Trans/plant/portation

Maybe it’s a sign of my age or limited cognitive capacity, but I do all of my thought organizing on paper, not in some computer application. It just doesn’t feel as accessible to me if I have to open a program and scroll around looking for each bit that may be important to me at that moment. Add to this that I may want to look for information in several documents or programs, and there’s no way I can fit everything on the screen. My actual writing goes into a computer, yes, but all of the character descriptions, time lines, visual ideas, and back story goes on paper. After learning the hard way that paper can run away from its owner, I now prefer that such paper be bound together with other paper and protected with covers, so I am a notebook kind of guy. And while I don’t prefer the color black for things around the house, I do like it in a notebook. It’s no nonsense and not fussy. I don’t need a Power Puff Grrl or fancy stitching to look at me every time I want to write something down. I just want to write it down.

AmPad Gold FIber notebook, Miquelrius graph-lined notebook, Moleskine notebook

These are the three I’ve used in the past seven or eight years:

• AmPad Gold Fiber notebook—This moderately large notebook, about an inch thick, has lined pages, a bookmark ribbon, and a hardcover binding (sewn through the fold, for those who care to know). It’s been jammed in my briefcase hundreds of times now, dropped, stepped on by a small child who admittedly didn’t weigh much, and after all of this abuse, it’s held up rather well. The pages feel substantial but perhaps let a bit too much ink show through on the other side. I do tend toward roller ball and felt-tip pens these days, so perhaps I’m being a bit hard on it. But overall it’s a good sized book, I like the rounded corners and reinforced edges, and as I’m one to dog-ear a corner on purpose, like that the paper holds up to me.
• Miquelrius graph-lined notebook—Two jobs ago I hired a woman who showed up on her first day with this notebook, and she brought it to every meeting, copiously copying down whatever we were saying in case it would prove important later. No worries, she could have written a new bible in there, it was so thick with paper. I asked her where she got it, saying I’d never seen a notebook like it, and she pointed me to the tiny bookstore in town that stocked them. They come lined, blank, and with a square graph. I picked graph because I find the light blue lines helpful but not overpowering on the page, and sometimes I write down diagrams instead of words, which I find a graph aids. My employee, on the other hand, had a blank book. That’s as daring and carefree to me as a hang glider. This notebook has two inches of paper and an impenetrable glue perfect binding. It’s got a real leather cover that survived a late-night attack from one of my cats, but it is really heavy, weighing in around 2.5 pounds. It is good at letting me sneak a business card or other paper into it and not batting an eye, but who could tell anything else was in there for all the sheets of paper?
• Moleskine ruled pocket notebook—Straight from Hemingway to hipsters to me. This is the notebook that people tease me about, but it doesn’t just play at being pocket-sized. It really is pocket-sized. I’m not as much of a purist with this notebook; any given Moleskine in my possession will have story ideas, grocery lists, character thoughts, directions to a city hours away, and my always-evolving writing to do list. It has, of course, a bookmark ribbon and an elastic band that keeps the book shut when say, you’re on an African elephant hunt. I shudder to think of Hemingway hunting elephants. What an ass of an avocation. At least we agree on a notebook. I’m also a fan of the little pocket in the back, and I’ve used it to collect receipts while I’m at a conference, or store a business card or something until I get home. It is hard bound (thread bound, this one) with a hard leather cover and rather thick pages so there isn’t a lot of bleed-through. But I do burn through a Moleskine quickly. Must be all those directions for Portland and Seattle.

In 2003, I volunteered at DC’s gay film festival, which meant working with some very nice people and a few overly controlling people, but I was willing to take the long view and deal with challenging personalities in order to get passes to other movies for free. One of the films I went to see was Drag Nuns in Tinseltown (rereleased in 2006 as The LA Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence), a documentary about the antics and charity work of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Some of the Sisters attended the screening, laughing along with us and hosting a Q&A afterward.

Unlike other drag performers I’d seen before, the Sisters don’t eschew things like facial hair (a Ru Paul no-no) or insist on lip synching to women-sung songs, but instead will occasionally take on tenor or other “male range” compositions, singing in their own voices.

They also have a tendency to rework lyrics to songs we’d otherwise be able to belt out with them, in order to make a point. I’d forgotten that little bit of Sis-trivia until last night.

Susanne and I trekked to the Tri-Cities yesterday with a few colleagues from the college to see the Seattle chapter of the Sisters host a fundraiser for Walla Walla’s Blue Mountain Heart to Heart organization, a non-profit direct service charity for people with HIV, AIDS, and Hepatitis C. Heart to Heart is, in fact, the only direct service charity of its kind in southeast Washington state, and Franklin County, which it also serves, has the highest HIV infection rate outside of Seattle, so their work is rather desperately needed here. I would have gone to see the Sisters in any case, but knowing it was a fundraiser for Heart to Heart only solidified my commitment to making the 60-mile trip.

We found our way to the only gay bar in these parts which, on the inside, was a series of differently shaped rooms and a hell of a lot of seating: booths, high tables and stools, plain diner tables that looked like they’d been purchased from a going out of business sale from the empinada counter around the corner. A room in the front boasted a stage and short catwalk where the Sisters and local performers belted out everything from Xanadu’s I’m Alive (unfortunately not performed on 70s-style roller skates) to Bjork to School House Rock, Electrify, and some strange German song about genitalia that left me covering my face because I was there with a student from the college. Talk about awkward! Thank goodness there’s no sexual harassment policy at Susanne’s school. (Ironic, I’m being ironic.)

As the performances rolled on, audience members left their seats to slip money into the contribution basket at the end of the catwalk. Here’s where I was reminded of the unofficial rules about gay bars:

1. No matter how gay the bar is, there will always be a creepy straight guy trying to strut his stuff or hook up with some random lesbian. Persistence of said creepy guy is in an inverse proportion to his level of attractiveness. And creepy guys tend toward creepy props/dress, like a pipe or opened up dress shirt.
2. As soon as a couple first hooks up, they must stand in a corner or against a wall, making out. It helps if they’re anywhere near a heavily trafficked area, so that more people will notice their coupled upness.
3. Older couples should feel free to bicker in the bar or stand apart from each other, at turns looking cold or hurt.
4. There will be an overworked, overtired lesbian bussing tables and shooting daggers out of her eyes at the careless customers who spill their drinks for her to clean up.
5. Even if the gay bar is occupied by 95 percent gay men and < 5 percent lesbians (the other 1 percent straight allies, transgender people, and lost people who haven’t realized they’re not in a straight bar yet), there will still be a long line for the women’s rest room.
6. A small group of depressed looking older men will be quietly sitting around a video monitor of gay porn.
7. A few young or questioning people will be in the bar on any given weekend night, looking astonished at the naughty humor and antics of the other people there.

All of these I saw with my own eyes last night, and nearly 20 years after walking into my first gay bar, I smiled a little to myself, because no matter what else changes, these dynamics are the same. Not that I don’t want all of those to stay the same, certainly not. But it’s kind of like I haven’t aged.

Who’s up for Gay Bar Time Machine? Or the Curious Case of Benjamin Buttman? We can make it happen, people. Actually, maybe I should do an Internet search and see if they’ve been filmed already.

Back in DC, the local NBC affiliate’s weatherman would take bets as to the first snowfall of the year; whoever came closest without going over (thank you, Price Is Right, for that little construct) would get a visit from the local celeb, who would shovel their walkway with a special golden shovel. To call it absurd would be a bit of an understatement.

Out here in Walla Walla, the betting is on when we’ll get our first 90-degree day. I don’t really see this as comparable to snow in DC, because 90 + days are a plenty in the um, desert, but snow days, last year’s winter notwithstanding, are actually fairly uncommon in DC. Looking for the 100 + point seems like the closer approximation to me. But fine, the Union-Bulletin is looking for 90-degrees as its benchmark. I’m not sure what the award is—maybe a free 10-minute lawn watering? A golden chalice with some ice cubes and lemonade? We don’t have a local television station, so there’s really no weather-forecasting person to bring anything to the winner. Like other things in WW, the glory is in just being right. That way there’s no real expenditure associated with the contest.

The heat and cold have been struggling over the last couple of weeks, and we even had a thunderstorm here a couple of nights ago, during the college’s “Naked Beer Mile” event. I don’t suppose it stopped anyone from trotting around the quad naked, but certainly, I was not going to head over there to witness their fortitude-slash-stupidity. We learned last year to keep our shades drawn that evening.

The tradition is this: the cross-country team, obviously a group of exhibitionists and nudists, sponsors a run around the quad on campus at midnight on the day after classes end in the spring. We hadn’t been forewarned about this last year until a few hours beforehand, and as we live on the edge of campus, heard shouts of “naked” from some students who, through the loudness and slurredness of their communication, seemed fairly intoxicated. Ah, college. I had friends who pushed a refrigerator out of a second story window, so I suppose this is par for the course, and less environmentally troublesome.

What is particularly amusing, once one gets past the communal birthday-suits-are-the-most-aerodynamic thing, is the email that went out in advance of the Mile this year, with some advice for participants:

In preparation for the big event, we would just like to take a second to play the grandma role and remind you of a few ground rules. First, if you are traveling from off campus, you should be wearing clothes when you arrive and when you leave. Your neighbors and especially the authorities do not appreciate public nudity. Second, do not enter any academic buildings, residence halls, or the library, no matter how tempted you are to do so. Finally, please do not set off any fireworks. Seriously. This quickly catches the attention of the police, and it’s in everyone’s best interest to keep their presence to a minimum.

This email amuses me to no end, because:

1. I can’t see any grandma offering any of this advice to young adults who were preparing to run around in their skivvies.
2. I can’t believe people need to be reminded to wear clothing in public.
3. I might have reversed the sentiment of the phrase “your neighbors and especially the authorities.” In our house, it’s “the authorities and especially your neighbors” who don’t appreciate your naked bodies skirting across the lawn on the way to campus.
4. (Really 3a) I can’t believe the email author had to give a reason why public nakedness is wrong.
5. Students really are tempted to go to the library au naturelle? Seriously? Mightn’t you be seeing these librarians again? You want them to be able to recall that image of you as they’re checking out your books or arguing over fines you owe? Seriously?
6. I just can’t imagine that fireworks and alcohol are a good combination, especially when there’s not even the barrier of cotton shorts or t-shirts, much less serving as an SOS flare for your activity.

Yes, I was once in college. And I poured orange paint on Penn State’s Nittany Lions as a prank. But darn it, I did it with my clothes on.

Of course her goggles and irises match!

I mostly bit my tongue when 30 inches of snow fell onto our house during the winter of 2009 and after which no plows visited our neighborhood. Scratch that, no plow, as in singular, moved any snow. Susanne and I understood a little bit better why people in this corner of the state and country act like they don’t need government, because hello, government isn’t, or wasn’t, there for us.

Fine, I get it. One doesn’t feel the pulse of the Capitol this far away, which means, one doesn’t have any reason to think that any government worker in the entire 2.6 million-person force actually cares about the average human walking around in this country. That such an idea couldn’t possibly be true doesn’t stop folks from generalizing what the U. S. government is and what it does. So they generalize. And then do it some more.

Sensing a problem here? At some point, our assumptions about government intent and capability take us off the rails entirely as we try to get our 50-train car over the river with no bridge.

Over time, we’ve gone from “alert your police to suspicious behavior” in the wake of 9/11 and the anthrax-mailing assclown to “pass laws so we can carry our guns into church” because apparently we’re now better at policing than the police. Osmosis? Or maybe strapping explosive metal to your thigh infuses your quadriceps with law enforcement knowledge and then that is carried up to your brain so that you know at any given moment who to shoot and who to leave alone. Damn those police academies for keeping us in the dark.

Well, wherever there’s confusion and hysteria, there’s someone looking to make a few bucks. I was ignorant of a lot of this until the other night, while watching a rerun of NCIS, I saw a commercial for a 72-hour disaster response kit. A what? I went back with my DVR. Yes. I’d understood correctly. Flashing images of the Katrina hurricane, the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, and the Chili earthquake, a deep-voiced, threatening voiceover told me that government wasn’t there for any of these people, and I should not sit around waiting for 1. a natural disaster nor 2. the government to bail me out. Bail me out? Wait a New Jersey minute.

Bailout is from seafaring, as in bailing water out of a sinking boat. It’s taken on a negative connotation because it’s used when the Feds have given money to a struggling company or industry. And the negativity has branched out to the struggling entity. So don’t call me a bailoutee in waiting! I haven’t asked for anything! I’m . . . I’m . . . I’m buying this nonsense, aren’t I? Of course it’s fine to expect that at least the national guard will roll in if half of Walla Walla blows away in a dust storm, leaving only Walla. That’s not a sign of weakness, that’s a sign that I’m an individual and not an institution, that’s all. Sheesh, for a minute there. . . well, I don’t want to think about it.

Okay, so this ad is comparing the non-Katrina response, the Haiti and Chilean earthquakes and saying they’re equally devastating, and suggesting the next one is around the corner and buying their $100 worth of plastic-wrapped product will what, be like having soldiers bringing me clean drinking water and tending to my wounds? Will it pull me out from a crumbled building? Is it like a Roomba on steroids with self-extending grappling hook? I had to laugh at the ludicrousness of this. I laughed, and yet my chuckles were laced with nervousness. Someone will buy this. Of course many someones will buy it. We bought Pet Rocks. We bought Snuggies. We bought ShamWOW!s. We’re Americans, darn it! We buy what we feel like buying! If I’m not spending money on insurance against Armageddon, I’m not a patriot!

I went online to see what was in these kits, anyway. And I was astonished to see how many different Web sites are hawking this schlock. Go on. Google it. 72 disaster kit, that’s what I typed. Open another tab and check it out, I’ll wait.

See? Holy preparedness, Robin! There is a lot of selling of crappy stuff! Light sticks, freeze-dried food, first aid kits, water pouches—I’m sorry, pouches? What’s wrong with water in bottles? Does it have to be so militaristic? I’d rather just put a case of Evian in the basement, okay?

I can buy pre-packaged kits or I can learn how to make my own from one of what, a dozen or so Web sites that have painstakingly put such content together. I’ll be good for 72 hours!

Doing the math, I see that that’s three days. Three days, really? Seriously? And then what? The earthquake ravaged buildings are renovated? The landslides are packed back onto the mountain? The flood waters recede like the hot air at the end of a car wash?

Oh. The government comes into town. The do-nothing, help-nobody government. We want to condescend enough to suggest we’ll need to sort out ourselves for up to three days, but then, we want our government to come to our rescue.

Let me know when any of this starts making sense. Maybe I’ll strap a banana to my thigh and walk into a church with it. That seems less kooky.

There are two kinds of writers in the world, those who overwrite and those who work for test laboratories.

I often write more than will end up in a story or piece of nonfiction, and I see this as a blessing rather than a curse, since trying to pack things on a skeleton of prose is for me, difficult and prone to introducing everything from a non sequitur to a blatant inconsistency—I’m much more orderly when I stick to my process, which is:

Write down initial idea—this can be anything from a character I keep thinking about to a rare astrophysical condition to some circumstance that would explain a mystery

Expand on initial idea—Aliens on Parade grew out of a question I had about how traveling by wormhole could go wrong once in the hands of a lazy or in-over-their-heads government. I started thinking about technology: if we “discovered” how to open wormholes in space, would we also inadvertently be inviting people in? If answer = yes, then what happens?

Identify the actors—my bio sketches start out very simple and I grow them from there. Age, race/ethnicity, gender, orientation all help me figure out their positions, power, and privilege in society, whether it’s a society I’m trying to reflect or invent. Because I see these things at play in the actual world, I feel responsible to bringing them to bear in my writing. But their back stories are more complex. I’ll put in things like “was mugged two weeks ago,” “has unmanaged bipolar disorder and self-medicates with alcohol,” “won’t let anyone meet her mom because she’s on welfare.” I don’t feel the need to write out absolutely everything about them if I’m writing a shorter story, and I try to come up with circumstances for them that let me see greater depth of character when I need to.

Visualize the scenes—this gets harder for longer work, so I keep it flexible, and I will add and subtract to this list over time. I think of this like one would map out a scene shoot for a film. What do we have, where do we have it? I deeply appreciate any writer who can create scene description and keep it interesting, and not just because it’s a magical street in a magical city, which is supposed to be magically interesting all on its own. Once I’ve got a sense of my characters, I try to come up with places where they will be best expressed and then make sure it will work with the plot. If I can find a perfect setting to enhance the tone, then great. In my short story, Underwater, I tried to paint a minimal picture to ask the user to fill in with their starkest memories, while keeping the places in the story bereft of emotion other than tired and empty. I think it works for a story that’s under 2,000 words like this one. My novel-length sci fi piece, Superqueers, spends a lot more time showing different neighborhoods in Washington, DC, because I wanted to work against the every-city feel of other comic book hero stories. Incidentally that story grew out of an image I knew I needed to write 20 years ago, of a small greasy spoon diner and a very large man who drinks coffee there, spilling a lot of it and using many, many packets of sugar in the process.

Do the first draft and don’t stop—At this point, I can’t not write any longer; I have to type words out through my fingers now now now. I will take a few pages to get up to speed, although I don’t like seeing it this way. I’d love to think my work was perfect out of the gate, but in reality I’m in last place until the final turn, to drag the metaphor through the mud, mix it and beat it like a dead horse. I and most everyone I know need to do an awful lot of rewriting before I will say the words have been crafted. No blacksmith made a nail with the first strike. But this rewriting process will come later. I don’t worry about it because I’m writing, I’m progressing, I’m telling the story. I may not use the section or piece of dialogue later, but I will save whatever I write in the first draft. Everything lives in the first draft. If I sit down at the computer on Day 2 and I hate everything I wrote, I can start anew if I can’t write anything else, but I will not delete the crap from Day 1. Draft Number 1 holds onto everything. While I’m getting through this first draft I will return to the character bios and the scene list and the original idea, and update them. Matilda is allergic to strawberries. I need the boat out at sea, not at the dock. Those two characters are too similar so I’ll merge them into one and make a note to rewrite the dialogue in chapters 1–3.

Rewrite until it doesn’t suck—other people may have higher expectations for their writing, but I’m shooting for not laughable. Perhaps I’m being too modest; I think I’m a good writer, but I don’t want to get stuck on myself, and I know by now that things can always be improved. I have no love for self-absorbed writers, no matter their level of talent, so I strive not to become one myself. I can’t say when I think a story is done, but when I go through on say, the 20th pass and only have tiny changes to my language, it starts to occur to me to work on something else. I’m either blind to the quality of prose or I’m deadened to making changes and now’s the time to go revise something else or start something new. All the while pitching my best stuff to agents and journals. But that’s another post for another day. This rewriting phase starts out intense and mellows out, kind of like March. I’ll cut whole scenes, chapters, characters, change the ending, put in or take out subplots. Thank goodness I’m writing and not building houses, because I’d destroy every budget I saw.

With that in mind, here is the very original dream from my memoir that drove me, eventually, to transition. It’s no longer in the memoir itself, but it’s referred to and is the backstory for the main character—uh, namely me—and I revised it something like 10 times before I struck it entirely, so it’s rougher than the rest of the writing at this point.

Trees, everywhere, mostly evergreens. He looked around at them, some clumped up closely, branches looped together with their neighbors, some isolated from the rest, the lot of them with varying heights and apparent ages, climbing up the side of the mountain. Far below the side of the mountain the trees were reflected back almost perfectly from the surface of a very still, large lake. He wondered how he’d gotten here, patting himself down absentmindedly, as if identifying the things in his pockets would reveal a useful memory. Looking down at his clothes, he recognized an icon of sorts. Is that what they’re called? Icons? Stereotypes? He was struck by the idea of lumberjacks. This was probably because he was wearing a red flannel jacket, or shirt, he wasn’t sure. It was something in between, and it would later occur to him that there is in fact, a hybrid jacket-shirt-thingy for sale on the men’s fashion market, if one used a very loose definition of the term, “fashion.” But he did notice, after taking in the color and texture of it, that it wasn’t quite warm enough for the brisk morning air. Wait, was it morning?

He squinted at the sky, a pearly blue with a few wisps of cirrus clouds high, high away. Well, he knew what the hell a cirrus cloud was, that was a start. When had he learned about cirrus clouds? He had a clear memory of Mrs. Warms’ 8^th grade science class at that crappy Catholic school on the main drag in Princeton. The one with the scary nuns. And then on graduation day with their caps and robes on, they all looked like nuns and none of their parents were clued in to the trauma that their children were experiencing.

So okay, he’s made it past elementary school. Good to know.

He took a few steps, only then realizing he had on light brown worker’s boots, with his jeans pulled down neatly over the tops. It occurred to him to touch his head, and to his shock he realized he had on a knit cap. He took it off and inspected it. Navy blue, maybe, or black. Size 7. Carhart brand.

Holy shit, he really was a lumberjack. That couldn’t be right, could it? He looked around for an ax and a large blue beast of burden.

Before he could continue on trying to figure out who the hell he was, he heard a voice behind him.

“Daniel! Daniel! What are you doing over here?”

He turned around and saw a woman running up a trail he hadn’t noticed, what with the sky looking gorgeous and the trail looking blah. She was wearing her own knit cap, plaid jacket, jeans, and work boots. There apparently was some kind of outdoorsy uniform going on here. Her cheeks were bright red from the cold and her spontaneous bout of jogging. Brown curly hair stuck out in gravity-defying directions as soon as it cleared the tight hat. She left the impression of looking like a balding Troll doll that had spent some good quality time under a diffuser.

He had no idea why he knew what a diffuser was.

“Hi, Kathryn,” he mumbled. He knew her name. Another surprise. Who was Kathryn?

“Daniel, we need you at the mess. Why are you all the way up here? We’re running out of pancakes and French toast, and Jackie doesn’t know how to make the dishwasher run.” She put her hands on her knees as she bent over, panting.

“Daniel?” He looked at her. He knew her name, but he didn’t know why she was calling him this.

“Yes?”

“Who’s Daniel,” he asked.

“You, silly.” She stopped a moment. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing. I just didn’t think that was my name.”

“Uh, what did you think your name was?”

He started to say and then stopped. It wasn’t right. Under this brightening sky, in the cold air, dressed like an extra from a Monty Python movie, something wasn’t right.

“Nothing, I’m kidding. I just wanted to catch the last of the sunrise.”

“Well, we need you, Dan. Come on, before the President runs out of breakfast.”

“The PRESIDENT is here,” he asked, following her, feeling his footsteps crunch as he made them on the frosty ground.

“The President of the Bucks County PTA. It’s their group that picked the campground for their stupid conference this weekend.” She looked at him like he’d lost all sense. She wasn’t far off the mark.

“Right, right.”

“Jesus, what did you do last night?” Her hair bounced around as she shook her head. He had the distinct impression that her cap was about to shoot off of her head from the pressure of her curls.

They walked into the mess and half a dozen children were upon him, tugging at his shirt/jacket and looking for more flapjakcs as if they might be hidden in his pockets. He hoped he could remember how to make a pancake, if he didn’t even know this name she was calling him.

He passed by a mirror, and got a look at himself just before entering the kitchen. Tallish, with a big, thick beard, hairy wrists and hands, twinkling brown eyes, wrinkles that implied he had smiled more often than frowned in his life. He was a mini Paul Bunyan, in fact. He realized precisely then that he had always wanted to be Paul Bunyan and only Paul Bunyan. He loved who he was now more than ever, and it had taken a long time for him to become the man these people needed and cheered. And that was really odd, for some reason.

And then I woke up.

I went to the 2009 Walla Walla Balloon Stampede, having never made first contact with the hot air behemoths, and I wasn’t disappointed. The evolved quickly, from reams of lifeless fabric spread on the ground to fat and bright living beings, puffing with hot air and then quietly lifting off into the air. One by one they drifted up, their engines roaring in short bursts until the humans with two feet on the ground can barely discern what color they are. And everyone watching seemed a little in awe of the balloon beings, but perhaps we were just still fuzzy from getting up so early.

This year I woke up pre-dawn to get ready for more balloon stampede viewingship, but was disheartened when my fellow watcher texted me to say it was sprinkling outside. Sprinking, I thought, so what? I pulled up the Web site for the event and saw that indeed, the launch would occur “weather permitting.”

What does weather permitting mean, I asked my friend. Baseball weather or football weather? As a sports enthusiast who has dabbled in both, I know that there is a big difference. Only Charlie Brown plays in a downpour, but I can recall football games in Alexandria in which we had to crunch through a crusted-over ice field in January, with the coach bellowing at us, “We came to play!” I’ll just note here that this coach had been a linebacker for the Detroit Lions in the mid-80s, so clearly, he knew all about hard work and winning.

We decided to forge ahead, crossing our fingers that some random precipitation wouldn’t mean disaster for our less dense friends of the parachute-fiber variety. At 6AM sharp, we drove to the fairgrounds.

Parking was too easy. If the launch were set for 6:30, more people should be here by now, I figured. We came across one older couple walking toward us, back to their car. They looked deflated [sic].

“They canceled because of the rain,” she told us, looking fairly dry. Perhaps she’d dodged every drizzle drop on her way across the field.

We turned around and saw four more senior citizens, who informed me that they’d followed us here, figuring we would lead them to the balloons. This is funny ha ha and funny strange for a few reasons, including:

1. There’s nothing about us to signal to other drivers that we’re interested in this event, like a neon sign over the car reading “Balloon Freaks,” a bumper sticker saying, “I brake for balloons,” or a personalized license plate.
2. The balloon launch was at the Walla Walla Fairgrounds, which are pretty large in a town that’s pretty small. There’s really no need to tail another car on the off chance that they’ll lead you to a very well marked place in the city.
3. Someone was more clueless than we were.

Faced with having woken up especially early and wanting to make the best out of the morning, we headed over to the Elk’s Lodge. While this may at first seem completely arbitrary, let me just note that hey, I’ve mentioned it before in this blog, and I have a curiosity about it, but more importantly, the Elk’s Lodge has been hosting Ed’s Diner since Ed’s had a fire last winter. It’s nice of the Elks to give the staff the capacity to stay employed while the structure is being renovated, and Ed’s makes a helluva good greasy spoon breakfast. It’s just a shame that the life-size statue of Elvis didn’t survive the fire, because I’m sure the Elks wouldn’t mind having his presence in the middle of their ballroom.

And what a ballroom it was. We walked in needing a second wind and hoping to find it on the other side of made-to-order eggs. I looked around and wondered to myself just how many people had had their wedding receptions here. All of the tables were empty save one in the far corner that had something like a dozen older men I presumed were Lodge members. I have to imagine that all of these groups—the Elks, the Masons, the Rotaryians, or whatever they’re called—are having trouble finding new members because all of these people were eligible for AARP.

We may have been the second table of the morning, but apparently I underestimated how many other disgruntled balloon watchers were following us, because within five minutes, 50 other people arrived at the makeshift diner-in-an-old-man-lodge. Seriously, there was one waiter and 18 tables with hungry patrons. Some people looked like they were considering bum rushing the fake elk next to the front door, hoping to find French toast inside like one stores candy in a pinata. Fortuitous for us, we’d already placed our order with the cook in the back before the mob took over the space. I enjoyed my mushroom omelet but my friend walked across the room to get some ketchup, and I waved down a fellow customer who was helping himself to the fresh pot of coffee at the waiter’s station. Hey, we Walla Wallans have some initiative, especially when it comes to our caffeine consumption.

All in all, it was an adventure. We took turns with our individual elk photo ops, and I went back to bed. Maybe next year.

One beer consumed with dinner still causes a hangover the next morning. Apparently I now need to drink twice as much water for whatever alcohol I’ve consumed which 1.) really doesn’t feel good to do at the time, sloshly stomach factor-wise, and 2.) makes one look like an old fart when he’s trying to be sociable. But okay, message from brain received. And I’m living in wine country why again?

The same set of stairs one has used for the past 19 months start to cause joints to sing a song, a little longer every time they are traversed. Once upon a time my right knee (the non-operated-on one) would click a couple of times while climbing the stairs in our house. Now it sings like Pavarotti. This is why I’m happy to announce that my right knee has a new recording contract from CBS Records.

You jump up and down with glee when getting carded for the beer mentioned in the first paragraph. And then you realize that jumping up and down doesn’t work so well anymore, so you just smile a lot, now looking like some creepy, semi-crazy dude. And the picture on your ID is horrible to boot, so you’d rather not show it to anyone. That gets the smile to go away pretty quickly.

Whatever skill you’ve gained from experience starts to become eroded by a lack of memory in how to repeat it. Sure, I’ve made the Joy of Cooking’s pancake recipe hundreds of times, but I still can’t recall the ingredient list, the page it’s on, or which measuring cup makes the best pancake pouring device. People are kind enough to eat them anyway. But I know they’re humoring me.

Those two gray hairs you’ve been avoiding suddenly decide to throw a gray hair party, and you realize you’re growing a clump that makes you look like Jay Leno. And that guy is such an ass clown nobody wants to look like him. A sudden red beard would be so much better, but there’s not a drop of Irish in you.

You see punk teenagers chasing ducks around for fun, and you yell at them to stop. Oh my, ain’t that just the mood killer? You realize you are That Guy. Long live the high school class of 1988.

Nearing the end of our initial stint in Wallyworld, I feel it only appropriate to take stock of what lessons I’ve learned thus far, as part of what I’ve tried to do while living here—otherwise known as how to carry on when lots of things in one’s life have gone awry. Through a torn ACL and meniscus, the free-fall of the world’s strongest economy, 30-some-odd inches of snow, for which our passengers tires were completely insufficient, and the sudden adjustment that accompanied moving from a town in which 70 percent of the residents were registered Democrats to a town that went 57 percent for McCain in the last election, I’ve tried to keep up, somehow, with my new reality. And along the way I’ve picked up a few things that I promise to take with me as we start our road trip and half-year sabbatical. These are, in no particular order:

1. There is nothing that being in a hurry makes better, except possibly catching a ferry. I spent a lot of time in DC rushing around, and now I wonder why.
2. Listservs just aren’t as good for meting out advice as real people. Sure, I appreciate the community list, but asking my local pharmacist who they recommend for something, even when it’s unrelated to pharmacy, helps get me information they feel attached to, and thus, it becomes better information. This is how I found the second dry cleaners in Walla Walla. For the record, there are two dry cleaners in Walla Walla. The first was cheap but a bit brusque, if anyone cares to know such things.
3. It’s not what you do, it’s who you are. This was a hard one for me. Career was very important to me before we moved; it was something I worked hard for, found accomplishment in, and that I could appeal to when I asked the question “why.” I also quite enjoyed the salary I eventually made, but again, I worked damn hard for that salary, including working at 3AM on a Saturday for a company vice president who was just about completely incompetent, and having a report thrown at me because the president didn’t like how much it had cost to produce. Fast forward to today and I’ve now been out of a job for 19 months. As long as I was focused on what I didn’t have, I tasted my own bile with the level of frustration I felt. But in the meantime, I’ve mentored people who really needed someone to listen to them and encourage them, I’ve helped out a mom with her newborn when she needed a sitter, I’ve tried to help people just this side of lonely make new connections to others, and I’m currently working on shining a spotlight on the emerging Walla Walla food culture/community, and I think those are all good things. None of them has made me a penny, and in a way, that’s very liberating. My sense of self has shifted from me inside an office to me beyond an office.
4. Sometimes you just need a nice glass of wine at the end of the day. Or if wine isn’t your thing, iced tea. Or some other refreshment, so long as there’s a moment to decompress from the day’s activities. And if chocolate could accompany this moment, all the better. But remember, we have to breathe before we take the next step.
5. When faced with an opportunity to do something unknown vs. already experienced, go for the unknown. I suppose this is another way to say nothing ventured, nothing gained, but damn, that phrase is old and worn out. We could have stayed in DC and not come to Walla Walla, sure. And Susanne would still be teaching as a part-time instructor and I would still be working for the government. And I would not have found the time yet to get to my writing. This would all have amounted to limbo as humans live it. So even if this writing thing is a pipe dream, I’m glad to be doing it, and not a week goes by that I don’t hear at least once that what I’ve written has meant something important for someone. All because I arranged pixels on a screen. That is really touching to me.
6. The more you make your life about learning Important Things, the less you’ll really know. Another hard one for me, since I’ve been all about the learning and growing my whole life. But I see now that I’m not less of a person for not knowing rocket science. The beauty of this position is that I can learn constantly, just by being aware and being principled. This drives me to keep picking up other people’s stories, because I can’t live everyone else’s lives. So the next best thing is hearing them, asking questions and paying attention. I aim to walk a whole lot of miles in other people’s shoes and spend less time fretting about what I don’t know.
7. Having a sit-down supper most nights is a great excuse for talking. I know, this means I need to close my laptop. I’m okay with that, because on any given night, it could be cheese grits with asparagus and seared pork chops, or curried chicken over rice, or smashed red potatoes with roast chicken and wilted garlic spinach. And I wouldn’t want any of those things to get in between the keys. I also like recapping the day and enjoying another person’s company while having tasty treats.

These weren’t the lessons I sought out when we moved here, but these are the ones I’ve run into. And I recognize that the edge of interesting and trite is razor-thin, so if anyone has puked on themselves reading this, my sincerest apologies. But at the end of the analysis, these have turned out to be important to me. It’s not that they weren’t important before August 20, 2008, but they were just hard to hear through the din. I would genuinely love hearing other folks’ life lessons, so feel free to add them in the comments to this post.

Reflecting on all of the intersections within Walla Walla, I can’t recall a single NO LEFT TURN sign. Not by the Bi Mart, south side of town. Not at any point on Isaacs Road, which is a straight shot east into the Blue Mountains and which is littered with fast food shacks, auto parts stores, car washes, and oodles of plain gray parking lots. Not in the small downtown, even though every other city I’ve tromped through has boasted at least one stubbornly red sign.

It’s a small thing, I know, but it takes on a bit more meaning once one ventures into a large city with any kind of traffic issue. One finds oneself in a strange place and on the wrong street, and once the first battle with orientation is settled, realizes that the quickest way back to the tiny quadrant one does know is forbade by the local powers in charge. And then one is faced with a decision: break the law and feign innocence, or try to find another way over to the relief zone.

In DC, drivers could find themselves hitting a series of NO LEFT TURN signs, their frustration building quickly as they creep along, stuck behind other tourists, bicycle messengers, and a lot of men in suits with big briefcases.  And here the visitors thought government was trying to go paper-free. Little do they know that those are more likely the private sector guys. There are 50,000 practicing attorneys in Washington, DC.

In DC, defensive driving means watching out for all the Lexus owners texting while driving, the cars with fake paper license plates in the rear windows that add the important note, “STOLEN,” and the truly clueless in RVs. Who the hell RVs to a major city? Sometimes I would stand on a corner and laugh while they circled the block, trying to find parking. I wasn’t trying to be mean, it was just such a great pastime. Twice in DC my car was hit while I was idling at a red light: once from a guy who slid into me on black ice, and once when a driver in front of me backed up, trying to make room for a turning tour bus. These things just don’t happen in Wallyworld.

In Walla Walla, defensive driving means looking out for small children who’ve broken free of a parent’s grasp, slowing down for momma and baby ducks, and watching the red light runners, which I’ll get to later. These things tend not to happen in DC, although there is a street over by the army hospital with a goose crossing sign, and the two days I was on that road, I did in fact have to stop for crossing geese. It was almost as if they waited for my car just so they could cross, which I’ll note is the logic most pedestrians in the city, use too.

I’ve been made aware of the split between this corner of the United States and the world inside the Beltway that ensnares everything in the District. It has come in the form of massive snowfall. And it has come in the total lack of snowplowing afterward. It’s shown its face in the 5-minutes-to-anywhere nature of the city confines, a distinct difference from DC, in which most things are at least 35 minutes away, no matter how one travels. 2,800 miles away from the Capitol’s epicenter, how government really functions is invisible to people, who have en masse decided to decide that everyone in government has their worst interests at heart. And I try to explain as gently as possible that the government is just like every other office they’ve worked in, with all of those personalities working against and with each other for 8 hours a day.

These discrepancies remind me that we fear what we do not know. I’m not a subscriber to the “if we educate, we’ll have world peace,” because I’m far too cynical to believe that bigotry, oppression, and anger are only the result of ignorance. People have stakes. People earnestly believe their group (read: race, nation, state) has stakes that are threatened by some of other group. I could no sooner “educate” Rush Limbaugh and inspire him to be a bleeding heart liberal than I could teach a worm to fly, and I say this feeling pretty certain that even Rush doesn’t believe half the crap he spews out into his microphone. But Rush has a stake in his persona, and like everything else, if he’s not being increasingly conservative, he risks becoming irrelevant. And so he spews.

In the same way, people dig their heels in about what they think government represents, who they think it represents. It’s been a long time since I heard anyone say they feel personally supported by the Federal government, even as they drive on interstate highways, take their kids to the public library, call 911 when their kitchen’s on fire, or go to their child’s high school graduation. Instead when they make the pilgrimage to DC they get caught with one-way streets and NO LEFT TURN signs and it signals to them that they’re unwanted, when all it really means is there are way too many cars on the roads in the city and someone is trying something to make the system keep working.

Walla Walla is a place where people run red lights all the time. I was astonished when I saw the first runner, because I’d been conditioned out of it from all the ticketing cameras that have grown into the East Coast traffic system like kudzu, and because I’m such a law-abider, my exception that of speeding. I never saw a speed limit that 7 more miles an hour didn’t make better. But going through a red light, to me, was just jaw-dropping, in the same way that any minimally suicidal tendency is, like intentionally gaining 500 pounds, or BASE jumping.

But maybe it says something about the garden variety Walla Wallan. As if the rules don’t apply out here. Or that my neighbors and fellow car drivers won’t mind. It’s just one light. It’s just today. It’s just that it’s 3AM. It’s just that I see other people do it all the time.

In this kind of context, what else can the government represent but an angry nanny, an everything-is-rules custodian who seeks to end pleasure and red light running, out of spite? I shouldn’t be surprised at the level of distrust, I suppose.

I wonder what 20 months in Walla Walla has done to change my perspective, what new kinds of things I’ll see as we drive back across the country, and what I’ll miss that I wouldn’t have before. I am the guy who wants to discover the hidden world in the sidewalk crack, a focus on fascination that I’ve carried with me since I was 3. I want to start seeing where we come together because I am damn tired of seeing how far apart we are. I want people in DC and Walla Walla to know that they are closer than they think: in both towns I was a regular customer of several businesses, laughing with them about inanity. Both towns boast big, tree-covered parks. Both towns struggle with caring for their elderly, face cutbacks to their education budget, struggle with aging and fading infrastructure. We could learn a lot from each other.

I am not looking forward to being told I can’t make a left turn. But I won’t blame anybody about it, either. I’ll try to take the laissez faire attitude of the Northwest to the Type A personality of DC. I’m a peace ambassador.

So we’ve sketched out and thought about and worked our way through to some summer plans, and wireless connectivity what it is, will be relaying our journey on this very blog, in what will wind up being a reverse travelogue of our trip in August 2008. Once June rolls around I will also be guest blogging for Bitch magazine, so I will have to get a bit creative in the early part of the month on ways to get my posts published. But as far as trans/plant/portation goes, here is a preview of our trip back east:

Hot springs in Idaho—non-sulfur pools like the one we’ve been to in Radium, British Columbia

Grand Teton National Park—Susanne revealed to me that “tetons” is from the breast-like mountain silhouette. Yeah, she had to go make it dirty.

Yellowstone National Park—we’re aiming to reach this park on my actual 40th birthday, because I can think of nothing as wonderful as standing next to “Old Faithful” when I enter my 41st year.

The Badlands of South Dakota—I have no expectations, but I am told it will be breathtaking, so I’ll bring some extra air with me.

Mt. Rushmore and the Corn Palace—I feel an itch to write this blog post very badly, juxtaposing the majestic grandeur of the presidents with . . . corn.

Minneapolis/St. Paul—no trip cross-continent would be complete without at least a short visit to the land of the Fargo Accent.

I think it may be fun to make some kind of flip book like I’ve seen for little kids. It could combine the destination, the beautiful feature of the destination, and how I could wound or maim myself. Roughing out the idea a little, here are some examples:

Everett got splinters | taking pictures of trees | in the Grand Tetons

Everett got sunburned | looking at the sculpture garden | in Minneapolis

Everett was bitten by a bear | hiking the stunning cliffs | of the Badlands

Mixing and matching only makes it more fun! I see a children’s book here, really.

After all of this traveling, we will land in DC, just in time for the DC Pride weekend, which will, it nearly goes without saying, be completely unlike Walla Walla in tone and demographic. And just watch, I’ll probably get overwhelmed from so many people. The desert’s always greener, or something.