"For every apostrophe omitted from an it's, there is an extra one put into and its."

Lynne Truss explains in her new book Eats, Shoots and Leaves that the number of apostrophes will therefore remain constant; commas may never be created nor destroyed, only borrowed.

This post was inspired by the Motorcycle Diaries, a film that reminded my of this short essay I wrote as a submission for a contest last year. I've felt inspired similarly only by one other movie. I think I cried for 45 minutes after Life as a House.





Windows down, and the radio playing softly, the needle points to full. Nobody in the passenger seat, and nothing in mind but the hum of spinning wheels, I pulled on to the frontage road, and mouthed the words of a familiar song which fluttered almost too faint to hear above the flapping shoulder strap. The wind started pealing away the leaves and pollen which had accumulated on the roof and hood of my car over of the previous stagnant two weeks, as sped down the entrance ramp onto the state highway. Ah, now I was getting somewhere. My restless mind simmered at about three thousand revolutions per minute, and I began to see where I was headed.

For most of my adolescent life I have fought this itch to move somewhere, anywhere really. I would scratch the itch a little, only to find that it became more and more irritated. And when I could not put it out of mind, I would leave wherever I was for a small walk or a short drive, arriving, a short while later, at the place which I had started, honestly feeling much better. But the feeling, as I said, would not last long, and my feet would get to tapping again after a few weeks lunch and dinner at the same restaurants. Every time I left the place which contained my life, my problems, my ex-girlfriends, my church, my bed; I felt that possibility which every person longs for, a new start.

As writers, part of our commission, our calling, is to create a sense of movement or travel for the reader. To take someone on a journey that they otherwise might not be able to take on their own is a marvelous accomplishment, a gift, when received, that is not repayable. Most readers find great joy in seeing, if in their minds eye, what they have never seen before, and so we make our living as storytellers, journalists, researchers, news writers, and the like, taking them to the places they cannot get to on their own.


* * * * * *

An interesting experiment, performed by Dr. John Bowlby, was noted by Bruce Chatwin in his travel log entitled The Songlines. When Bowlby constructed a machine, which imitated the motion that a child might experience in the arms of a walking mother, he found that an upset child would cease screaming if the rocking motion of the device was to be accelerated to fifty cycles per minute. When the machine was set at lower speeds, had little effect on the child. It appeared that the simple sensation of movement pacified the cries of most normal children. This experiment alone was enough to convince Chatwin that man is primarily a migratory species. While in the same travel log, I came across this Old Latin aphorism: solvitur ambulando, meaning 'it is solved by walking'.

* * * * * *

As long as I'm standing in the same spot, I will remain in this off-balance state, dodging punches thrown at my already dizzied soul. I must move. Like a bicycle which gains stability as its velocity increases, I was finding my feet were more confident with each step in the same direction: out of town. More often, this movement becomes a remedy, a solution, which brings the traveler eventually to the place where he or she started; the only difference is, direction, velocity, and momentum have value. As travelers, we are no longer standing at a particular location, but moving through it, both figuratively and literally. It's not the movement that we ultimately crave, but the sense of purpose that it brings. The trip we take, whether it is around the block, around the globe, a few minutes, or an entire chapter of life, allows all of those tangled and echoing voices to grow fainter and fainter, swallowed by the volume of roaring wind in our ears. And we hear instead the voice of our heart, many times bringing us full circle to see we were at home all along. It's the travel itself that does the simplifying. The seams in the road, the steady broken lines, the pulse of ground underfoot, and the passing of day into night, all conspire to fill the sojourner with an understanding that they are closer to their goal (wherever they are headed) than they were just a few hours ago. A new place signifies a new day. When traveling, it is hard to misunderstand that we are not where we were yesterday, that we are progressing toward something, often the place where we began. And yet, we arrive there anew.

* * * * * *

It may be only to create the illusion that we are informed of our purpose, but however we can, we love this notion that we are moving forward. We, being the descendents of a nation which wished to fix its old problems by conquering unknown territory remain obsessed with calculable progress into the darkest regions of human understanding. There are thousands of accounts of some American traveler who wished to leave his home and find his home at the same time. America learned from its experience, forging itself a new constitution, heeding the call for a new breed of poet, and constructing a horizon which cut and gouged the sky. America was less interested in educating its inhabitants of their past. Instead it wished to show them how to leave it behind, to pierce the edges of their own boundaries.

America from the start it seems was an event of great disappointment. Winthrop and company left for this new world, zealous to show the rest of humanity a bright and shining city on a hill. Instead, they found themselves performing one of the greatest failed experiments ever attempted in the history of the globe. So many colonists and explorers left their homes to be set on this global stage. They arrived rather disappointed to find the lights turned out and curtain closing quickly.

So then the question, "What does it mean to be an American?" becomes uniquely American in itself. Culturally, don't the French know what it means to be a Frenchmen? Would and Italian find difficulty if asked what it meant to live in Italy? They know exactly what it means. But to be an American means precisely that we are on a journey, passing through our narrow alley of experience, learning piece by piece, just who we are. As travel essayist William Least Heat-Moon suggests, "Maybe America should make the national bird a Kentucky Fried Leghorn and put Ronald McDonald on the dollar bill." We are a nation without tradition, built on the broken fragments of each other's heritage.

A traveler's success is due solely to his ability to see the strangeness of a new place around him and perceive it as potentially familiar all at once. A desert or an open grassland prairie is indiscernible at first glance, but if I inquire into its purposes, its plants, and lives that make it a home, I find myself a spokesperson for the hope that is embedded there. Hey, look here, there's something that makes sense about this desert. Absolute hostility, such as the desert projects, serves simultaneously as a deterrent and as an invitation. Within the desert there is a fascinating web of interdependent creatures, an ecosystem of mutual giving and receiving that largely ignores the human race.

Meanwhile, getaway vacation homes, and fast food chains chomp across the land, blighting many of the attempts to understand the desert and its independent existence. In the wake of these bulldozers and contractors lie the remains of purposes undiscovered. Lesser purposes defeating greater purposes pose questions that morality must answer. Like the protective coloring of an insect or fish, the desert preserves itself from destruction by projecting such a howling wilderness onto the minds of its outsiders, and those not willing to humble themselves before entering will not learn of its secrets.

I, for one, have become more and more disgusted with our latest abstractions of these kinds of discovery. I went, this summer, to a theme park in Florida where they had assembled a ride famously termed, 'Rhino Rally'. The ride consisted of a Discovery Land Rover equipped with special locking bars and guide. The underutilized vehicle was to proceed along a track of steel rails constructed in a slightly discombobulated figure eight. I thought to myself, "Has the American adventure been reduced to this?" And as I left the ride confused, I considered shouting to the hundreds of adults waiting, corralled inside a maze of ropes, each sweating out their two and half hours: TURN BACK NOW, IT'S NOT TOO LATE. It's likely they would have found more novelty driving their four-door mid-size sedans around the block.

Wonder and discovery go hand in hand with our traveling itches. And yet the power of curiosities to lure our hearts into some deep crevice of interest will almost always pull our roots down with it into the people and places we decide to love. These individuals we find along the way which we love are the ones we owe the most to. They soothe the itch, they share a peace with us, and they give us an immediate and acute feeling that we are here because they are here. These tangible, contiguous connections we make with a specific and almost measurable progress are the kinds of relationships or purposes which we find easiest to believe in. Purposes which cannot be seen, those which are much grander than our limited first person view, are more difficult to embrace, and even more difficult, those purposes which we serve without ever knowing.

Everything and everyone that exists is discernible by the certain patterns and rhythm which give those things and persons purpose. They interact with other persons or objects in a certain way, and this relationship is purpose itself. Valence electrons race around a nucleus at the rim of a molecule, waiting for an opportunity to meet and interact with other molecules. Planets trace their orbits around the sun, ours at precisely three-hundred and sixty-five days per round trip. And there is always a tension between the patterns which tend to stay the same and those which are always wishing to break the rules. This tension is a delicate balance, and some will find their purposes at odds, but without this movement, without this change, wouldn't we find ourselves lost in a dissonant pool of stagnant disarray? Perhaps we would not find ourselves at all.

Still, what is this obsession with finding ourselves in the other's shoes? Why must we always sleep in a different bed, or better yet, abandon our beds altogether? It is because when we move, we find that we are left in the hands of God. For some, this may be the easiest way to the deal with the question of what to do with oneself. The choice which we recoiled from is no longer ours to make. When we place ourselves on the path of destiny by moving in the line of a single direction, we will inevitably arrive where the road takes us.

I too have begun to think that I simply need to edge past the boundaries of my own familiar ground. I want to leave, not because I have an appointment somewhere else, but to let the fingerprint of a trip take me where it pleases. So, I packed a bag and headed to the gas station, where I filled my tank completely. This is a rare occurrence, mostly because I don't use much gas to get around the small town I live in, but also for fear that I might need the money to buy something else (writer's income). Still, I felt the joy of a completely filled new tank of gas. I knew by the time it was spent, I would be somewhere else.

I went to a reading this week on Valentines Monday, attended primarily by dateless students and poetry addicted instructors of Austin Community College. We celebrated love's (primarily the erotic kind, philosophically speaking, Mark you remember that class) woeful and blessed way of bringing persons, who were by all practical purposes dead, to a revelatory awareness of a beautiful and new kind of existence with their newly found object of obsession.

One by one, a poet walked to the stage and stood illumined by a street lamp hung against the brick wall, marking the edge of the coffee venue. Some of these readers became the poems they were reading, finding emotions somewhere inside themselves that were not there a moment before. One woman, asked to read as a special guest, weaved her way from the back of the crowd reciting her first poem. We played along with her, watching as she moved from table to table before finally reaching the wooden platform. She was no less lyrical when she put her poetry down.

One man felt it more appropriate to sing his words. A nervous student hid behind his sketch pad. Most rallied around the idea of, "once upon a time I had sex with this ivory statue." And if there was one thing that all of these poets had in common, it was this aim to retell what some other poet had already said, only differently. Poets who have something new to say and who and who say it well are rare. Poets who redefine what we mean are priceless.

But what about this idea of "love" being "sex"? It just doesn't make sense. And if there was one thing that did make sense the whole night to me, it was what one young man said before reading a poem about a close friend of his. What about all the other kinds of love that we leave out on Valentines day? Where are their days? I think we should devote more than one day to exploring this idea of heartbreak and heartthrob.

What is one your most uplifting or devastating love moments?

Living at home again with my parents has been an interesting study in Fathers in Sons for me. I find myself constantly staring at my Dad wondering how I am so much like him and nothing like him, both at the same time. There was a moment yesterday when I walked into the bathroom downstairs in the office where we keep our computer and library. My Dad has pretty much set up shop in there and is always working on something that requires precision, something I know little about.

When I walked into the bathroom, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and wanted to compare my face to my Dad's immediately. It wasn't just the features that I noticed were similar, but what they indicated: secluded, intense, unimpressed. The blue light from the computer screen encased my Dad's face, making it look older than it really was, frozen. He wasn't moving much either, which added to the effect. I don't know if he saw my staring at him and then back at the mirror, but it's likely he wouldn't have reacted (he's not interested in such things) even if he did.

I saw myself there, him, dead and alone. I saw what I loved about that. It's peaceful. Then out of the corner of my eye I saw the me who refused to be my Father, always drawing attention, always laughing and inviting people to dinner. The images never mix, never collaborate. They shove and slink away from each other, assuming kingship over the vessel, both wanting ownership, an imprint designating permanence.

Both are spirits wishing to take the wheel. But mostly it is me, realizing that what I want most is to be my Dad, and at the same time realizing that I cannot, that I must not, that he must not let me be him. It is in his presence that I find my knees the weakest and my hands groping for definition.

Some of you may remember, from the early blogging days, that I posted a letter to a really really cool guy who drove a monster truck around Bryan-College Station. I wanted to let all of you know that if you have been praying for my relationship with that Badass, rejoice, your prayers have been answered. We are like really good friends now, or something.

It turns out that the Cousin of Badass lives here in Austin. Who would'a thunk it? She's really down to earth, drives a Miata, and has three tattoos, that I know of. I was downtown trying to get across the river yesterday for church, when a long strand of sweaty and dog-tired looking folks with numbers plastered on their chests just started running down the middle of the road.

Two police men were walking across the from the adjacent side-walk with orange barricades and fencing, but not before one of the runners stumbled over the front fender of my car, which was poking it's nose a little too far into the intersection beyond the crosswalk. The runner never saw it coming and neither did I. She slid across my hood, smearing her sweaty body across the silver paint, and then collapsed with a squeal in a heap at the front my car. I thought I had just killed an Austin marathoner, that is until she poked her head up from the ground to wave in apologetic fashion.

Funny thing, you won't believe this. She was wearing a tank top t-shirt with a picture of the Badass from Bryan-College Station standing in front of his truck, all covered with mud, save the confederate flag license plate which he had wiped clean for the shot. I offered to give her a ride to the hospital for good measure when I notice the photo screen-printed on her shirt. I think she thought I was staring at her boobs. I explained.

Well it turns out she has this friend who works in the used car business and said that really weird people are always showing up there because they don't do credit requests or criminal background checks. The dealership keeps an extra key to every car and maintains accurate records on where each car-buyer lives. So, when a payment doesn't come in, a car does instead. They just steal it back. When you walk onto this car lot all you need is a Blockbuster Video rental card to roll home in a citrously scented vehicle.

I told her I've been looking for a job that draws some odd ball characters into the picture for a short story collection that I'm hoping to begin this month. She offered me the job. All things work for the good I guess.

Living at home with your parents at twenty-four is highly underrated. Sure, women aren't exactly thrilled about the prospect of "living together" in your old room with the bunk beds, but PEEOOPLE, build a bridge. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are free and almost never cold. You get to feel like you're not growing up. Who wants to grow up? Please. And when they're gone, you have a sweet pad off which you may launch almost any kind of large group gathering event that you want. Off the chain, off the hook, off your rocker. Whatever you want man.

People be lookin' at me these days all sappy. Sayin' they's sorry for my unfortunate hand of cards. But I ain't complainin'. They say that I've about hit rock bottom, and that maybe that'll turn me on to the right thing. But peeps...how's I'm sposzed to hit rock bottom, when all'z I gots is me and this nice padding everywhere?

Live with your parents. It's alright.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
Moneyball by Micheal Lewis
Best American Non-Required Reading Series (2002, 2003, 2004)
The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Fastfood Nation by Eric Schlosser
We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Persig
Bible by lots of guys (best non-fiction since the flood)
Touch the Top of the World by Erik Weihenmayer
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
The Future Dictionary of America edited by Jonathon Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, and Dave Eggers
The Cliff Walk by Don J. Snyder
A John Graves Reader
Blue Alleys by Paul Christensen
Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck
The Opal Desert by Peter Wild
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon
Bitter Lemons by Lawrence Durrell
The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein
The Next Christendom by Philip Jenkins
The Message in the Bottle by Walker Percy
Travels in the Cevenes with a Donkey by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

In a place where sound, image, weirdness, and creativity have fought for decades to drown the invasion of clean sidewalks and corporate suit shops, an elaborate population of homeless beggars jockey for position at every major intersection. People pace, each with personal advertisements: some, containing thoughtful phrases of experienced panhandlers; others, simply asking for beer or cigarettes.

A middle aged man holds a sign every day typically at rush hour announcing that he can no longer take care of his wife and kid. He stands strategically at the mouth of one the wealthiest communities just west of Austin on Loop 360. Westlake, my old stomping grounds, has long been known for its sea of expensive cars, privately owned independent school district and winning football program, which now accepts students who wish to pay for "better" education and dominant Caucasian demographics. But scraggly men with camouflaged utility pants and thread-bare backpacks don't seem to be taking the hint. Barriers of expensive restaurants, and even more pricy clothing stores line the 7 mile stretch of Bee Caves road and are meant to keep the unwanted out, but homeowner associations and community planners could not foresee the migration which has slowly siphoned street sign holders from South Austin on Lamar north toward the suburbs.

Now, these homeless are treated like an flock of overpopulating geese. If we could get rid of them with blanks and flares, we would. But there are laws against such tactics. So these homeless profit, or get by at least.

Absurd indulgences brings with them a sense of guilt, if for a while, and there emerges a willingness among local country club members here in Westlake to pay for some temporary relief of their tortured souls, one dollar at a time, a small price to pay. Landrover's windows open a crack enough for a hand to reach through while others in line sigh with relief as the light turns green.

For me though, there remains a gulf unbridged between these people and myself, a gap, created perhaps only by a different line of blood. And the longer I observe this increased distance between poor and rich, the more I realize there is something greater at work here. Why do the poor get poorer and the rich get richer?

Thoughts?

Brick By Brick HiFi LoFi lyrics
Magic Mountain HiFi LoFi lyrics
Hey Hey HiFi LoFi lyrics
I've Got To Go HiFi LoFi lyrics
Underwater HiFi LoFi lyrics
Sweet Complication HiFi LoFi lyrics
Tell The Truth HiFi LoFi lyrics
Dislocate HiFi LoFi lyrics

Brick By Brick

when my eyes are out of focus
i like what i see
flesh and blood are hard to stomach
can you bring a wall down

brick by brick

black and white
she keeps talking like she does
sheets pulled tight
i dreamt i was wandering

i didn't travel very far
for a stained glass poem
and a shining star



Magic Mountain

i've no alibis
yes i've told some lies
but do my feet fit the shoe
cause i'd like to wear something new

take me up a mountain up so high

it's just the scenery that i've failed to notice
and the road signs i ignore
my heart won't skip a beat
but i can't keep it from giving in to this damn gravity

take me up a mountain up so high

i've seldom found a path that was kind
but there's always another road that winds
right through the trouble
that has made itself a home in your mind



Hey Hey

god i need some answers
cause i don't believe in luck
and i've been takin' orders
out the back of an 18-wheeler truck

i'm hoping for a reason
i don't want a place to hide
when all my thoughts come back to me
they echo of the other side

hey hey...

night train pushing through my mind
dirty stories that i've been told
haunting tales of a real life mess
and i'm only 223 years-old

scatter-brained, can i borrow a buck
can you help me out
cause i'm just plain stuck

give a little, take a little, make a little
make a little love last long
touch the other end of a trail-blaze baby
little more love won't do you harm



I've Got To Go

i've got to go, i've got to spend my time alone
and no one knows, just who i am all on my own

there's no way out
there's no sound when i shout
in these empty rooms

tongue in my cheek
there's no sound when i speak
and you make me laugh

tables and chairs, but there's nobody there
my music spills into your head
faces and spaces with harrowing eyes
and books that i've already read



Underwater

love revolution kicks out all your prop-up solutions
photograph session in the red-light kitchen
and you play me 'til i'm all strung out

death comes softly on the radio
and laughter is the sole conclusion

i can feel you in this pain
broken people on a screen

underwater movie screen
voluntary drowning dream
laughter is the sole conclusion
when pages are already filled

the sun stopped shining
the sun shone again
somehow it moves me
out the door, into the wind
which of these strangers
will make me love again



Sweet Complication

six years now
has it been that long
i've forgotten how
many memories

black lit moon
doesn't mean that the sun won't shine
but that's how it is
between you and me

a sweet complication is all that you are
it's all that you are

it's okay to cry
even if you don't remember why
come to think of it
you're the reason why
i can laugh out loud

one little stone
a weeping world wipes her eye
never knowing love was a dream
that could come to life

you could have dropped it anywhere
but you left it in my lap
that's how it is between you and me



Tell The Truth

she doesn't look that much like her momma
she don't have her daddy's eyes
she doesn't think she has much potential
that's alright it's just a lie

she's growing wings just like an angel
but you won't notice them when she passes by
all the boys are out to get her
she'll stay with the same man every night

someone should tell you the truth
someone should see inside of you

people don't pay her much attention
disbelief has swallowed all her pride
simple smiles are all she offers
all she wants is a simple life
she gave up crying just like piano
she keeps her blue notes bottled up inside



Dislocate

i can always smell the rain
even though there's sunshine
it can take a dirty rock
to make a diamond ring

i love to watch the snow flakes
if it ever starts to snow
they remind me of how much
there is to get to know

i'm trying hard
not to let my heart dislocate
it's all i can do
to keep my mind of this dull pain

god bless the poor and weak ones
with their dirty hands and feet
i believe the ones
god would really like to meet

keep the things that make you love more
get rid of all the rest
keep the things that you're for sure
will endure the fiery test

i'm trying hard not to let my heart dislocate



I Guess It's Goodbye

i won't forget where i've come from
or where i've been
some of my mistakes are still chasin' me
but don't let that bother you

i wish i could wash you
with each of the purest tears that i've cried
i wish one would fall on your skin

i'm working to hard to come up
with these things that i just don't feel
and there's too many miles
between the towns we're living in

what is it i want
something i need to say
i guess it's goodbye

of all the places i'd like to visit
wouldn't you think i would know myself
sad faces are made before their time
too many books put on the shelf
before you've even read one line



You Were Right

careful that the future
is not a prison for you now
sometimes the plans you make
will blind you,
'til you can't find your own way out

careful that the life you live
is not just a stepping stone
sometimes it's hard to read the wisdom
in another man's broken bones

maybe you were right
how will we survive

i know you miss the erie rhythm
of those steady broken lines
you miss the hum of spinning wheels
the road they leave behind

coughing up your money
is not a sign that you are sick
it's the hope stuck in your throat
that makes your broken heart
hard to fix

stage fright stage right
two... three... four...
refuse my muse
more vocals please

don't know me
don't want to
i'll chew
the microphone next please

get it? write.
what do you mean nest?
what do you mean song?

a moving sidewalk
no words. no sound.
conversation grounds

try this suit case on
face=blank screen
heart+mouth=ouch

aren't you meaning full?
why do you need all that?
someone shouts
on the next hill top