S___ Gets Real.

It's June 1st.

One month until I head West from Ocean City MD, and commence a trip of... well, I don't know how long, really: although I have established my rough Itinerary, I haven't actually added up the whole distance in a single Google Route yet. I'll do that soon, both so you can follow along, but also so someone will know where to look if I suddenly disappear and am never heard from again. Like this woman: missing-hiker-geraldine-largay-appalachian-trail-maine

It. Is. Real. Now.

I have lots of conflicting feelings and thoughts. They range from uncontrollable excitement, to a genuine fear that I may be biting off more than I can chew. In my experience, when I am torn between these feelings, something important is about to happen, so I think  am on the right track.

On the one hand, this will be the longest I have ever taken for a vacation in my life. On the other hand, predictably, I have gone out of my way to make sure it feels as little like a vacation as possible: I am charging other people for the privilege of tagging along, I have linked that to a charity I feel very strongly about, and I am undertaking to hold myself responsible for the trip being interesting enough that it will be worth sharing.

But still: I get to ride across America on a motorcycle! How effing cool is that??!!!*

So, June 1st: I said I would start reading ZATAOMM again, and that you could read along, too, if you wish. I have chosen to, besides carrying along the dogeared copy Tricia gave me, just before her passing, (along with the "for J-O-E-X" Post-it that will always elicit a soft welling of tears) also downloaded the e-reader version, and the audio tape, so that I can listen/read without interruption. They are available here:

ZATAOMM Audiobook

For Sale on Amazon

I listened to the first two chapters, traveling from St. Mary's to Gunston Theatre 2 for a preview, and then read them late tonight. Two things blew me away: the language feels less dated than it did to an even slightly younger me (I'm getting old - not such a shock). But what really knocked me down was how specifically relevant the first chapters felt to the moment we are living now. Fifty years on, it's as though we have completed a navigation of a great and arduous trek, only to slump, finally, on a log to rest - and then found a sock we've been missing for months now, or the remains of our first campfire. It feels as if we have been walking for weeks, and yet, find ourselves right back where we started. I'll address this more later.

First, I want to share this passage from early in Chapter 1, because it defines (and has, for some time, for me) why I am doing this particularly arduous journey the way I am:

“You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.

"On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it’s right there, so blurred you can’t focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness.”

Excerpt From: Robert M. Pirsig. “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” iBooks. https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/zen-and-the-art-of-motorcycle-maintenance/id360625670?mt=11

This is the crux of motorcycling: The Presence. It's always annoyed me that operating a car is called "driving" and operating a cycle is called "riding" - because one is more active and one is more passive, and the relationships in reality are reversed. Though, the relationship between a cycle and good rider is much more akin to the relationship between a rider and a horse, so in that sense, at least, the word “riding” is accurate. Cars, more and more, are designed to insulate us from the experience of Going. They are, specifically, designed to mimic the artificial interior spaces between which we travel. The atmosphere, the comfort, the silence, the music, the entertainment, hell, even the CLIMATE.

On a bike, it's all there, the air, the smells, the wind (the bugs) but especially - the smells. The way the you can smell the spring water as you cross a creek as the temperature dips just a few degrees; the way you know what the local cattle have been fed by the smell of the fields they have fertilized; the way you know miles away that a bakery is coming up in the next town.

In this chapter, and the next, Pirsig and his companions have just headed out of Minneapolis, and are looking for the best "secondary" route to wherever in Montana (that's as specific as he gets). There is a lovely discourse on the value of secondary roads - I will be spending as much time as I can on them, but many of the routes he traveled have been built up, in the intervening 50 years, and my timetable dictates more Interstates than I would like.

Oh, one more thing that should be mentioned, as little serendipities have been dogging this journey from the get-go: the audio narrator for the Audible Audiobook I downloaded?

Michael Kramer.

Yes, I know him...

Here is the passage that most resonated with me, as I drove to rehearsal and Michael's voice articulated the syntax for me:

“...They don’t want to get into it.

"If this is so, they are not alone. There is no question that they have been following their natural feelings in this and not trying to imitate anyone. But many others are also following their natural feelings and not trying to imitate anyone and the natural feelings of very many people are similar on this matter; so that when you look at them collectively, as journalists do, you get the illusion of a mass movement, an antitechnological mass movement, an entire political antitechnological left emerging, looming up from apparently nowhere, saying, “Stop the technology. Have it somewhere else. Don’t have it here.” It is still restrained by a thin web of logic that points out that without the factories there are no jobs or standard of living. But there are human forces stronger than logic. There always have been, and if they become strong enough in their hatred of technology that web can break.

"Clichés and stereotypes such as “beatnik” or “hippie” have been invented for the antitechnologists, the antisystem people, and will continue to be. But one does not convert individuals into mass people with the simple coining of a mass people with the simple coining of a mass term. [... ] It is against being a mass person that they seem to be revolting. And they feel that technology has got a lot to do with the forces that are trying to turn them into mass people and they don’t like it. So far it’s still mostly a passive resistance, flights into the rural areas when they are possible and things like that, but it doesn’t always have to be this passive”

Excerpt from ZATAOMM, Robert M. Pirsig

Substitute the terms "liberal elite" or "Trumpster" for "hippie"or "beatnik" and you get a sense of why I think this is going to be so resonant. For someone born in 1962, just old enough to remember Nixon, Watergate, Vietnam, the civil rights movement, (I was six when MLK was shot and Washington burned - and I grew up with the aftermath of our continuously failed Reconstruction) and the current morass/mores seems like "deja vu all over again."

Civil rights marches, women trying to liberate themselves from the patriarchy, foreign wars dragging on beyond hope or solution, energy crises: sound familiar? One could be forgiven for wondering if we actually lived the last five decades, or if we only dreamt them, before some cruel dungeon master hit the reset button while we slept. One of the few clues that we are somewhere further on is that we actually elected an African American man  (who was running against a viable woman candidate in the primary) as President.

Oh, and that he didn't get shot.

So, much of what I hope to accomplish, and perhaps ignite in my few readers, is a sense of combining genuine critical thinking with genuine empathy, for the people we meet along the way.

More tomorrow.

*A note here, on "language": we are, at this cultural moment, suspended between the Roseanne Barre episode and the Samantha Bee episode, and there are lots of strong opinions about "profanity." I often warn friends, co-workers collaborators and now, students, that i equally well-versed in Attic Greek and early period Full-On Mamet, and I will pull from either lexicon as I see fit. You are forewarned: 



1) I am unlikely to use the "c-word", because much like the "n-word", only participation in the class to which it refers confers absolution for the usage, and just as I am not-african american or dark-skinned, I don't have a vagina. But I would like to point out that this is one of the moments when our Euro elders could teach us a lesson: it's not as big a deal as we'd like it to be. Vaginas are awesome, and since  certain misogynist circles may have given some of the slang a bad name, a woman calling another woman the c-word is something most men would do well to have no opinion about. I think it's interesting that more people are up in arms about "c__t" than "feckless" - which is rather more insulting and quite, in my opinion, on point.

2) The quaint euphemism above notwithstanding, I am not above engaging in full-on Anglo-Saxon "direct speech." If you don't like that, you'd best ask for a refund now.

3) I have recently become a big fan of "asshole." There is no doubt that assholes are everywhere: they're ubiquitous, gender neutral, and, mostly, full of shit. The real test is whether you acknowledge, in good time, that the shit stinks and needs to go somewhere else before it causes a problem.