bag in the hall closet, and I rejoice the influence of the writer’s life.

Thoughts of hitchhikers making their way across country, has led me to our friends Jay and Silent Bob, traveling from New Jersey to Los Angeles in search of their fair share. The two young men were taught lessons about hitchhiking by a vagabond George Carlin, who had played a fancy priest in the boys’ previous road trip film. They learned even more when actually putting his advice to use, as one “hairy bush nun” could attest.

Sadly, this seems to have been the end of the road for the smart and witty Kevin Smith movies. It’s as if reaching their destination in Hollywood was a symbol and a harbinger for the movies to come. He tried, but did not quite redeem himself with a movie about two friends making a porno. Alas, it was funny, but did not reach the depths of his earlier films.

I don’t think Mr. Smith is “off the artistic roll call for life,” as our late friend Bill Hicks might say. He just needs to watch his bridge-burning tendencies, much as I have worked to control my own CLTs.

I bought myself a new car this weekend, and I’m selling the old ‘93 Accord to my brother so his daughter can have her own ride as she turns sixteen next week. It’s kinda special because that car is as old as she is. It’s also as reliable and sensible as she is, and I know it’s a lot for a sixteen-year-old to live up to, but I have a lot of faith in her.

Of course, I wasn’t as sensible when I was her age, even if I was a smidge more sensible than most of my friends. For instance, the night we had a sleep-over at my girlfriend’s house, and the rest of the bunch got arrested for being out past curfew, I was asleep in bed so I could wake up early the next morning for driver’s ed class.

This was the summer of the cross-country road trip with UB.  Once I was finished with driver’s ed and being grounded for letting my younger sister get arrested, I was equipped with a learner’s permit and a need for speed. And I couldn’t turn down this perfect opportunity to put my new skills to work. My uncle needed someone to help him drive his monster Lincoln Continental from Orlando, Florida, to Dayton, Ohio, and back down to Texas. My brother, who already had his driver’s license, was busy with a summer job, so it was all me.

It was a hot summer that required a lot of beer. With a cooler full of Miller Lite 16oz cans, it was my job to pour, while UB warmed to the idea of putting me behind the wheel of his big yellow car. Since the cups only held 12oz, I was rewarded with the other 4oz from every can.

I learned a lot that summer. I learned not to keep a death grip on the steering wheel and not to blank out watching the dotted white line. I learned to change lanes to give a wide berth when cars were parked on the shoulder. I learned that I shouldn’t drive when I’m really sleepy for fear of putting my car under a tractor trailer. And I learned the proper way to flick cigarette ashes out the front window of a moving vehicle. Ah, memories.

I suppose if my thumbs were monstrously huge, I might feel destined to hitchhike all over the country like Sissy in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Then again, I have a higher sense of self-preservation that keeps me from getting in cars with strangers.

I remember driving along I-45 in Houston when I was in college – 3am, rain is starting, and there’s a man with his thumb out, hoping for a ride. I felt a brief empathy, thinking about what it would feel like to be stuck on this road in the middle of the night, about to hit the mix master, where it’s a little harder to walk along the freeway, especially in the rain. I’m going the same direction, I thought, and it would certainly be a nice gesture.

But it was just a flash before my mind said, “Skinny little girls don’t pick up hitchhikers.” Especially skinny little girls who don’t own guns and who’ve never even been in a fist fight with another skinny girl. I don’t actually have to try it to know it’s not a good idea.

Trust is a tricky thing. I’m a glass half full kind of person, who tends to think that people are mostly good, that most people on the road are just trying to get from point A to point B safely. But I’m not so delusional to think there aren’t bad people out there, who might find joy in hurting or killing me. So the question is, who do you put your trust in? I’m not going to trust solely to probability and statistics.

But if I did find myself on the road, needing to trust to the kindness of strangers, I like to think my instincts would keep me safe like a seasoned traveler who just gets a bad vibe and goes in the other direction.

So, we’ve been talking about The Grapes of Wrath and migrant farmwork, which led me here now to David Sedaris and his very funny book, Naked. His story “C.O.G.” starts with a long-distance bus ride to Oregon where he is bound for an apple orchard so he can pick fruit from trees. On this road trip, he encounters a number of people, some of them quite “touched.”

I love how he describes some of the people he encounters on the bus, particularly the girl who curses her dead-beat ex-boyfriend for knocking her up. (As a contrast, Wade over at Vagabond Journey describes how super nice it is to travel by bus in countries that aren’t the US. Who knew?)

Sedaris seems to have gone the way of Kerouac, slipping into these farm-workers’ worlds for a moment of his time, just to escape home to the east coast when things get a little too hairy for him. Of course, Sedaris is well aware of his youthful delusions and pretensions in the hindsight telling of the tale, poking fun at himself as mercilessly as he does the people he encounters. It just makes him all the more endearing.

So I went with my mother and sister-in-law to see Topol’s farewell tour of Fiddler on the Roof in Dallas two months ago, and at the end of the show, the sister said, “I didn’t remember that the ending was so depressing.” Well, yeah.

Her brother had told her before we left for the show that the story was about events that triggered the start of the Zionist movement and the creation of the state of Israel. She just looked at him funny like he was making it all up, probably because he makes up a lot of things and she can never really tell if he’s serious or not.

He’s literally the boy who cried wolf as most of his tall tales end with some sort of wolf attack, which he fends off with his masterful powers of Dan-fu. She should have known that since there were no wolves in this story, that he probably knew what he was talking about.

Anyway, the story ends with a big long road trip that somehow wends its way to Jerusalem. The end. Oh, did I mention I met a hot Israeli chick on the airplane to London? I told her I was going down to Houston for a Jewish wedding next month. It was only a five hour drive, I said. She had to comment that a five hour drive would take you all the way from one end of her country to the other.

Amazing how they were spread out all over the world and now they can just hop in the car and be there in less than a day, only dodging a little gunfire along the way.

So, I’ve been writing about road trips, and I’m actually on one. Right now. We drove from Dallas, south on I-35, through Waco, Austin and San Antonio, to the lovely new Best Western motel on Highway 90 in Hondo, Texas. The view from our window is a corn field that stretches off into the horizon.

If you’re ever out this way, check out Billy Bob’s BBQ, out back of Billy Bob’s Hamburgers. Word is, it’s a very popular spot for high school kids, and it seems to be built for picnicking and socializing. New on the menu is the brisket taco for $1.79. A thin layer of soft flour tortilla wraps a huge wad of tender, smoky meat. A smear of guacamole and a smattering of pico de gallo adds just a hint of southwestern flavor.

Mmmm. Mouth filled with meat. Need I say more?

So I’ve got wretched allergies, right? And I’m really bad about going to the doctor.  It’s more because I hate making phone calls than I hate going to the doctor, and I think more doctors should do online scheduling, but that’s another story.

My eyes were itching and watering for three months before I finally decided to go to an eye doctor. Anyway, the first thing they did when I went in was to take a quick eye test, and I could hardly read any of the lines on the chart, with my glasses on.  One week later, after 10 drops a day and a bizarre regiment involving baby shampoo and a Q-tip, my eyes were vastly improved, and I could read a whole lot more lines on the eye chart.

So I’m realizing that I’ve been driving around with seriously impaired vision for a while. I might even blame my vision for that ticket I got running a red light on Northwest Highway, costing me $75. Not only was my eyesight impaired, I drove around squinting all the time because the light hurt my eyes, driving east in the morning and west in the evening, always into the sun. It’s a wonder I didn’t have an accident.

So the moral to the story is… ach, no moral. It’s just better to be able to see if you’re going to be driving a motor vehicle. Duh.

I went looking, but I couldn’t find the paper I wrote in college called, “Migrant Farm Workers and Wandering Jews,” comparing the lives represented in Tomas Rivera’s The Searchers with the Jewish people scattered across the globe. Like the dispersed Jews, the migrant farm workers share a faith and a history, a mindset that connects them beyond the miles.

I found a nice succinct definition of the collective unconscious on answers.com.

“In Jungian psychology, a part of the unconscious mind, shared by a society, a people, or all humankind, that is the product of ancestral experience and contains such concepts as science, religion, and morality.”

Kurt Vonnegut also had a bit to say about collective mindsets and both the reality and the illusion of being connected. In Cat’s Cradle, he first introduces the “granfalloon” to his readers, this illusion that just because we have this one thing in common, doesn’t mean I should like you – “My God, are you a Hoosier?… I’m a Hoosier, too.” But in Breakfast of Champions, he pays a little more honor to things that connect people on a deeper level. (I’m not sure how well Bruce Willis captured it, so read the book if you haven’t already, but not before Cat’s Cradle because that would just be the wrong order.)

Having been raised Catholic, I noticed at some point in my life that being a Catholic is a bit of a granfalloon, especially if you’re on the fence about the whole thing. Earlier in life, when I would run across other Catholics, they’d act like we were a little more deeply connected than I would have liked. “Oh, you’re a Catholic? Come sit next to me.” (It’s even worse when someone thinks that just because we’re both white, we should be buds.)

Then again, when I meet other former Catholics, I do feel an instant connection. Go figure.