Grandparents Day

Day Ten, Portland OR

Whenever I’m back in New York talking about Portland, I’ll inevitably say that what I miss most about the little city I used to call my home is all of the businesses. Portland’s filled with coffee shops, second hand boutiques, video rentals, and toy stores that feel less like the result of an acute business plan and more like they might be someone’s dream. So with an air of fresh perspective off my Sasquatch weekend and some time to kill around my old stomping ground, I decided to mosey around to some of my favorite old haunts. 

After Derek dropped me off downtown and went to teach movies for the day, I couldn’t help but wander thru Powell’s, the biggest independent bookstore in the country. Perusing record stores used to serve as an instant laxative for me because of how tense they made me feel. But a good bookstore is one of the most calming sensations around. Powell’s was so calming that I fell into my old trap of being swayed by a staff recommendation and picked up “I Was Told There Would Be Cake” right in the same spot where I had bought my first collection of personal essays “Me Talk Pretty One Day” during my first trip to Portland back in 2001. Powell’s spilled right into Reading Frenzy, one of the best zine shops around. It’s only natural for Portland to have a great home for zines; it had to be one of the most DIY spots around. And despite the fact that I wish I was returning to New York to work in an awesome hub for self-published magazines, the reality is that I will be temping and possibly substitute teaching. So what better way to motivate myself into romanticizing that than picking up a ‘zine called Sub about the author’s four years as a New York City substitute. From there I barely had to leave the block before hitting Buffalo Exchange, where a pair of size 13 Nikes that looked like tennis balls were practically staring at me from the moment I walked thru the door.

Wait, what was I doing?! Half an hour into my day and I had spent fifty dollars within one square block. And yet I felt on top of the world. It’s not surprising that I’d land in Buffalo Exchange, my ex’s stomping ground because one of the most valuable lessons she taught me has been about the miraculous healing powers of retail therapy. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why Portland, with all its feel good shops, has kept her head above water for longer than either of us expected. I sure hope that something’s keeping her happy.

Luckily it’s not all wallet bending here and just as I left Buffalo, the sun peeked out for the first time since I had been back in town. I gallivanted around downtown and hit the old staples of my weekday walks on my days off: Jackpot Records to listen to new CDs, the Soup and Salad cart where the couple working always checks in with how my radio show is going, and even to the little alley no one really knows about next to the Embassy Suites, right under a vent where the chlorine fumes from their pool sneak out onto the street below. That used to be my ticket to instant sunshine back in the day. Along the course of all this, I even bumped into Christine and she joined me for our regular lunch of the Soup and Salad combo. Nothing beats an unexpected run-in with an old friend.

Inevitable of course I gravitated toward Stumptown, where I showed that I was no longer just a chump of a kid who squirts chocolate syrup into his coffee. No, New York had changed me. I drink espresso now. So I proudly ordered my first shot of Stumptown’s Hair Bender blend. I’m not gonna lie. I was pretty proud. And on my espresso high, I realized that today was basically like Grandparent’s Day, taking in all of the best little things about Portland that used to brighten my day without the responsibility of feeling stuck here and answering the big questions of what exactly I’m doing with my life.

But like any grandparent, there comes sweet relief in getting to leave the kiddies in capable hands. But I still hadn’t exactly come up with a plan of how to enjoyably travel around the northwest during my time to kill before the big wedding on Sunday. Where to next? As I tried to come up with a plan, I unexpectedly got two texts within ten minutes of one another: one from Heidi telling me my passport had arrived in the mail and one really out of the blue from my old friend Liz Clayton, offering me any help I needed with my trails throughout Canada. I love it. I made a quick call to Canada’s VIA Rail and like that I was scheduled to be off to Vancouver tomorrow.

Okay, I’ll be honest. One of the baristas in Stumptown I used to chat with more mornings than not didn’t seem to remember who I was. The Soup guy who always seemed to be in the perfect couple with the Salad girl appears to have gotten a new girlfriend to share his cart with, a girlfriend with less cute earrings and a lower priority for tossing a piece of butter in with your roll. The chlorine spot didn’t have the slightest trace of aroma in the air. And of course, I found myself bolting from downtown at five, my westside curfew because the ex was getting off work. So it was far from perfect. But I saw what I wanted to.

Ghost Land

 Day Nine, Sasquatch Music Festival (Day Three)

I’m not even supposed to be here today. Here was how my weekend was supposed to play out: arrive from Glacier Saturday morning, get picked up by the fellas and go to Sasquatch, shoot my first gun on Sunday, hitch a train over to Seattle, and take off for San Francisco. Somewhere in between all that I planned to tell Glenn and Cathie that I would not be able to attend their wedding. That due to the fact that I am an emotional wrecking ball and that just flipping thru old flickr photos of my ex-girlfriend wells me up with tears, that I did not feel equipped to be in the same room as her for five hours next Sunday.

But something happened as the sun fell on the Gorge Saturday evening. The National was one of the bands I was most looking forward to at Sasquatch and by the time we arrived post-flat on Saturday, they were the first band slated to be up on the mainstage where about ten thousand people were camped out on the big grassy hill, mostly just complacent to be parked for the weekend to enjoy whatever bands the festival was tossing at them on their biggest venue. However, when we arrived a little grumpier than we had hoped due to all the complications in just making it up to the Gorge and in thru the gates, Rainn Wilson was quick to inform us that The National’s bus had broken down and they wouldn’t be on until later in the evening. As the spacey chant band from Seattle took (and quickly drove the four of us away from) the stage, the change in schedule felt like an auspicious beginning to our weekend’s festivities.

But with band after band (and even comedian after comedian) knocking us dead throughout the afternoon, my spirits were in a much better place when The National finally went on around eight o’clock. The real bonus of the switcheroo was that instead of playing in front of that deep sea of mainstage viewers, they got bumped over to the third stage, playing last for anyone who decided to pass on Modest Mouse or sacrifice a prime spot to see The Breeders. They were amongst a crowd who really wanted to see them. And their set wowed us all. So much so that as the sun went down and it turned into night, the crowd continued to hold off rushing to either of the big rock bands on the surrounding stages and prompted the band to come up for an unexpected encore. Somewhere amidst the magical feeling of it all, I decided that I would do the same. Shitty circumstances weren’t going to dictate me from making the best of this trip as I could. I was going to stick around and go to Glenn and Cathie’s wedding after all.

So after such a dramatic Saturday followed by an active if anticlimactic Sunday, Monday was the first day of the trip that was dominated by a feeling of general contentment. There seemed to be no fresh adventure to be had. The gang of four had established a pretty comfortable rapport of statements primarily drenched in sarcasm and/or lecherousness. The friends I had made on the train and reconnected with at Saturday’s show felt like familiar faces after spending so much of the week with them. And the bands I was eager to check out on Monday just weren’t packing the same punch as the knockout lineup of Day One. So we laid on the grass and chuckled along to Flight of the Concords and just sort of took in a special surrounding to enjoy a Lazy Monday in. I suppose that’s sort of what you’re supposed to do with yr Memorial Day.

Sasquatch tossed one hiccup into a day that was otherwise going according to plan. Monday morning I got an email from my friend Jen that I should go check out the set of a band called Ghostland Obervatory. I had heard their name once or twice, but really knew nothing about them. Still, a nod from Jen is always worth a looksies. Ghostland was closing out the second stage at 8:30, a full half hour before The Flaming Lips landed on the mainstage for their UFO show, the attraction that Derek had sold us all on sticking around until Monday to come see. But when we arrived to The Gorge Monday afternoon, a sign had been posted that Ghostalnd’s schedule time would now be at 9:00, putting them directly head to head with the Lips grand finale. I was stumped as to what to do.

Luckily the years have taught me not to take my friends’ advice lightly. So as the sun set on Monday, Dan and I walked from the truly awful Mars Volta set at the mainstage and up the hill to see what this Ghostland group was all about. Our hope was to check them out for ten or fifteen minutes and then come back for the bulk of the UFO show. That’s not how it worked out.

The first sign that we were in for something special was the intense laser setup that was laid out before Ghostland took the stage. Just as the sky turned dark, a whole spectrum of lasers and smoke shot from the second stage across the the grass to set the mood for the band to follow. And what followed was INTENSE. Rapid synthesizers felt like they were shredding my brain. The Ghostland frontman had a howl that ranked up their with the wrestler Dude Love’s “Owwwww, have mercy!” Even just the way he moved across the stage was hypnotic, more feline that any other dude I can recall seeing. After our fifteen minute marker had passed, Dan asked me if I wanted to go down to the Lips show now and all I could say was, “There’s no way I’d forgive myself if I pulled myself away from this right now.” Dan realized that he was in the same boat and thank goodness we didn’t.

What an unexpected burst of surprise the Ghostland set was. I was so drawn in that I felt myself being tractor beamed toward the stage, pushing my way closer than I had for any other set. Dan, the model of cool and calm stoic sarcasm throughout the weekend, was rocking out more than I had seen during any of the other bands we had watched together. And all of this came from an isolated recommendation and a whim to follow up on it. Not to mention the fact that I had decided to stick it out and stay around when I hadn’t planned on it.

The biggest criticism I faced when I told friends that I was taking this crazy leap to a month (and beyond) of instability and uncertainty in the name of adventure was that I couldn’t keep running away. When I first decided to cash in all my chips in New York, that was a big part of the driving motivation behind it, the desire to run away. But that really forced me to assess just what I would be running away from and how silly it would be the leave behind all the momentum I have going for me in New York right now. 

Well I can’t run away from Portland either. This might be a quiet corner of the country, but it’s one I have to deal with. I’m not exactly sure how that’s going to play out over the next week, but I think that I’ll be all right if I keep embracing the unexpected twists of fate that are bound to come with it.

Knowing yr Limits

Day Eight, Wenatchee, WA

Once a group of all guys tips over a total of five, there’s usually bound to be trouble afoot. Thus it’s not surprising that Day Two of Glenn’s Bachelor Party was the one that found us shooting guns, pounding shots, and doing our best to keep Glenn away from the fence lest the children next door get an early dose of ironic racism.

Any questions of our manhood leftover from yesterday were quickly silenced by our host, Ben Taylor. Ben grew up with the rest of the guys back in their Portland suburb McMinnville. But unlike the fellas who have spent most of their twenties kicking it around Stumptown, Ben has opted to buy a house in far away Wenatchee. He apparently “does not like people.” What he does seem to like from the looks of his house is spending most of his time playing XBox Live, reading Blazers blogs, and listening to the Doobie Brothers. Was he still alive today, Thoreau would not quite know what to do with the monster he had created.

Ben took the gang out for a hike off the beaten path where we would do some target shooting with Ben’s 22, my first time shooting a gun. In that one hike up the mountain, I have one upped the total number of hikes I did in my previous two years living in the Northwest. Add on that this would be my first time (ever) holding let alone firing a gun and I started to think that my return trip up here was all about making up for time wasted when I lived in Portland. It’s funny when people ask if living in Portland led me to doing a lot of nature-y things or living a more small town life. The answer is no because mostly I just drank at bars, hung out at coffee shops, and went to indie shows–sort of the same as everywhere else I’ve lived.

But ya know what? Shooting a gun kind of bored me. I really missed all the bands and comedy and mostly just all the people around as at Sasquatch. Maybe Kim Gordon was right. Maybe rock and roll is the life for me.

After a quick (and so so delicious) stop at Dairy Queen for treats, it was back to Ben’s for the requisite debauchery. We put back shots of Jaeger and stuffed ourselves with pulled pork that Ben had marinated all day for us. But the night just couldn’t seem to get off the ground. Maybe we had gotten too much sun on the hike or were just worn down from a long Day One at Sasquatch. Or maybe we just didn’t have the Bachelor Party sort of spirit when it was really up to us to make it happen.

My sendoff gift to Glenn was a Betty and Veronica’s Double Digest. He read it cover to cover. And that was sort of how the night went. Derek and Glenn’s brothers played XBox. Dan took a nap. And I snuck off to catch up on the blog.

Still, we put our best foot forward. Ben broke out some t-shirts with the sleeves cutoff and we rocked those for a while. Dan fired up the Wii porn for everyone to enjoy. And Glenn went from zero to drunk in a hurry, hooting and hollering nonsense about Beaners and spontaneously playing a character who got up in Derek’s face and screamed at him for abusing his eight year-old daughter. Then he went into the bedroom and abruptly passed out around 9:30. He’s gonna be a good husband.

Boyz II Men

Day Seven, Sasquatch Music Festival

“I saw the raddest porno the other day. It was these two Japanese girls playing Wii. And then this dude comes in and fucks the shit out of both of them. But the whole time, their attention never breaks from the Wii.”

-Dan Tankersley, 8:30am, Thirty Minutes into Glenn’s Bachelor Party

Between four dudes, all aged around twenty-eight, we were able to change a tire. Sure, there was a false start when the jack was originally positioned upside-down and being mysteriously noncompliant for the first twenty minutes of the process. And there was some delay after that when the lug nuts (that’s what they’re called, right?) would not come off because it turned out we were using the wrong-sized wrench. And really the pronoun “we” is unfair because my primary (sole) role in the process was as photographer, encouraging myself that it was entirely possible that my photographs could prove to be some sort of savior down the line if chaos erupted again and we needed to inspect the evidence of our process to go over just what we had done wrong. So yes, the simple act of changing a tire along the side of the highway on the five hour drive from Portland to the Sasquatch Music Festival proved to be a comedy of errors. There was a lot of joking about what a nightmare the scene would be to our fathers if they could see just how bumbling the boys they raised were nearing thirty and barely able to complete the most basic of masculine duties. But luckily the four of us starting of our Memorial Day Weekend Bachelor Party for Glenn could hang our heads high because we finally did “git ‘er done.”

My guy friends, be it the Duck House in Los Angeles or the McMinnville Boyz up here in Oregon, are a little hesitant when it comes to figuring out the right way to throw a proper bachelor party. At some point in our adolescence, we began defining ourselves against the guys’ guys who would eventually be prone to throwing a debaucherous weeklong trip to Vegas. And yet we are not typical geeks. We don’t leave a party complaining of a headache because we secretly want to go home to read. We get loud and we’ve been thrown out of bars. But they were cool bars, maybe even too cool for school bars. We were too cool for school in our minds at some point. But we still went to school, ya know?

So how do we celebrate our bachelorhoods without feeling like scumbags? Well, Derek’s solution was a weekend up at the Columbia River Gorge, checking out a killer lineup of bands and comedians performing throughout the holiday weekend at Sasquatch. But lest it all be about the music (and thus making us true nerds), Derek freely admitted that this weekend was about giving Glenn a few days away around about ten thousand good looking chicks into cool bands, maybe even some ones camping out to celebrate their upcoming high school graduation. Monday evening a group of girls camping out invited us to stick around and crash in their spot. We didn’t even think twice about it. There were girlfriends to get back to and classes to be taught Tuesday morning back in Portland. But did we spend the rest of the weekend making lewd comments to each other about every panties we snuck a peek at and every rump that warranted the callout “Suppertime”? You bet. Too cool for school and yet perfect attendance–get it now?

On top of the girls constantly parading themselves buy us, the acts at the festival itself rocked us top to bottom. Discovering new acts we had never seen before like Destroyer and Okkervil River, using my comedy cache to get us hooked up into the maxed out comedy tent to see UCB’s ASSSSCAT, and ending the night getting to see R.E.M. songs we listened to hundreds of times when we were barely teenagers, Saturday was a great balance. On the way back to our tent, Dan and I talked about how it seemed like a lot of these sorts of festivals and concerts are filled with people in their mid to late twenties, basically our peers. And yet when we were sixteen and going to them, the crowd didn’t feel older and intimidating, but dominated with teenagers just like us. Without reading too much into that observation in one way or another, it’s kind of nice to feel like yr surroundings are growing up around you.

Once the bands had finished playing into the rainy night, we went back to our tent to camp out for the night. In the closest moment to bachelor party ritual the weekend would find, we presented Glenn with his sendoff gift into married life, a couple of grocery store pornos. (Pornos, btw that Derek’s girlfriend had picked out, selected mostly for their comical article titles such as “Too Cute for Poop Chute.”) In the middle of one of the magazines turned out to be a spread with naked clowns. It couldn’t have felt more appropo.

I Get Wet

Day Six, Portland

My left sneaker was soaked thru and I was stuck wheeling my suitcase aimlessly around downtown within ten minutes of arriving into Portland Friday morning. Maybe the town just doesn’t agree with me. One of the biggest knocks on Portland is how insular it can be, how there isn’t enough perspective or even desire to interact with the world at large. Maybe that’s why whenever I’m here I feel like I’m avoiding something.

Luckily for me, Portland has one of the best places to avoid what you don’t wanna deal with…Stumptown Coffee. Stumptown is the best, strongest coffee I’ve had and each of its three locations have a different way at making me feel comfortable and protected from the world outside its doors (okay, maybe not Belmont and their baristas with attitude, but nonetheless…). So when I arrived into Portland days ahead of when I had planned to make my triumphant return to my home of two years, I didn’t have to think twice to walk over to the Downtown Stump, the easiest location to set up camp and not be terrified that I would run into anything that I wasn’t ready to handle yet.

Walking around town was as haunted as I imagined it would be. I’ve wanted to make peace with Portland in the two years since I move away and back home to New York. But I haven’t been able to pull it off yet. Some people say never to move to a place in order to be with a person. Now I see why. If things go wrong, the place can never get a fair shake.

I did my best to go thru the motions and make the best of it. I visited the people and places I loved the most during my time living here. I ordered the Spinto Burrito at Laughing Planet (which still is not on the menu but it never loses the fun of watching the cashier figure out just what you must mean*) and I took a picture of Stumptown on Division, the place I used to come almost every morning when I lived here and would constantly wonder what I would need to do to dig my life out of the rut it had fallen into. But as soon as I went in and the baristas were unfamiliar, the couches had been switched out, and yet the clouds thru the sky light were gray as ever, I knew that it was too much to handle and now that wasn’t even a safe zone. So I moved on.

Eventually my day found a little peace. My friend Ryan heard I was in town and invited me out for beers and basketball. The fact that he wasn’t here during the time I lived here and has little connection to everything here that weighs on my mind made getting together a big relief. Then some drinks and 90s dancing with as many friends here as I could think of really took me away. There weren’t many nights like this with this mix of people back then, so it was easy to avoid comparing it to everything I left behind.

But I did still compare it. I knew that there was a whole ‘nother scene going on across the river, one that I was doing everything in my power to avoid going near. No matter how many drinks I had, there was no escaping the awful feeling in my gut that knew that I was trying to connect with everyone here who I had shared something special with, except for of course the one person that I’ve shared the most with.

No matter how painful it is, my gut instinct is generally to try to connect with people, to make the best of it with whoever the people are around you who matter. So I wasn’t sure what to do with the best way to connect being to avoid connecting altogether. But the important thing is that I held my ground and didn’t buckle in to attempting that reconnection that I’ve convinced myself would be little but unhealthy for me to have.

I could have avoided Portland altogether. I considered it. I almost kept going with Rachel and her brother to Seattle. But I knew that I couldn’t keep ducking my old home. This trip has already had a lot of points when I realized that moments are always waiting for you under yr nose, that sometimes it just takes a little patience not to force them, but moreso it takes an awareness at being able to detect just when it’s time to snatch them up. But on the other hand, it has also taught me that the perfect moment is unlikely to ever arrive, that sometimes you have to dive in not knowing if you’ll be able to swim or not. So I came to Portland, not knowing if I’d feel ready to handle it. And I didn’t.

But I did.

*Spinach and Black Bean sub Pinto

The Third Rail

Chicago–>West on The Empire Builder, Day Five

No one has a typical story on the train. The lesbian couple who work together at the historical society, the former lieutenant with the drinking problem showing you her bullet wound as she utters “every town’s a party town,” and even just the small town Nebraska farmer who looks like John Edwards and never left the state until his daughter was born needing special surgeries from a specialist in Baltimore in order to even out her two legs. So I shouldn’t be surprised that the cute girl who’s been sitting across from me all day, who bought me a beer minutes after meeting me and hasn’t blinked an eye as I’ve been not so covertly snapping pictures of her throughout Montana, that it should be all but second nature to expect that this girl is heading back west to her girlfriend waiting at their house outside Seattle. Have I just found a new way to get hung up on an unavailable girl or is she clearly flirting with me? At some point, it doesn’t matter.

When I told my Mom that I was going to be quitting my job and taking this trip (in a letter I wrote and read to her expecting to receive a great deal of disappointment), the first thing she ended up saying in response was, “You gotta do what you gotta do.” So somewhere around an hour outside East Glacier National Park, where I was scheduled to make my next stop a big one that would throw me out in nature and into a you hostile alone for a day, I looked over at Tracy who had spent most of the day giving me flip but sincere answers to all the inquiries I made into her life back in Seattle, and I decided that I didn’t want to get off this train just yet.

So I was officially “riding the rails,” on board without a legitimate ticket, taking a risk of getting tossed off without a place to stay or anyone I could get in touch with in West Glacier or Whitefish. And doing all this for a girl who upon hearing a brief rundown of my story said to me, “So I guess you’re a legitimate hobo then.” Now she had turned me into a Boxcar Willie.

Still there was a question now of what to do with my borrowed time. After the initial excitement of my new illicit trip to nowhere specific yet, there came a lull between Tracy and I. Maybe it was her brother Doug returning his nap to break up our one on time or maybe we were just fading after thirteen hours of sitting lazily in the downstairs lounge car. I knew that if I was going to do something as foolish as go to Portland without a game plan earlier than expected (a whole ‘nother nightmare), then I better do what I could of it. So as the eleven o’clock last call approached, I excused myself and turned to the one weapon I had trekked along with me: the suit.

At the bottom of my suitcase was my favorite suit, there so I had something to wear to Glenn and Cathie’s wedding next weekend. At some point, I started to question just how impractical it was to force myself into dragging around a wheeling suitcase by bringing this suit, so Justin (my host in Madison) recommended that I might as well just wear it throughout. I liked the idea, but felt like I should hold off until the right moment. When I arrived back at our booth along with a bottle of cabernet I had picked up at the bar and saw Tracy’s face light up, I knew that I hadn’t been the least bit trigger happy in picking this as the moment two days later.

Tracy had spent a good part of the day acknowledging how gross she was feeling in her second day of pajamas that then had gotten splashed up with mud when we had earlier made an unsanctioned dart for a railside bar at an extended stop in Shelby, Montana. Soon after the suit arrived, she was the one ducking off to change into the black cocktail dress she had brought along for the ride without any real reason. While she was changing, I made one last run to the bar at 10:55 and picked up a Heineken that I would then hide underneath my laptop case, all in preparation for a rabbit in the hat unveiling when the inevitable moment presented itself an hour later when she lamented our lack of backup booze. That one lit her up as well.

I never made any move. Maybe it’s because the potential for infidelity (as vague or as invited as it may be) clams me up or maybe because I’m just generally a pussy when it comes to first moves. I did give her my jacket to wear when she started getting the chills in her dress. She looked pretty damn good in it, too. Maybe even a kiss goodnight would have made the story a little too typical.

I feel like we’re warming up.

Well I Guess This is Growing Up

Layover in Chicago, Day Three

It’s nice to be able to check in. I sent Jade a text on my way to Madison that I’d be in Chicago for a few hours the next day. She immediately wrote back that she’d be at Union Station to meet me in the small window she had in between her PhD courses at Northwestern.

Jade’s so vibrant that a couple hours of coffee and walking around downtown quickly felt like a full day. She was fine with letting me lead the way–to Intelligentsia so that I could make my fancy coffee rounds and a stop in the flagship Marshall Field’s (now Macy’s) flagship store to show her this hidden palatial space on their seventh floor called the Narcissus Room. I first stumbled into the Narcissus a couple years ago during a similar stint in Chicago where I wandered around with Lesley and Jim, siblings I knew from the west coast in town for the holidays. The three of us were so taken with this secret spot that we uncovered that we made a pact that the first of us to get married promised to wed inside the Narcissus. I’ve often winced at what a lose-lose situation this is likely to be for me (assuming I’m the first to take a dive into the Diamond Sea). But Jade was the perfect friend to reevaluate the room and its potential with. She would never be anything but sunny in finding glass half full ways to look at such a silly conundrum.

Madison had been so wonderful that it had triggered off some of my old internal debates about my desire to settle down in a liberal college town. It’s a vision I’ve had for a while that Madison just about perfectly fit the bill for. I’m a sucker for the idea of a happening town that’s small enough to still feel like a community (where I could know everybody). But it often seems like the only way to get there is thru academia and I worry about that sort of environment existing in a bubble, lofty ideas developed outside of day to day urban realities. So I tossed all this at Jade in hopes of getting a better picture of just what she hoped to get out of a PhD in literature, how she could still thrive and remain relevant.

She didn’t miss a beat. She talked about how less appealing a tenured position tucked away in a college town is than she had the chance to teach at a city community college or even possibly high school. This was all music to my ears as it’s obvious that she’ll make a wonderful teacher so it’s comforting to know that she’s already tapped into developing that so young.

It’s difficult to see yr friends go on such divergent paths and make sense of how the people you were so invested in as the ones who would be right alongside you when you guys took the world by storm could be going about it in such different ways. When my friends become corporate lawyers, I’m left scratching my head at how this was part of the plan, even if there never really was any plan to begin with. But whenever I reconnect with them in their new, different looking lives, I’m reminded that it was these people that I trusted and chose to grow alongside of at one point, not the directions they were aiming their lives in. If I can ask people to give me the benefit of the doubt that I (maybe) know what I’m doing with this seemingly outlandish adventure I’m on, it’s the least I can offer them as they gear themselves up for weddings and babies and all the stuff that seems so much further out of my grasp than I expected at this age.

And I guess you just keep reaching out, not letting them go. Because no matter how far away any of them might seem, I never know just when we might need to call on each other to be side by side again.

(PS-Met up with Mike the comedian after Jade had to leave for class. He dropped a bomb on me: he has a kid! So many adult things to process at once! Better get on a train.)

Name Dropping

Day Three: Madison, WI

Why Madison? That was the question (or more often the look) I got from people upon telling them that Madison, Wisconsin was going to be the first destination upon buying the rail pass that would allow me to go anywhere in North America (excluding Mexico, they don’t count). People would ask where I was heading straight out of the gates and expecting an answer like San Francisco or The Grand Canyon or even Montreal probably would have sufficed. But Madison? What the hell did I wanna rush over there for?

The problem with straightforward questions like this one is that they always seem to freeze me up. I’m terrible at giving people concise explanations to satisfy their curiosity about the strange decision I make. Here are some more questions over the years that I never could respond to with grace:

*Why do they call you Billy Hot Chocolate?

*How come you moved to Portland?

*What made you decide to get a degree in Television?

*What’s a fifteen year-old boy doing with barrettes in his hair?

And so it goes. But the problem isn’t that I don’t have any answers to these questions, so much as that their actual answers are way more than anyone who asked knew they were in store for. So the short answer to “Why Madison?” is Tara McPherson.

Back in 1999, I was cruising thru my sophomore year of college with a declared major in American Studies. I had drifted toward American Studies because it was the degree of my teenage idol and ultimate crush, Janeane Garofalo. The problem with my American Studies program fifteen years after Janeane graduated from Providence was that mine required me to take an American History class that was offered every semester three days a week at eight. Back then, eight AM wasn’t very often in the cards for me. So when I found myself missing so many mornings that I had to drop the class and essentially wave the white flag on American Studies, I was left scrambling for a major before my time was up to declare. Luckily I had just signed up on a whim for the Intro to Television class that met once a week (at six PM) with a thirtysomething professor named Tara McPherson.

Tara was a triple-threat for nineteen year-old me: she wore dark frame glasses, was a staunch feminist with a sense of humor, and was obsessed with television. I often found my college professors lacking in the sort of personal touch and jovial connection that high school teachers would make with you; they were more often performers whose focus was on the material rather than you. But Tara seemed pretty easy to roll with. So I started hanging around her office hours, almost every week.  But it was all harmless.

My crushes have always been weird. To start with, they’re so nonsexual that I’m convinced that they’re not crushes. They’re more like imaginary best friends for me. One of the weird side effects of being an only child who hung out in his room by himself all the time is that when I grew up and started liking girls, I was more interested in a lifelong best friend than an ideal sex partner. And then there’s the whole blurry line between keeping her a crush and turning her into a role model. So after not too long of hanging around Tara, I had declared myself a Television major with thoughts that I could follow her path. Maybe I’d even keep going and teach this television stuff and head to grad school in some small liberal arts college town I missed out on by going for my undergrad in LA. Maybe I’d even end up where Tara got hers, The University of Wisconsin at Madison. Now you see why it’s a bad idea to ask me about my major.

Eight years later, I finally made it to Madison. And the first thing I did upon getting into town? Tracked down the office of my new crush these days: my favorite author, Lorrie Moore. Lorrie’s a fortysomething fiction writer with a mean arsenal of puns and a flip knack for sarcasm. And since she teaches at UW, I thought that I’d wander by her door just in case she held office hours. No dice. That’s probably for the best. My opening line was likely to be a question I tried to ask her at a reading she did back in Portland a couple years back: “How does Madison feel about sharing its name with America’s new favorite baby trend?” When I was the last person passed over to have a question asked, that actually may have been the moment that I decided I wanted to try to visit Lorrie in her hometown.

So in answer to yr question, that is why I went to Madison.

And my name’s Billy Hot Chocolate cause I think that it sounds funny.

Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Chicago, Day Two

A year committed to doing something seems to me to be a significant amount of time to pay yourself on the back for it. I may have gotten this idea from a local news story I saw as a kid one New Year’s Day. A twelve year-old boy and his parents had made a deal the previous New Year’s that if the kid didn’t watch any television for the whole year, they would pay him six hundred dollars. While nowadays that same story would mostly shock me yet again as to just how irritating white people can be with their yuppie parenting methods, back then I was in awe of how (and *why*) a kid would put himself thru such torture. If at twelve my Mom had told me that times were tough and we no longer had the six hundred dollars a year that cable television cost us, I probably would have gone out and gotten my first job. Regardless, the story made such an impact on me that I’ve always since thought that a year’s worth of commitment to just about anything resembling a sacrifice is worthy of reward.

So after a year of holding down my first full-time office job, an internal timer went off and told me that I had done my duty and deserved to do something a little crazy, but something that I have had my heart set on doing for most of this decade. I checked out of my job and my apartment and have begun to travel the country by trains. I am anxious by nature and have a bad habit of convincing myself that most decisions I make are the wrong ones immediately after making a choice. So luckily this one year reward meter supercedes all that and so far I’ve been able to wander around guilt-free.

Yesterday was my first day stepping off the train, by force at the Cardinal’s final stop, Chicago. My original plan had been to hop on a connection head straight to Madison. But as the train was in its final hours approaching the Windy City, I decided that I might as well get out and enjoy it while I was here. It’s been almost twenty-eight years; Madison could wait another day.

Chicago wasn’t too difficult to put things together in on the fly. My “college buddy” Sean Mulvihill had just been thru New York a few weeks back and stayed on my couch, so it was easy enough to call him up and know that he’d be more than willing to return the favor. But then came the question of what to do with myself with an evening to kill. Not only am I bad at making plans, I also struggle when forced to make a decision amongst a countless number of choices. Tell me the world is my oyster and watch me clam up.

Luckily, I have been blessed with terrific friends who are often ready at the drop of a hat to point me in the right direction. So instead of spending a cold and rainy night seeing the second half of a Sox game (literally the *only thing* I could think to do once 6:30 rolled around), my friend Kristin rallied for me from New York and connected the dots between me and her childhood friend Mike Leibowitz. He happened to be performing in a free stand-up show at a club called Zanies in Old Town and even offered to comp me. The nice thing about knowing a comedian at a stand-up show is that no matter how terrible the collection of comics inevitably is, you don’t question why you just wasted two hours of yr life since you were mostly there to support someone.

My expectations for this particular showcase was particularly low since it was taking place at a club called Zanies. You would think with all of the big name comedians who had signed their headshots on the wall (Jay Leno, Richard Lewis) that I would have soaring expectations. But the sad reality is that most of the material that you see in these clubs often feels like it was written around the same time those pictures were taken. On the flipside, low expectations are rarely a bad thing, and a couple of good zingers (like how Neil Armstrong should have come back with moon powers such as never having to wear a condom again) were enough to satisfy me. And most importantly Mike was really solid and natural. Having to get a beer with my friend’s friend who turned out to be a douchebag stand-up might have been enough to ruin Chicago for me once and for all.

Mike turned out to be not just a decent stand-up comedian, but a stand up guy as well. He bought me a beer and even gave me a ride back to Sean’s up in Edison Park. It’s nice to be able to discover a comedian friend. It can be so difficult. Two guys whose primary means of social interaction is to make the people around them laugh often have a tough time finding a comfortable rapport with one another.

Mike can also be added onto the list of people who wonder what it is I am “searching for” with this trip. I keep responding that my month of roaming around was not spurred by a desire to find myself nor am I on any sort of specific quest. But I wonder.

The Scenic Route

New York->Chicago, Day One

I really don’t want to get off the train.   I’m twenty-seven hours into the first leg of the North American Rail Pass I bought yesterday morning.  For the next month, I can get on and off the trains as much as I like.  My trip begins with a week long trek towards the Columbia River Gorge in Washington, where I promised I would be for my buddy Glenn’s bachelor party next Saturday.  Pretty much all routes to the Northwest from New York go thru Chicago.  So I had two options to start my trip: the Lake Shore Limited, which cuts pretty directly from New York up thru Buffalo and rides along the Great Lakes or the Cardinal, which leaves Penn Station and dips south all the way to Virginia before it begins cutting west and winding its way thru West Virginia and Indiana.  Both trains get into Chicago around the same time on the morning of the next day, but the Cardinal leaves New York a good nine hours earlier since it takes such a circuitous route.  Easy decision, right? So I arrived at Penn just before six in the morning and booked the last available seat on the Cardinal, assuring that I will not die without having seen the Cincinnati skyline as well as the West Virginia prison Martha Stewart served her time at.

I learned all about Alderson, West Virginia, the town where Martha was incarcerated for investment fraud a few years ago from some significant face time I got in with a few local retired fellas yesterday evening. That happened as a result of an unexpected stopover in Alderson when our train was held up there for almost two hours waiting for coal trains to pass thru. I wandered over to the group of older guys who were pulled over in a couple of cars alongside the rails after spotting that one had the license plate “World’s Greatest Grandpa.” Now there’s a roadside attraction you never see in guide books. The group of five of them all seemed like pretty decent grandpas, wasting no time in giving me the town’s history. Paul Blain and Cricket took me all the way from Martha back to when Alderson was a hotspot for rich Southerners to come up to in the summer and chill out inside sulfite baths and coal miner’s daughters. The Civil War changed all that and the booming hotel industry died down, leaving a humble spot where old men drive into town on the afternoons when they know the Amtrak is coming thru. Yesterday was an unexpected treat for the crew with the coal train delay. The guys were curious as to why I was taking a month to ride around and and they bid me off by telling me that they’d be looking for me on TV. That alone earned them the license plate title if you ask me.

The coal trains have led to us now being three hours behind schedule. I’m uncertain where I’ll head once I arrive in Chicago. The day before I left New York, I started stressing out that I hadn’t done a very good job at getting in touch with old friends and booking hostels in the spots I’m hoping to hit in the next couple weeks. I’m terrible at making plans. But now that I’m actually on the train I remembered that my only real plan was to buy this month long pass and ride around wherever I wanted to.  That’s taken care of. If I don’t feel like getting off anywhere, I don’t have to. I spent the same amount on this pass than I would have on a month’s rent if I had committed to any of the Brooklyn apartments I had been looking at before all this began. Amtrak is my landlord this month.

No matter where I’ve lived, I have a tendency to spend little time around my place.  As soon I arrive home, I’m usually quick to turn around and go out to meet up with friends. Couch surfing often takes up as many of my nights as sleeping in my own bed does. It’s nice to have the opposite instincts for once.

PS-Until I figure out how I wanna put pictures up here, you should come visit my flickr page to see shots I’m taking along the way.