November 4, 2008
On my way into my building tonight, my doorman told me to look in the mail room, located directly across from the elevators.
In that room, directly visible from anyone stepping out of the elevator tomorrow, on election day, rested a mask.
On top of the mail room table, in the center of a pile of old, unwanted mail, was a rubber mask of George W. Bush.
After seeing that I noticed the mask, my doorman said, “I put it there so people could think about that before they voted.”
November 3, 2008
I was exhausted from Wii Fit before I even played it.
Venturing through Manhattan on a quest of errands, I collected my treasure a little too early.
In videogames, when a character finds a new item, be it a sword, a bazooka, or magic steel shoes, they never are held back by the weight of the item. The new item simply vanishes from the player when collected, only to magically appear once the user pauses and activates the item. It’s brilliant in a fictional world, a hero can hold as many swords as he wants, yet never feel the burden of the weight of steel, gold, or magical dragon bone that forms the many swords.
Today I purchased Wii Fit from the Nintendo Store, all ten pounds of the workout pad/weight scale/game disc. I then carried my ten pound brick throughout this great city, as I performed errands in the city’s various neighborhoods – on the subway, at my favorite grocery cart (for a great smoothy), and through a surprisingly calm walk in the east 30s.
By the time I was home, my biceps were sore. Ten pounds isn’t much, but for several hours of carrying it can add up.
After returning home I completed 30 minutes of active workouts in the game, and am surprised by the challenge of many of the game’s activities. My back is sore, my legs are more flexible, and I’m amazed how difficult their combination workout with pushups was.
It feels like a Nintendo game beat me up.
The game’s interface and challenges are designed for short and easy workouts. Everything about Wii Fit is inviting for daily repetition, from the sleek design of the balance board to the daily BMI and varied, short workout exercises.
My election day tomorrow will not begin with a vote, or an hour of Metal Gear Solid 4. Instead it will begin with Wii Fit.
November 1, 2008
Something just isn’t relaxing about my last win.
As I completed forming the piles of spades, hearts, diamonds and clubs, my emotions of this last bout of Solitaire were not focused on conquest, but instead on hesitant enjoyment. My win was not because of skill, perseverance, hard work, and knowledge, but instead because of Lady Luck and her dictatorial decision to reward my efforts with the right randomly generated cards.
Solitaire is a game I cannot enjoy.
My heroes are those who can be clutch and dependable. Michael Jordan didn’t wait for a lucky bounce against the rim, he controlled the game and its score. Derek Jeter built his legacy by making plays when they counted, and not when they were statistically easy. And say what you want, but a band like Oasis couldn’t break out of the largely unemployed city of Manchester without dedicated work ethic and a self-belief in victory.
I can believe in those heroes because to some extent they can control their destinies. You can’t believe in someone playing Solitaire.
There are a few easy rules to remember when playing Solitaire, and suddenly, all players are on equal footing. No amount of practice, skill, or art will give a player an advantage. Players of this game are dependent solely on handouts from Colonel Chance and Lady Luck.
It’s a lot like life. Some of us try to play life as a game of odds. There are risks, there are rewards, and in the end we’re the result of a calculation of our culture’s variables. Life can be looked at as a card game based on chance — the cards your dealt can dictate your life.
Others ignore the numbers and stretch themselves far enough to get past life’s standardized path. Life can be about more than living by the odds; if our heroes can do it, so can we.
While everyone else is waiting for a the right cards, I’ll play my own game with my own rules. In the end the odds might be the same, but it’s more fun to fight the good fight.
July 27, 2008
Looking back at my notes a half year later, it’s hard to construct my final statement of the trip. I had grand ideas in place for this article, about defining American’s biggest attributes as its natural land and beauty, its people’s determination and work ethic, and the interaction of those against capitalism’s questionable snuggling with greed. Looking back, I’m not sure if that captures the full story of my journey.
My trip started off with a drive through a landscape unlike anything on the East coast. The mountains looked so exaggerated that they reminded me of fake foam rocks, with vibrant and contrasting colors painted from graffiti and super-sized spray paint cans. Yet the mountains, the colors, and the rolling hills like those on childhood drawings are all real, all reflecting a blessing American has when it comes to the vast beauty of this country’s landscape.
I made sure to stop at as many local outlets as I could, whether it was a surprise visit to a chicken breeder, dining on eggs in front of heavily bearded truck drivers, or eating fried chicken with locals discussing politics. The constant class and job elevation pressures of the Northeast weren’t present on my stops — people worked hard, but they defined themselves less by their jobs and more by their character, their friendliness, and their attitudes to life. Hard work, yes, but not once did I hear any complaints.
It’s suitable that my trip ended in Las Vegas. America was too perfect on my trip, hitting Vegas reminded me of one of America’s lasting charactieristics: the thirst for the mighty dollar. I remember stepping into my hotel room and seeing casino skyscrapers plunge out of the desert. As I mourned the loss of the spotless nature scenes of my drive, I caught a building-sized advertisement for a Beatles show in town. I grabbed a hold of my desk as I lost my balance: buldings, a fragmented desert, commercial Beatles – it was all too much to handle after seeing the innocence and power of the Grand Canyon. There was nothing representing the Grand Canyon there. An hour later and $100 down in Blackjack, I returned to my room and slept, hoping to wake up outside of a city where every job doesn’t exist solely to pluck from one’s wallet, and every traveler’s aspiration is more than just thickening one’s own wallet.
Before writing this entry I knew I couldn’t end it on that. My grand statement shouldn’t be about the balance of powers inside America, but more about the people I met.
The night I spent in the Grand Canyon felt like a carnival. As a lone traveler, I set a goal to visit every bar in the national park, each with its own flavor, age, and crowd’s mindset. At one bar I sat down with a glass of wine and reflected on my trip, while wealthy couples stared blankly at others for a visual escape. In another I was surrounded by Japanese tourists as we talked about New York, music, and who would win in a game of pool. A pool victory later, I knew little more about the Japanese tourists, other than that they loved America and were pleased to have shared a conversation with a native (they also loved Budweiser). In another bar I wrote post cards to others at home, and I still remember concentrating on my handwriting while a singer/guitarist played original tunes only twenty feet away. A bartender and I talked about the area, and he shared that he knew nothing about the Grand Canyon; he only answered a job ad from his home town hundreds of miles away. Fate brought him here and he had no intentions to leave.
Earlier that day I grabbed a pint at the bar closest to my cabin room. I sat next to an older man and shared intentions on the trip. This man was finally retired, and once a year he took a bus out to the Grand Canyon to hike down its seemingly limitless cliff. A lone traveler, his retirement focused on trips like these, and the country’s landscapes kept him traveling. While some people might throw in the towel on life, he set his own path, and clearly his road trip is an ongoing venture. Maybe that’s what my trip was about. We’re all free to forge our own path.
Or maybe it was about finding innocence again: discovering that it’s alright to be yourself, to trust your intentions, and to accept and take in the beauty around you. Having an open mind and open eyes allowed me to take in all of the landscape, and giving every bit of the trip a chance is the only way I saw see every bar in the Grand Canyon, went to church in a living room of a snowed-in house and spend a night speaking with Budweiser-fueled Japanese tourists.
Or perhaps, more suitably, I’ll end with my last unedited notes written about my trip, reflecting the innocence and awe regained on this trip:
• Cliffs diving in diagonal directions
• Rainbows in the distance
• Mountains with the texture of rough oil paintings
• A ground full of spots of coal – looking like the world’s biggest barbecue just took place
• Round bushes ready to roll!
• Patches in the distance of sun, fog, rain, all visible in the same view
• A&W Cream Soda Ice Cream Float
Cheers.
February 25, 2008
Half the magic of a road trip is the soundtrack. With the right choices, music written years ago can seem like it was written solely for one trip.
My carefully selected playlist of albums for my drive:
The Verve – Urban Hymns (A Favorite Album)
Oasis – The Masterplan (A Favorite Album)
Arctic Monkeys – Your Favorite Worst Nightmare
The Kooks – Inside In / Inside Out
Ryan Adams – Cold Roses (Disc 2)
U2 – How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
Ryan Adams – Heartbreaker
Mix CD – This Year (2006)
Fiona Apple – When the Pawn…
Kasabian – (Self Titled)
Dashboard Confessional – A Mark, A Mission, A Brand, a Scar (A Favorite Album)
Weezer – Pinkerton (I found a Pinkerton badge for sale on Route 66)
Zwan – Mary, Star of the Sea (A Favorite Album)
 The memories of the trip roll by like a slide show. I remember the childhood laughter I produced as I first drove out of the cities of the west. The hills rolled like our crayon-filled drawings of our youth. The great road trip imagery of classic movies all came true: hippies in rusting cars, 60s vans blanketed in stickers, and even an orange Volkswagon Beetle.
I remember driving past abandoned farms and homes, and thinking how alone I was on this trip. If my car broke down, I’d be alone, and that would be OK.
 Not all is as innocent as our youth though. I remember spotting an Indian smoke stack on a reservation, and after driving closer for twenty minutes I realized it was really smog stemming from a power plant.
Still, driving in the East isn’t conductive to taking in the scenery. Unlike at home, my road trip west was full of straight roads, little traffic, few stops, and more varied backdrops. For this drive, the activity of driving was less about shifting gears and turning the steering wheel, instead it was about how much one could spot from the windows.
 I’ll end with a set of phrases written on the signs of Route 66:
Green sign, red sign
‘Twould be more fun
To go by air
If we could put
These signs up There
Just this once (red exit at end)
And just for fun
We’ll let you finish
What we’ve begun
????
Number of times I spotted a bouncing and rolling bush on my road trip: 19.
February 24, 2008
To my surprise, a lot of what goes through one’s mind while driving on a highway is based on expectations. How much traffic will there be? Will the weather be good? When is the next road stop? These expectations let the driver prepare for the trip and pace him or her through the road trip.
On my trip from the Grand Canyon to Las Vegas I was shocked when I saw a sign for the Hoover Dam. What I expected to be a non-eventful drive to Vegas turned into a mammoth route across the giant purple gorilla laughing in the corner of the room. My fear of heights, traffic, and a long congested drive suddenly emerged. Expectations of a smooth drive quickly vanished; whether I liked it or not, I had to confront the great Hoover to reach my destination.
The sign was completely unexpected, but so was what I eventually saw.
I expected a drive over an elevated road with water on one side, and a valley on the other. With my limited knowledge, I imagined a bridge-like structure with water only on one end.
Instead, I saw a marvel in engineering. If the Grand Canyon shows the scale of transformation that God can create, the Hoover Dam is a symbol of what human ingenuity can accomplish.
Fear quickly passed as I pulled my car to the side to view the dam. The twisting dam road looked more like the curving walls outside of a medieval castle than the dull straight structures of bridges. The road itself dropped sharply to equally spring back up to high elevation. Tourists walked the area in awe, and I stood against the calm water looking at the mass of land and water that humans managed to tame.
The constant hiss of the damn was clearly audible, but gears and mechanizations of the dam were out of view. Concrete and steel beams were all that obscured this artificial presentation of nature.
My strongest memory is a view of the dam wall fading into the curves of the river. I imagined what was beyond the river curve, and wondered what I’d find on the nearby land or swimming in the just-too-far waves. I wanted to take a canoe and find out.
After I passed the damn I drove up to the top of a nearby mountain to view the landscape. Water, land, the sun, and an army of clouds rested in peace above me. Despite three or four other cars full of tourists snapping their photos, I felt alone and in peace with the backdrop.
The weather took a wild turn as I drove from the Grand Canyon, with flooding rain and harsh winds slamming my car as it crawled through the highway’s slippery trail.
Semi-trucks, heavy enough to handle the storm, weaved around my car’s right lane position, while my wipers tried failingly to weave a viewable windshield through the never ending splashes of rain.
For ten minutes I braved the storm on the highway because it was still the quickest route west, but in time I grew frustrated at the hopelessness of the situation. Why was I fighting through a storm? Wasn’t this supposed to be a vacation?
As these thoughts dripped through my mind I realized things didn’t have to be this way. An upcoming exit sign showed Route 66 was a few miles away. The slower road wouldn’t get me to my destination any faster, but it would certainly provide a less stressful route. Within a few miles I pulled off of the raging highway and emerged onto a quiet road that welcomed me with the gentle echo of rain drops. While the rain didn’t actually weaken, its impact diminished when it no longer had the highway’s traffic splashing water onto my car. The rain soon transformed into a managable piece of scenery.
The switch to Route 66 marked a turning point on my trip that reestablished the journey’s dominance over the trip’s final destination. While I ended up driving 25 miles per hour through a tourist loop dedicated to the American legacy route, I was still emotionally conquering the highway that was full of snow, rain, ice, and aggressive trucks. When I later returned to the highway to get to another area of Route 66, all of the weather issues were gone.
I’ll finish this post with a phrase written on a series of signs sprawled through a quiet section of Route 66:
You can drive
A Mile a Minute
But there is
No future in it
Pause! Avoid That
Rundown Feeling
P.S. On my excursion from the snow I stopped at the Route 66 Brewery. It was closed, but the staff inside (playing pool) let me in and I picked up some souvenirs.
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