Well that was fun

So, I finished up my internship, and then I left New York. It kind of snuck up on me too. And my internship boss started freaking out a bit because she was suddenly running out of interns. But it happens at the end of every season, and she gets over it and gets new interns. She did say I was a good writer, which was nice.
-The way I left New York was that I got on an absolutely enormous bus—one might even call it a Mega-Bus—and the bus took me and a few other people to Boston. Now I'm here at my friend Willie's house, and tomorrow morning we're going to leave on our camping trip. It'll be in Vermont, which is only 2½ hours' drive away—it takes a little getting used to how small these states are up here. But I'll write about that when I'm done. What about New York?
-On the whole, I'd say it was an exceptionally positive experience. Even though I'm definitely still not a big-city person, I now know what it's like to live in a big city. But if all I gained from New York was being able to rule out a lifestyle that I'd already pretty much ruled out, that'd pretty much make it a waste of two months. I also gained something pretty great to put on my résumé, which is certainly good, but it's also not even close to all that I got out of the city. What I got was an experience. Like Aunt Irene said commenting on the last post, if I want to be a writer, I need to experience as much as I can. I found that I was looking at some things from a writer viewpoint. For example, just yesterday, on my last subway ride ever, sitting down the car from me was a woman with a tremendous voice, relating a story at full volume to her friend. I was reading my book about edible plants, and glared at her a couple times. Then I realized that she was a lot more than loud and annoying. She was also putting more feeling into the delivery of a story than anyone I may have ever seen. I couldn't even tell what the story was about, since I was at the other end of the car and the words got blurred with all the train noise, but I just watched her tell it. She jumped up into high, incredulous voices, and then with no pause she swooped down into a preposterously manly voices. She never seemed to breathe. Almost always she was acting out the story with her hands too, using them to guard her head against something heavy falling on her, or spreading them out to show something hugely expansive, or lifting her arm up to punctuate a deep "WHOOOF" sound effect (which popped up several times—I really wish I knew what she had been talking about). Eventually, instead of being angry that she was so loud and distracting me from my book, I just grinned and watched her performance. Once I started enjoying it, I thought to myself, She might have to be a character in a book I write sometime. But I'm more than a writer, too; in fact, one could make a convincing case that I'm not really a writer yet, since I've never really tried to sell anything I've written (though I still write, so I count myself as some sort of writer at least). I'm also just a person, and I like to keep these experiences just as experiences, since experiences are what make up a life, once they've turned into memories. I've certainly had two months packed really dense with experiences. Free symphony concerts, tasting home-brewed beer at a friend's house, riding a fixed-gear bike, watching punk music lovers dance by skipping around a circle at top possible speed and collide with each other. These are the things that, whether or not they make it into a book I write, if I ever even write a book that gets published, are what I'm now going to be able to tell people I've seen, and laugh with them, or maybe commiserate with them, or just talk with them. Everything was new and amazing. Even if it might not have been, I made it that way anyhow.
-I shouldn't write any more than that, because I've got an early morning tomorrow. Willie has this strange thing where he's apparently constitutionally incapable of getting up later than about 5:30 in the morning, and as a result he also never goes to bed later than about 9:30 at night. So, during our camping trip, I suspect we'll both end up synching our sleep times to the hours of the night, making midnight a real midnight, instead of the late-ish evening that it usually is for me. If all goes well, maybe I'll be able to keep it up a long time, at least up until I try polyphasic sleep. That would be another excellent experience. That's the most common kind, especially if you expect it to be.

Quiet!

I suppose it has been a while since I wrote. I guess it's because I've gotten into a bit of a routine, where nothing terribly new happens that I want to report to you on. That's my first clue that it's about time for me to mix things up, and indeed I'll be starting the biggest mixup of my life so far starting on the 30th, which touches off my long period of being nomadic for as long as I can. On the 30th, for the first part of my long nomadic stretch, I'll arrive at my friend Willie's house. Then he'll take me and Kane and probably some other of our friends to the scenic White or Green Mountains: he hasn't decided yet. We'll camp and hike for a week, during which time I'll have occasion to break the soles of my feet back into toughness after two months of mostly coddling them with shoes or flooring since I've been here. I'll also work on a set of muscles that I've been paying a little bit more attention to lately, the ones in my legs. On an especially stationary day for me last week, I decided that I really, really had to go blow off steam. So I jogged to Prospect Park. Which was only, like, three blocks, so I also jogged within Prospect Park. Then I had to go back and get something, so another six blocks. The reason I came back was that I discovered on my first trip that the New York Philharmonic was going to be playing some music there, and a few people were going to watch. One of the more awesome things about New York is that it's one of very few places in the world where you can just happen upon a professional orchestra giving a free performance of such music as, to take this night's fare, the "Polonaise" from Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, the Symphonic Dances from Bernstein's West Side Story, and selection from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. I was slightly more jaded to this than you might initially expect, unfortunately, because I had just two nights prior gone to Central Park, in a whole other borough, to see them play, and tonight only half the program was different (the first half). Even so, I'm not one to pass up a free trip to the symphony that carries with it an opportunity to jog and an opportunity to watch celebratory fireworks after the show. So that is why I came back and watched them play all of the above-mentioned music beautifully and with feeling, while I reclined on the grass at the front of the crowd of thousands of picnickers and music-enjoyers sprawled all across a cluster of the park's baseball fields. Then I got a view of the fireworks lifting off from a fenced-off area and exploding in the sky, and still got home in time to take Kane's cute old incontinent dog out on the deck.

I bet you don't remember that I was talking about my nomadic schedule. I sure didn't by the time I got to the end of that paragraph. But it turns out I was, so I'll keep going with it. After the Mountains of Some Color trip, I'll head back to Cincinnati for but a few scant days, then turn right back out the driveway so I can go acquaint a fresh generation of new freshmen with the splendor of the Manitowish waters. After that, and a bit of socializing with people I haven't seen for a long time, I'll come back to Cincinnati and gather my traveling party and we'll sit around a big map of the United States on the floor and trace out a route that takes us to as many as possible of the interesting places contained within the imaginary (but powerful) lines that delineate this nation. Via rail, of course; and then we'll put that plan into action with all due speed. So that's the rest of the nomadic period, if you're interested.

In fairness to New York, I suppose it's more that I'm getting used to it; it hasn't actually been getting that routine—witness the two free symphonic concerts I watched. And also witness last night, when I went to a gathering of freegans. A minor effect of this is that I can now claim to have been to a majority of the boroughs of New York (I haven't checked off The Bronx or Staten Island yet, and maybe I never will). A more substantial effect was that I had a night full of fun and delicious food, but mainly fun. I talked with a woman who's very strongly for animal rights about hunting, and my ideas from my old "Replaceability" post. And about fabric with someone else, and about spelling bees and foreign languages and all sorts of stuff. It made me wish, heartfeltly, that I could get together with these people more, but unfortunately I'll probably never see most of them again. I guess I'll just have to find other people like that in someplace where I'll be for a little longer.

Witness also that I've been shuffled back into the East Village, and this time my host is here more often and wants to give me a bit of a tour of the place. I've already found out much more about the place than I knew before. For example, he told me that all the adventures in Jack Kerouac's Subterraneans actually took place right here, across the street from where we were sitting in fact, and Kerouac just translated all the action to California when he wrote the book. I'm sure there are tons of other stories like that buried around here. Regina Spektor came from the East Village, for example, and tons more I don't know about yet.

But another reason I'm glad I'll be getting out of the city soon is one that everyone I know was thinking about before I even came. What am I, the hairiest dirtiest nature-boy hippie, doing in the biggest most frenetic city in America?, everyone has wondered at least once. And I thought the same thing too before I came. I've made the best of it, but I'm coming to the conclusion that I was quite right about myself, because I'm definitely starting to feel suffocated in this Land of Infinite Boxes. I keep wanting to go outside and do something, but there's no outside here. It's all just more and more boxes; the outside is inside because it's all enclosed within walls. Lately something that's been plaguing me is the realization that there has been entering my ears since the first minute I came here a hum, a thrum, or a din of some sort generated by the haltlessly pulsing electricity that is the filling of the heart of this city, and by the motors that flock over every paved surface they'll fit on. I've had one or two moments of peace, in the deepest reaches of Central Park. But other than that I've been hearing from humans for about fifty straight days. I like humans, but that's just too damn much.

That's all I had along that line. But here's another short thought that's occurred to me lately. While reading on the subway, I've noticed that there are lots of other people who read on the subway. The subway is a space where you have no connection to anything outside of the subway. Cell phones don't work, your view is usually of concrete wall, there's no WiFi. Books are the only thing that really works there. And so that's what people look at. Could this—here's my thought—result in New Yorkers being pretty smart? I have noticed that there seems to be a disproportionate number of smart people here. Maybe it's good for a society to have a little while of reflection each day, some time where they don't have to be plugged into anything or pay attention to traffic, just read, or, if they're not feeling that on some particular day, think about things. The subway may be smelly, infested with rats, often crowded, and sweltering hot, but its Purgatory nature might just be a good thing for people.

Le Doppelgänger

(This is my second post today, because I couldn't resist. It's small. The other one meatier.)

Here in Kane's house I have found my Doppelgänger. The only trouble is I'll never get to meet him and compare notes, because he died in 1877. Even so, what do you think?

Before

After

He was Gustave Courbet, 1819–1877, a French painter. I found him on the cover of a big book full of his paintings by the fireplace. I was transfixed.

This means we can expect that when I'm forty or so, I'll look like this:

I fully intend to find a proper coat and take this picture at that time.

Trash Talk

In some of the books and stories I've read lately, a curious theme has come up: getting free food by salvaging it from garbage. The obvious reaction is to say that that's something that no one should even consider unless perhaps they're particularly close to starving to death penniless on the streets. But practitioners of dumpster-diving write that there's no need to be anywhere close to as afraid as most people immediately are. Food that's thrown away by commercial outlets is usually thrown away whole and uncompromised by fungus or germs. It's in large part just as hale as it would be if you pulled it right off the shelves, except that it might be a little warmer.

This is among the strange things that I've wanted to try. I attempted it a bit during college, in town, but all I ever found was a loaf of bread and a tapestry showing something that one of my friends tentatively identified as the Kaaba in Mecca. Then I forgot about the whole deal, all up until a few nights ago, when I realized I'm living mere paces away from a sizeable supermarket that probably throws out lots of food just because it's reached an expiration date that corresponds only loosely with germs that live in reality. So that night I went down to the store, but there was no garbage in front of it. Then, thinking about it, I realized I'd never really seen any dumpsters anywhere in the city. So I gave up on the night, but consulted the internet for tips on how people glean from the garbage in this city—because I knew people must, and that the garbage must go out somehow even if I never saw dumpsters.

I found a group online, a group of freegans—a term I'd seen before but forgotten about. It's akin to veg(etari)anism, but instead of refusing to support the meat industry, or for vegans the meat, dairy, egg, and even honey industries, by not buying their products, freegans go yet a step further. They refuse to support any food industry, by not buying their products, but rather living off the many excesses that we're surrounded by, most of us unknowingly. It's a way of rejecting the capitalist system. Another name for it is urban foraging. So, people subsisting on the food they find naturally occurring around them—only, in this case, their surroundings are a bit different from those of the original foragers. This group, I discovered from their website, was meeting up to give a tour and a course on "Freeganism 101" in just two short nights. So obviously I went. Here's my journal from that night.

I had worried that I might not find the freegans on time, or that I'd be seen as an intruder, since I didn't know anyone there. But with five minutes to spare I found them there in the park, with a handy sign that said who they were. They were wrapping up their fortnightly planning meeting. I sat next to a guy who asked if it was my first time. It was his too, tho he's been on their mailing list awhile. He's called C——. I got a few other names from people who introduced themselves while they weren't talking, though I only remember A——, a small, sturdy woman in her 30s or 40s, and G——, a longhair like me, who had a big tow-along cart. There were people of all sorts of descriptions. A sizeable contingent of twentysomethings like me and C——, but mainly, I think, people in their 30s and 40s. An east-Asian woman, three Russians who spoke lots of Russian with each other.

Some people feel like they've "finally made it" when they get to New York to do a modeling gig or a music deal or an acting job. I didn't feel like I'd finally hit it big until tonight, meeting all these people so interested in the art of living without contributing to the capitalist civilization machine. I knew there were such people out there, but only now did I finally see them. Being there with them was like a confirmation that all the crazy stuff I've been reading baout and getting into in theory really does happen outside the books and the few accounts I read onlyne, all these intermediated ways of geting to know about awesome things to do with your life. I had a onstant grin on, knowing I was finally somewhere I wanted to be.

A—— and a bunch of other veterans welcomed the newcomers (and everyone else too), and gave an introductory speech about what freeganism is. It's not just dumpster-diving, she said—though that's the claim to fame—the group also does soup kitchens, free markets, even wilderness foraging. (I asked who teaches the wilderness foraging. Z——, they said, but he got in an accident so he's out of commission for a while. Hopefully I'll have the chance to meet him and learn.) Then she told us some guidelines on picking good food—these boiled down to using pour five senses to make your own judgment as to the food's edibility, like humans did before expiration dates were invented—and gave us some tips like the proper time of night to hunt through trash (about 9 or 10; garbage trucks come around 11). And then we all—about 25 of us—headed off toward the tour's first destination.

It turned out to be a fancy, designer grocery store. I learned that they don't use dumpsters in this city per a directive of Giuliani, and instead they put all the garbage out on the sidewalk in bags. So we untied these bags in front of the store—which, we had also been informed, was completely legal since the sidewalk is public property—and dug in. My first bag yielded about five cucumber slices, which I left, though I considered taking them—I didn't know how much we could expect to find, so maybe five cucumber slices was a good discovery! Then I got into another bag and found whole untouched ears of corn, ensconced in a big nest of husks, probably at least a dozen of them—more, at any rate, than I could use. They were completely mold- and ergot-free, not even any cornworms in sight, their only reason for rejection being occasional shrunken kernels or easily removed blemishes. I hollered out the corn find. By this time people were finding tomatoes, peaches, "honeycots", beautiful food everywhere. I got some chives as well, and some fruits. It was a terrific display of cooperation, too—if someone found something but couldn't use it all, they announced its presence to the group, like I did with the corn. Eventually, after more food than I expected, we exhausted the garbage there and moved on to the next stop, a Dunkin' Donuts.

Apparently, Dunkin' Donuts promises its customers freshly baked bagels and donuts each day. This means they have to throw all the unsold bagels and donuts out each night. Not too bad, it would seem, except for something else: they like their display racks to look full and bountiful all day long, even up to closing time. The result for us freegans: three garbage bags full of pristine bagels, donuts, and pastries, more than even our small army of 25 could handle. This really opened my eyes to how preposterously wasteful this culture can be. Dunkin' Donuts throws out, each day, enough bagels to satisfy a good fifty people's hunger for a day or so. (And at the same time millions starve in Africa.) Everyone there, especially the newcomers like C—— and me, commentied on how amazingly ridiculous this was. I was having a terrific and informative time.

We moved on to another branch of the same upscale grocery as the first one (lots of bananas, among other things), and then finished out the night at the absolute mountain of garbage outside an even bigger grocery store. At this one we put all our haul into a display pile before dividing it up, and it was a graphic illustration of waste. Dozens of baguettes and freshly baked artisan breads. Fruits, vegetables—an entire watermelon. And at least seven whole roast chickens. A—— (I think it was her) got our attention and drew lessons from this haul. This capitalist society, she pointed out, raises chickens, then kills them just so it can throw them in distant trash cans, lives completely wasted. It ships organic bananas from Guatemala, then throws them out at the first signs of brown spots. It tosses out whole watermelons because of cosmetic flaws. It's our responsibility to glean this waste, to keep it from going to the landfill, to avoid making even more waste by buying expensive and consumerist foods covered in packaging.

We split up the food among ourselves—in the process, I completely filled my enormous Army-issue backpack—and then we split up too. I went with C——, G——, and a woman whose name I've forgotten, to the subway station. G—— and the woman left; C—— and I thanked them for everything and took the train back to Brooklyn and talked the whole way. I felt like I'd finally had a successful night. You can bet I'll be at the picnic they're throwing this Saturday. Maybe I'll even cook something with all the food I got—it's way too much for just me to eat by then, and giving freely is one of the driving forces behind this whole movement.

The East Village in eight days

As part of my nomadic time in New York, I moved to the East Village for a little over a week. This is because everyone's going on vacation at all different times.

• Darwin and his mom, from June 24 to July something. Before I even asked to rent they agreed to rent their house to someone else during that time.
• Kane has been in Ireland since early June, but his family's been here.
• Well, up until today. Today is when I start my ten-day shift of cat-sitting and plant-watering for them.
• But from June 24 until today I needed somewhere to stay, so Darwin's mom got a friend of hers, Michael, to let me stay at his apartment in the East Village.

Up 'til I left it, I was staying in Park Slope, which has been described to me as the place where sort-of-rich people come to have their babies. It's true: strollers are all over the neighborhood. The East Village, however, has a rather different reputation. It's where two or three kinds of people live, in harmony: poor creative types, immigrants (especially Hispanic ones), and possibly hipsters, though I'm not sure about the last. It's much grittier and more crowded. There's graffiti on everything, including many of the cars. When stores are closed their storefronts are all secured with metal rolldown covers. The building where Michael's apartment is, he tells me, started out as a squat, and eventually the people squatting it managed to get the deed transfered to them legally.

Michael's been in the apartment for a long time, and built up a pretty considerable amount of junk. Whenever I came out of his bathroom, for instance, I found myself staring directly at a life-size wooden cutout of Marilyn Monroe getting her skirt blown up by a passing subway. Until my snap-decision mind trained itself to realize this large human-shaped object was not a real human this was quite unnerving. But other stuff he had was more benign and fun, such as his extensive collection of vinyls and his other extensive collection of old, very good books, many of them first editions or autographed copies that he's accumulated during his time living in the epicenter of New York's independent bookstore scene, where so many authors visit. The East Village is also where Soft Skull started, in a basement a few blocks away from Michael's place, publishing the books that a strange man named Sander Hicks wrote. I found one of these books while I was in Park Slope, bought it from a guy selling books from a table. The back cover is taken up by a photograph of a dead mouse on a concrete surface, with Sander giving it an aggressive middle finger. Soft Skull has changed a bit since then, but it's kept the name Sander gave it, even though no one now seems to know exactly what possessed him to name the company that. The East Village scene is a tight-knit one, especially among the creative types: Michael used to know Sander, and one of his good friends, as I've mentioned before at some point, is an author we've published recently, Seth Tobocman.

I didn't have much time to enjoy being in the hub of everything weird and creative in New York City, so I tried to make the best of it. Since Michael was away and I didn't know anyone in the neighborhood, that actually turned out a bit difficult. But I saw what sights there are. The independent bookstores, of course. There are three within easy walking distance: Bluestockings, East Village Books, and Saint Mark's Books. Their anarchist books were about the extent of my acquaintance with the East Village anarchist scene, which I hear is particularly alive and interesting; another thing the East Village is a hub for is anarchists, and their kin. These sections of the bookstores weren't enormous, no bigger really than any other section, but that they were there at all was unique to the East Village's stores among all the bookstores I'm aware of having visited. I got some interesting books at these stores, including The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and hung out for a long time reading bits and pieces here and there, of zines and other interesting stuff. Soft Skull was well represented in these places.

The other thing I visited besides the independent bookstores was Tompkins Square Park. I first heard about this from the trainhopper I met at Punk Island; she told me it's where lots of travelers hang out when they're in town. She was right. It took me a while to find them, because they stay mostly in one corner. But it was obvious when I got to the corner, because everyone was: filthy, wearing dark clothes, carrying backpacks, and, for the most part, asleep. I was still crippled by not knowing anyone, though. It just didn't seem right for me to say to a traveler, "So, where are you coming from?" It seemed like it'd be a breach of etiquette, since I was obviously not a traveler myself. If I'd had filthy clothes and a backpack and at least a rudiment of a story of my own, I'd have felt at ease with them. But as it was I just felt like an intruder. So I moved on to other sections of the park.

It's a strangely sectionalized park. There are bunches of playgrounds where kids jump and run on the jungle gyms, and there's a dog walking park, and there's a place where bands play. These are all pretty normal things to find at a park. But then there's also the chessboard tables: these have chess players at them, but also, apparently, addicts of most known drugs. Particularly there were two women who, in the bizarre way their body fat hung, appeared to be melting before my eyes. They had rasps for voices. One of them asked me to take out the circles of tin that had fallen into her cans of tuna. I did, and I also watched some chess in progress, but I was too distracted to follow it, let alone ask one of the nice-looking old men if he'd care to clobber me in a game, so I kept walking around the park. For all its reputation, though, it's a surprisingly small park—you can easily see from one side to the other—and I had exhausted what I could do there, so I went back to Michael's apartment.

While I was staying there, I got lots of work done on my latest font, Walleye. This one's been tricky to make, for obscure reasons that would be hard to explain. They have to do with the unusual mix I've got going on of straight lines and curves. But it's turning out really well, I think; the trickiness mainly just makes me glad I waited until I had some experience with Bézier curves (the mathematical curves that make up each letter) to start this font. I've had to do some weird stuff with these curves. I also read a little while I was there, including the weird and spectacular If on a winter's night a traveler (which is about you trying to read If on a winter's night a traveler, but every time you get to the exciting part the book gets cut off by something and turns out to have been the wrong book anyhow). And I ate some pizza, ramen, and some too-expensive ice cream.

Then, today, I packed up everything I have in the city, except a bottle of sesame sauce that I forgot, and took the subway back to Park Slope to start cat-sitting. This apartment is about five times as roomy as Michael's and Marilyn Monroe doesn't peep at me in the bathroom, but all the same I'll still miss the East Village. I feel like I never really even got to know it, in some ways. But, since Michael's not disappearing, and I'll be staying with Darwin's mom again after I'm done here, I'll probably end up going back there at some point. So maybe I'll get to know it yet.

Covered in bees

This is the second post in just a few days. You might not have seen the one below it yet... I don't know how dedicated my readership is.

As you know, I qualified for the finals of the Williamsburg Spelling Bee, barely. The finals were yesterday: Monday the 21st. I stepped into the bar just in time to save $2 on a beer by catching their happy hour, and then signed up and sat while the rest of the finalists came in and signed up on the sheet for the night. The finalists were the top three placers from each qualifying bee, each of which was open to eighteen whoever-type people who could wander in off the street. There were a lot more than six bees leading up to this final, but a lot of people won several times, and a couple people couldn't come (including the legendary Wilson I'd heard so much about), so we actualy only had thirteen people, plus a bunch of spectators.

At 7:30, the hosts got the show rolling. They're Bobby Blue, who founded this thing back in 2004, and Jen Dziura, who's good at pronouncing everything except her own name. (It's Polish, and Poles would say it "Joo-ra", but she and her immediate family say "Di-zoo-ra". Damn shame.) I hadn't seen Bobby Blue yet, because he wasn't at the bee when I qualified—standing in for him was that shiny-headed man you may remember. To kick off the bee, Jen and Bobby sang a song they had written about the Williamsburg Spelling Bee, with Bobby on guitar. Everyone enjoyed that.

There were all sorts of competitors there. A lot of them were local twenty-somethings, but there was also, for example, a senior woman with a cane that lights up with the flick of a switch on the handle. During the round of icebreaker questions, Jen asked, "If your cane could have any superpower besides lighting up, what would it be?" (Answer: clearing traffic.) There were some middle-aged types, and one man who had just come off of getting second place in the AARP's national spelling bee, and I think had flown in from California for the pleasure of competing.

The bee ran mostly like last time, with round 1 being one word, and round 2 being two, but this time we cut out the three-word round and just made round 3 the round where you spell until you exhaust your strikes. I was fourth on the list, and I successfully spelled organogeny, which is the process of organs forming. Not many people misspelled anything in the first round, but I think at least one person did. In the second round I got one right, legerdemain (which I repeated in a flowery French accent), but screwed up on bottine (a little French boot thing that women supposedly wore at some point), because I just forgot to think, I guess. I could've figured out I should use an o, but I didn't think about the definition, or about the Spanish word bota for "boot". I just thought about the pronunciation, which sounded like "bah-teen", and spelled it the way it would be spelled if you pronounced it that way in French: BATINE. Now that I think about it, that's eerily similar to the mistake I made with marotte. And I doubt I'll ever like the French, because of their damn words for stupid trivial things that should be easier to spell if they must even exist, which they of course shouldn't. But I still had two strikes, so I watched the rest of the round go by.

In round 3 I just really disappointed myself. I got two words right: Pentateuchal and mucilaginous. I spelled rubefacient with an i (damn schwas!). And then Jen gave me a dirty, unanalyzable word: sticomythia. It has to do with telling stories back and forth, so the myth part was obvious, but where the hell was I supposed to have heard the root for talking back and forth? I guessed it had an h. It didn't. And there was no way I had placed. So all I could do was sit down and watch everyone else.

Immediately I felt bitter, because when Tamara, a British woman, came up after me she got a long string of words, all of which I knew how to spell unhesitatingly. But she eventually got out on something where I'd have had no clue whatsoever; I believe it was steentjie, which is some species of something-or-other from South Africa (it's Afrikaans, and pronounced "steenchy"). And as the bee wore on, I realized I might not have gotten too far among these people even if I hadn't been given dirty schwas and nonce Greek roots. There were some serious spellers there, people who could spell things like ditalini, which all knowledge of Italian tells you should have at least one doubled letter (my guess was DITTELINI). When David R., the AARP 2nd-placer, came on, I realized I could never have gotten first place. This was because he spelled something pronounced "ainchee". Go on and guess. You'd never get it in a million years without access to a dictionary or a South African botanist. If you were Scottish you might try AIN'T YE?; if you were a regular person you'd probably go with something like AINCHIE. David R. said, "Oh, Afrikaans?", and then, without even pausing, calmly spelled UINTJIE. Immediately Bobby yelled, "That is the hardest word I have ever seen in all the years of this spelling bee!" David R. had already spelled about 20 words without even flinching, so they told him he could sit down and they'd call him back up if anyone somehow got close enough to challenge him. If they hadn't done that, he probably would've spelled every word in their book of words, and then asked them to start quizzing him on Chinese characters.

As I'd expected, I didn't place, but everyone got prizes; mine was a set of Bananagrams. David R. got two hundred bucks and a big stuffed neuron with cute eyes and a trophy and books and a DVD of Spellbound. He also got a big bar tab, but he let the other David, David Z., have it. I hope you're happy, David R.: you won enough to cover most of your airfare back to California, and killed the dreams of everyone in New York who thought they were pretty good at spelling. He did look pretty happy, actually. He was having fun with his big plush neuron.

A bunch of people left, but some of the other spellers hung around at the bar and talked. David Z. bought me a drink with the tab he'd inherited, and he and Jen and I sat at the bar a long time and talked about stuff. I met Carolyn, another speller, and we both reminisced about our National Spelling Bee days—she went in 1997. Eventually the night died out and I went home, perhaps a loser, but happy to at least have played.

Even when it's bad it's good

Because I've been a little exiled in small-town Iowa, I haven't really been in touch with much of a base of trainhoppers. I did manage to find one: a retired hobo who rode trains all around Iowa for decades, making a living by selling books of poetry, before eventually settling down and doing the rest of his rambling on a motorcycle. I sent him a couple postcards, and talked to him on the phone once (but he was getting ready to leave, so only briefly), but that's all. One of the things I was thining before coming to New York was that maybe I could get in touch with some train-riding types to talk about where they've gone and what it's like, and maybe to get a copy of the Crew Change Guide. I don't know if I've told you about the Crew Change (for short), but it's basically the atlas of trainriders. It's also the ultimate in underground publications, in that it's a cardinal sin of trainhopping to give it away to someone who hasn't earned the right to have it. So you can't buy a copy on Amazon. You have to find someone who has a copy and thinks you're worthy enough to borrow it and go to a Kinko's and copy it.

I ended up finding a copy online, one that no one's successfully taken down yet. But I felt like a cheater downloading it, and also it's poorly copied and hard to read, and also it's a little outdated, and also it's missing pages. And also, getting it that way meant I still hadn't talked to any real trainhoppers, which I still wanted to do. So I checked a website I found a while ago, and found out a place where I might meet some such people. It's called Punk Island. Whoever organized it rented Governors Island for a whole day, and scattered 130 punk bands into 17 different spots on the island, in among all the island's quaint, stately red-brick buildings, on its tidily buzz-cut lawns. Governors Island (Wikipedia tells me) used to be owned by the military until 1996, and as I gather, it was never very heavily developed, because it's all broad lawns hemmed in by buildings that look like they were stolen some time ago from Miami University. Although I knew next to nothing about punk music, and was pretty sure I didn't like it much, I decided to go to see if I could meet any train people. Its being free was instrumental in this decision. The concert had no cover, and the ferry that takes people from Brooklyn to the island is also free. In order to make it truly free, I bypassed the subway and walked all the way down to Pier 6, which, going the way I went, was about 4½ miles. Google says it should've been 2½, but I was aiming for Brooklyn Bridge Park, and either there are two Brooklyn Bridge Parks, or there's one and it's really, really long. At any rate, I got to Pier 6 in time to see only the last three hours or so of the festival.

The ferry filled up with lots of people, most of them wholesome-looking, many with babies, lots of them off, I guess, to see Governors Island's old buildings. I got there and wondered which way to go to find the anarchists and the punks. I started heading vaguely left, and then a shirtless guy with a tattoo said to his cell phone, "Tell him to follow the stench." I went his direction. Soon enough I walked by some people yelling and flailing against electric guitars and drums, while other people looked at them. I had found punk music.

When I listen to music I really like to listen to the lyrics. This was unlucky today, because of all the bands I saw, there was only one whose lyrics I could understand, and it was the very last one. The first one I found, well, they were yelling into the mic and playing as fast as they could. The next band was yelling really loud and playing as fast as they could. By the time I found the next band, I was unsurprised to find them yelling really loud and playing as fast as they could. Instead of trying to understand the music—by which I mean not understand its words but understand why people like it a lot—I decided to look at people. This was partially pragmatic, because I wanted to find a trainhopper, but I didn't really have a clear idea of what I thought a trainhopper would look like, so, really, it turned out to be just for fun.

I've never seen so many mohawks in so many colors and varieties in my life. There was a double-crested one; one that was a main mohawk with two minihawks flanking it; a woman with a mohawk that made use of hair at least a foot long, spiked directly out, which made the slightest turn of her head visible from hundreds of yards away; a couple who had matching-sized mohawks, one green and one pink; and one that was brown on the left and blond on the right, so that when its owner turned his head, his hair changed colors. There were too many tattoos for me to register what they all showed, but they certainly lent the crowd a lot of color, especially the big fat man with a green and black circle of some sort on his belly. I began to feel positively tame, only having long hair, and wearing a shirt that wasn't made entirely out of patches and had both sleeves. I wandered around the small stages, each with maybe a dozen people watching someone yell really loud, and then politely clapping after each song. Eventually I stumbled upon the Main Stage, just a few songs before the headliner band came on to finish out the night.

When the headliners—called Negative Approach—did come on, I saw clearly why they were the headliners: of all the punk bands I'd seen today, they played the very fastest and yelled the very loudest. The guitarwork was so fast that most of their songs lasted a minute or less. I only timed one; it came in at forty seconds. And whenever their singer talked between songs, I was at a complete loss to explain how he was able to talk. Maybe it wasn't him—I didn't have a clear view. At this show, I also discovered the preferred punk style of dancing: running around really fast in a big clockwise circle, or sometimes skipping, and crashing into as many people as you plausibly can. One guy, middle-aged, mostly bald, and shirtless, took a different approach, though. He stood with his arms outstretched, as if he were channeling energy from Thor. Then he slowly drew power from the music to flex, or throw lightning bolts at the ground, or—giving in—skip in a circle and crash into people. But only joking fights broke out from all the crashing, and I think this is because punks are, most of them, essentially good people, who just look funny and act funny. Even if I wasn't so hot on the punk music, I would say I really enjoyed going to Punk Island, because I saw something that few people will ever see: thousands of punks roaming a classy island and crashing into each other and being as punky as they could manage to be. And I even found a trainhopper! I could tell because she was wearing an iron necklace with a miniature rail spike for a pendant. It was getting blackened iron all over her neck area. She told me she's been riding trains around the country for the last year and a half, and she's been back and forth between New York and California three times. When it gets cold, she rides trains in the South. She even told me where I could get a Crew Change, a place where lots of train kids hang out—but before I go right down to where they get together and drop in on them with my piss-poor riding credentials (on a freight train one time; got off in the same yard) and lack of any stories that would convince them I'm not a poser, I'm going to see if I can meet any trainhoppers through, like, mutual acquaintances, or happening upon them. That'd be less weird for everyone involved. Although New York isn't a great place to meet trainhoppers, because, as I found while reading my ill-gotten copy of the Crew Change, New York is a terrible place for freight trains. I haven't heard one freight whistling since I got here. To get out by freight, you generally have to go to New Jersey first. So, even though New York is where every other kind of group of weirdos gets together, I think I'm not likely to meet many trainhoppers here. Oh well.

Things have been going well at work. I proofread a chapter of a book that had gotten all screwed up, because I was familiar with the British style's way of dealing with quotation marks. Then, because I did so well, Anne (I never know whether to call her my boss or my supervisor or manager or what) asked me if I could do a rush proofreading job on a whole novel, for which she could pay me some money. Which is great, because I've heard that being a freelance proofreader can be somewhat lucrative, and I think it would make me some good money, perhaps if I felt like taking a break from teaching people what plants are okay to eat and what ones will make you die, or perhaps by internet or fax while I'm living in Korea, or some other time when I feel like having some money and getting it by proofreading.

In a few days I'm moving to the next place where I'm living, with Darwin's mom's boyfriend in the East Village. This is a grittier part of New York, in Manhattan, and a smaller apartment, but I don't mind. For one, it'll be interesting to see a new place, just like Punk Island was interesting today, and for another, it's only for ten days. Then I move in to Kane's place to catsit for his mom, and then back to Darwin's until I'm done here. I'm really getting the grand tour. Part of it is that I wanted to see lots of New York, so I've made a point of exploring; but also, things just seem to work out to let me see the whole place.

I think I'll go buy a candy bar.

Cross-purposes

As part of planning for what I'm going to do next, after the New York chapter of my life is over, I looked on the internet the other day for wilderness skills schools. I found something that's not exactly a wilderness school, but is certainly an event where I could learn some good stuff. It's called, by various people, either the Falling Leaves Rendezvous or the Earth Skills Rendezvous, and it's in Georgia from October 5th to 10th. As I understand it, the idea is that a bunch of people who know, or want to know, things about how to live in the wilderness get together and teach each other things. There's always more to learn. So I'm going to plan my countrywide journey around getting to Georgia around the 5th. This looks like it'll be fun.

Another thing I noticed while searching this rendezvous out, though, was how expensive a lot of these wilderness skills places are. For a lot of them you can pay upwards of $800 for a week of being taught skills. I guess they're priced that way because of supply and demand, and I'm guessing the demand is mainly among disaffected yuppies who want to get back to what life was like before there was any such thing as being a yuppie. These people have money, so why not take it? The places aren't all so profit-driven. I think in a lot of them you can do work-study to pay for your time there. There's one that's not too bad where you can spend a semester there for around $4000, which is considerably cheaper than a college semester. And I suppose they do have their expenses to pay, for supplies and especially for property taxes and such. So I'm not blaming them so much, but I think at least some of them could be cheaper.

From there I got to thinking how I would run a wilderness school, and then I backtracked a moment and realized that I had just been thinking about having a job in teaching wilderness skills, something I'd never really considered before. I'm glad I stopped to consider it then, because the more I think about it, the better it sounds.

My plan up to now has been vaguely this. It's not terrible, and a lot of it is staying in, but here it is. Once I got out of college, I was going to pay off all my student loans as quick as possible. This would start out with going to teach English in Korea for a year or so, which, as I blogged about before, would leave me with about $10,000 saved up at the end of the year, or more if I was cheap, which I would be. After getting back from Korea, I would probably take an office job, hopefully in publishing, and eventually pay back the rest of my student loans. Once that debt was off my shoulders, I'd be free. This is the part where my plan got a little hazier, but I was planning to probably, I don't know, take some sort of part-time job or something, or write books, or design fonts, or all three, and use that money to house myself while mainly living off the land. Probably have a garden and a cellar full of jarred produce from it in the off-season. Hunt stuff too. That sort of stuff.

I realize now that this plan is built on a cross-purpose. Basically, I would be working a job that I wasn't terribly enthusiastic about in order to finance my pastime, or hobby, or true passion, of learning more and more how to live off the land. This opposition would probably lead me to doing as little "real" work as possible in order to have just enough money to keep financially afloat. I'm guessing this would end up in neither my "real" job nor my outdoorsy pastime being as fulfilling as they could be. I'd be forever having to take time away from one in order to do the other one. Maybe it wouldn't work out too terribly, but I think my newest idea is way better.

The new plan goes something like this. After I graduate from college, I'll still pay off my student loans as quick as possible, and I think this will still involve teaching English in Korea for a year or so, because that's something that still sounds like fun to me. Also I want to get out into the rest of the world. Did you know that when I went to Costa Rica, it was the first time I left North America? Heck, the first time I left the Canada-USA cultural conglomerate. (The Canadians may be adamant that they're not Statesiders, but their culture is probably the most Statesy of all the cultures in the world... despite Japan's best efforts.) Getting back to the plan: after coming back from Korea, I'll do whatever I need to do in order to train myself up to be excellent at wilderness life and also at teaching it. There are actually a few organizations that do this sort of training. One of them is Outward Bound, although I actually know practically nothing about that organization. I believe I know a few people who've gone on a trip with them. Another one is that place I mentioned earlier that does the wilderness semester. It's called Jack Mountain Bushcraft, and it's in Maine. (I would guess that they'll probably accept college graduates as well as current students, as long as I could pay them money, even though they bill their course as a "semester".) Once I have some experience, I'll see what I can do about finding a job in the field of teaching bushcraft. That's the key, because this way, instead of making money to finance time outdoors, I'll be making money by spending time outdoors. Probably the money won't be terrific, but you never know, and anyhow I'm not in it for the money, I'm in it for the lifestyle, which to me is the ultimate prize—money for me would only ever really be a means to the end of living in the wilderness. And what's more, this plan allows me to plan a little further, into the next stages of my life, which I think about even now. One of them is getting married, and another one is raising a kid. In my plan Mark 1, these were going to be a bit difficult. Getting married would be a trick because, as someone with what would look like no ambition and no money, I'd have trouble finding a woman who'd be very hot on the idea of living with me and my lifestyle. And the kid would be tricky because, as I'm aware, kids cost money to raise. The cost of parenting would make me work a lot more hours at whatever uninteresting job I'd have, and I'd probably end up cursing the day I got into this financial commitment, even though I'd love the kid. In the new plan these problems pretty much vanish. As for the ladies, I can boast that not only do I have a steady job, but it's a job as a rugged woodsman. And as for kids, not only would I save up college money from my job as a rugged woodsman, I'd also be the coolest dad around.

I'm not sure if it's a common conception that I don't plan for life after college very well, but if it was, I hope I've wrecked that conception. If anything I may be planning too far ahead. But while we're at it, I'm just going to put out there that I'm really sold on fatherhood. It'll be a blast.

Of course, there are potential dangers with the new plan. One of them is that it'll be hard to find a job as a wilderness skills teacher, and it probably will be. I have no idea what that job market is like, but I imagine it's full of interested and dedicated people. But I'm the persevering type, and I'll get through eventually. Another danger is that after finding such a job I'll suddenly find that having to do it every day, teaching wilderness skills to a succession of disaffected yuppies who can't tell poke greens from poison ivy, will take the magic out of it and I'll stop liking the time I spend outdoors. But really, I just can't see myself ever losing interest in the outdoors. And even if I found the job unbearable, I could use my college degree and publishing experience to find some other, normal job. So, I think I've hit on a solid plan. It might take a while of working in office jobs to get the money to get the training, but hey, that's what my current internship is for, huh?

Every week at EcoHouse, we would have a Sunday dinner meeting, and we would start it with highs and lows for the week. I remember that in one of the last few weeks of the year, Ethan—a guy with whom I went on a 36-mile biking/camping trip in the days after the school year ended and before I left—told the house that his high for the week was that he was pretty sure he'd figured out what he wanted to do with his life. He said it was a pretty nice feeling, and I imagined it must be. Now I think I have a flavor of that myself.

I suppose I should write a little about my time here in New York too. The Celebrate Brooklyn! program has started up for the summer. Celebrate Brooklyn! is a series of concerts and such events that all happen in Prospect Park, which is about five minutes' walk from where I'm staying here. These are high-end things. For example, they kicked off the season with Norah Jones. Unluckily, it was raining pretty resolutely when the time of the concert came around, but that didn't stop me from enjoying a free concert. I didn't bring my raingear here, so I poked a neckhole in a garbage bag and walked up the street to the bandshell. On my way, a fellow rain-walker told me, "You've got the right idea." The concert was rather good, although there were a lot of umbrellas in my way. The president of the Borough of Brooklyn called us all meshuggenehs ("Michiganers?"), and then Norah played a Johnny Cash song and some other good stuff. I stayed nice and dry and enjoyed the music. On my way back a woman with an umbrella said to me, "I need one of those. Seriously."

My friend Darwin, whose mom I'm renting from, came home on the 10th, and so far it's been parties ever since. His birthday was the 8th, so we've been packing the parties in, and his friends have been coming over in number. Today we had a delicious barbecue and everyone there talked. This is a really nice place, I discovered. Out of necessity, people know their neighbors well here. For example, Darwin's family shares a deck with their neighbors Mary and Steve. So they've all gotten to know each other well enough that Mary made a cake from scratch and brought it to the barbecue. Mary and Steve are instantly likeable, which seems to be the case with lots of people around here. Steve shared with me his views on the drinking age, and it was the first time I've heard a person over the age of 21 get upset about that law. (He's in his 50s.) We talked about where there is to kayak around here (New Jersey is apparently nice for it), and about what people they all know are doing these days. This neighborhood has a feeling of being an actual neighborhood that I haven't gotten in any of my time living in the suburbs. It probably has something to do with the old, cramped architecture, but I think people are also just generally nice here. I think I've gotten a great deal coming here: not only is my rent pretty cheap, but over the last few days I've been given free food too, even when I've tried to pay it back by offering some split pea & ham soup that I made. I do chores here and there to earn my barbecuing keep, but really I've got it incredibly nice.

As for work, I've been rejecting book proposals left, right, and center, still looking for the next bestseller among all the crap, semi-crap, and actually-fairly-good-but-not-quite-good-enough stuff we get. One of these days I'll find something I can really be happy about. I'm pretty happy with this internship, but there's not too much more to say about it than there was last time.

Enough of my blathering. Go get on with your lives.

All right, explain this

I was looking through an old computer folder that had stuff in it that I wrote for the Craft of Fiction class I had in sophomore year. I wanted to come back to a story I'd written for that, reread it to figure out why it sucked, so I could make it not suck on the rewrite I'm starting. I knew it must suck, not only because when I turned it in for the final project I got what's still the worst grade I've gotten at Grinnell (C+), but also because I remembered it not flowing or coming together naturally. I was mostly right. It did suck, but there were also a few good parts where my 19-year-old self surprised my present-day self with some pretty nice writing.

I closed the file that had the full story, and, curious, opened up a document called "TimAltern.odt", which must mean "Tim's story, alternate bit". I found something that I have not the slightest recollection of writing:

I grouped the walnuts into a small flock and edged them closer to the incinerator. They trembled lightly as the first one fell off the edge of the table into the flame. It made a nearly inaudible popping noise. Then the table, the incinerator, and the house vanished, leaving me standing in a rectangle of dirt and my pupils struggling to contract quick enough. As it turned out, they overcompensated and turned my eyes inside out. I took a good hard look at my brain, and finally decided to lie on the ground. Our moles must have been overzealous, because I found my head in a hole. Then I realized it was not attached to my body anymore. And my body was no longer attached to my limbs. I groped around to find my arm. As I closed my hand around it, my eyes came back to normal. I was lying on the ground at the bottom of a sheer cliff made of ice, and on top of it my arms were holding each other, an amphisbaena. In fact, I was not at the bottom of it but on a ledge. I looked down and saw my legs. “I wonder if I’m the tallest man in the world,” I said aloud, but instead of words, a stream of walnuts emerged from my mouth. They entered my leg stumps, and my arm stumps, and filled me full of walnuts. I was now round and distinctly lumpy. My arms jumped off the cliff, and my legs climbed up it, and they rejoined my body. Walnuts were still entering through my neck, until I jumped up back onto it as well. Then my skin popped open, revealing my body to be a giant walnut. My arms and legs were small and made of wood. A sharp wind caught me and I rolled off the edge. Then I woke up inside the coffeemaker.

My only guess is that I must have been trying to write the most bizarre dream sequence I could possibly come up with. I guess I succeeded?

I had my first day of intern work on Monday. I found my way up to the 11th floor and entered with another intern who had come at the same time, Yana. Her job, for the first hour or so, was to teach me the things that had been taught to her yesterday by another intern who had learned them the day before. Our boss, Anne, acknowledged that this was like a game of telephone, but had faith in Yana, and it worked out okay. She mainly told me passwords to email accounts and databases and such things. Also, what to do once I was in those accounts, like how to put new events up on the calendar. Then my job for an hour or two was to read through the unsolicited manuscripts in the unsolicited manuscripts email account, and reject them. Rejection wasn't the necessary response to them, and I was told to keep an open mind, but I was also told that it was only rarely that a good manuscript came into that folder. As I went through, this description was borne out well. There was, for example, a terrible erotica novel; a woman who, in lieu of a manuscript, sent a link to her blog; and my favorite, a guy who asked us to buy the book he had written by going to a desktop publishing site, and then appraise it. Someone had already rejected him, and what I found in the inbox was his note asking, "Does that mean your [sic] interested?" So, that was fun.

Then I started reading an agented manuscript, which was pretty good. But partway through that, Anne had me stop what I was doing so I could do a different task. It was this: to walk to a copy shop nearby and have them print a full-size copy of the cover of a book they're going to release soon. This was at the request of Vanity Fair. They had called earlier and asked for such a copy, so they could wrap it around the printed galley of the book and make it look final and take a picture of it. Once I was done with that, my next task, to be carried out this coming Monday, was to go to Vanity Fair's headquarters on Times Square and deliver the cover and the galley so they could take the picture of it. So, not two weeks into being in New York, and on my second day of work, I get to go to the headquarters of Vanity Fair with unique items that are also fragile. I'd say I'm pretty happy with how things are going.

After work that day I walked to a notorious radical bookstore nearby that I'd heard about a few days prior from a guy who was selling books and anarchist zines from a table on the street in Brooklyn. There was a reading and signing going on there for one of the books we've published, Understanding the Crash by Seth Tobocman, which is like a graphic novel but nonfiction—I don't know if there's a good word for that sort of thing. It was fun stuff. Seth and the other collaborating authors read stuff and had a visual presentation, and live music behind it as well. It was hot, but fun. I didn't buy any books yet, but I want to go back and look around.

Lastly, another reason I'm glad I came to New York: I just discovered that the country's most popular adult spelling bee takes place right here in Brooklyn, in a bar. There are only two bees left in their bee season, and I intend to be there for both of them. Maybe I'll even win the final on June 21st. It's called the Williamsburg Spelling Bee. I haven't spelled competitively in so many years! This is going to be a hoot.

For now I'll just read all the enormous number of things I have for reading, or write Tim's new story, or maybe even finish my font. I think I have practically nothing left to do with it now, except make the files all work. All the design is taken care of. I just have to push through my inertia long enough to do all the byte-juggling required to make the files work. If I've got time, I'll try to do that this weekend.

Oh, P.S.! I tried bubble tea, like I said I would. It was interesting. I think I would've liked it a lot better if I hadn't gotten honeydew flavor. I guess I don't like honeydews. If I try it again, I'll say something else about it. But it costs $4 at the place down the street, and I'm really, really cheap, so I don't know if the bubble tea saga will go any further.

In place

At 3:29 in the morning I got on the Cardinal train bound for New York. All the pairs of seats had someone in at least one of them, so I asked an older black man, "Mind if I sit here?" and he said sure and I sat and we both tried to sleep until morning.

When it was properly daytime, I ate some ginger snaps and gave him one. We got to talking and I told him I was an anthropology major. "Since you're in anthropology, I'll show you these," he said, and took out some pictures from his leather satchel. They were pictures of him in Ghana with members of the Fanti people, in the traditional dress of their culture. It turned out he's a nana there: he only translated it one way, which was "king", but he pointed out that a nana is more of a servant and a helper in the society. He was raised in New York, but he's lived in Ghana a lot, and was given the title after he stopped the spread of cholera there, and taught them about ecology, and spent some time "living well". Then (this was 1988) he changed his name from George something-or-other; now his first name is Nana. He has two other names, but I'm not going to mention them here, out of respect for privacy. He showed some pictures of people with T-shirts that had his name on them. Evidently he's pretty popular. We talked a lot, and I didn't read much, which was something I'd planned on doing. But I was just reading in Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose about the difference between these days and the old days. In the old days, a story like Heart of Darkness was plausible in its framing: it's framed as a story told by one sailor to a group of other ones. But today, even though we go on long journeys all the time, people trade tips on how to keep their neighbors from talking to them: headphones, intent stares at whatever they're doing, those black cloth eye-cover things. I was happy talking to someone interesting for a day, even if he did have sort of bad breath.

The Cardinal got into Penn Station at about 10:30 at night, and Nana took me a block away, to a subway stop where I could get on the F train. We were in the middle of towering towers and deliriously blinking lights, and I thought my initial impression of the city: "Holy shit, is the whole place going to be like this?" Then we went underground again, and it was a bit quieter. He showed me how to buy a subway ticket, and sent me off to the F train stop, then went to his train. I stood there, mostly alone, looking down the empty tunnel and watching the occasional rat. I was carrying lots of money, my big packpack with a sleeping bag attached to it, and my laptop in its case. Know what? Absolutely no one robbed me. Seems like everyone in my family was telling me that going to New York was as good as throwing all my possessions into a pit and possibly committing suicide as well. I knew this was bogus even before I got there, but now I can confirm it empirically. I got out of the subway near my friend Darwin's house, which was in a mostly unlit neighborhood, and I eventually found his house and fumbled with the key that I was given under the mat and made it inside. During this time, no one robbed me. Then I got inside and was, of course, home free.

No one was in the house, but I called up Darwin's mom, and she told me where to stay. Then I called my other friend, Kane, and he was still awake, so we met at a street just down the hill from Darwin's house, and went to a 24-hour sandwich place that Kane knows about. I had a tasty chiliburger and most of a milkshake, and we talked about New York. He told me about Prospect Park, and the free concerts that happen there. I'm pretty sure they're all free, and there's an upcoming one by Norah Jones. Prospect Park is less than ten walking minutes from Darwin's house. There are tons of interesting-looking restaurants around here. So far I've only been to that sandwich place and to a pizza place that I visited with Kane the next day, but I think I'll get some bread at a bakery soon.

I've been exploring on my own time, now that, unlike at college, I have my own time. Yesterday I went on a bike ride with Kane and his brother, and pulled off what was easily my most impressive bike move in years. I was on a borrowed fixed-gear bike, and we hit our first big hill, which I had never dealt with on a fixie before, since this was my first time riding one. I realized too late that it's rather hard to control a fixie while it's going down a hill. I tried to slow it down as well as I could with my legs, but I was still going at a horrendously unreasonable speed down the hill, straight toward a roadway with pedestrians on it, on the other side of which there stood a fence. I hurtled toward a woman with a baby carriage, and managed to miss that, by aiming toward a lamppost at the left end of the fence. Before I could smash into the lamppost, though, the curb took hold of my wheel and redirected me firmly off to the left, down the road. Accepting this turn, I kept my feet on the pedals and rode gracefully down the street until I could slow down enough to turn around. "Guys," I said, coming back to Kane and his brother, "I have no idea how I didn't fall off the bike just there." They were impressed, and so was I. The only consequence was that at some point the tire rubbed a nasty stripe of skin off my heel. Kane's brother offered to take the fixie. I accepted this.

Today I walked around. First I walked down the street, and looked at what sorts of interesting establishments I could find. There are a bunch of laundromats, and a Vietnamese bubble tea place that I mean to check out sometime. I also found a little tiny art supply store and bought a pen. Then I found my way to Prospect Park. I walked around the park, making up each and every step as I went. It's a nice park, although it's only the illusion of nature growing wild. They're up-front with you about Prospect Park being an illusion. Near a waterfall, there's a sign that explains, "The watercourse starts here, with water piped in from New York municipal sources." This waterfall, the sign also explains, was placed around a blind corner so that visitors would hear it before they saw it, which would make the park seem bigger. Despite all the little subterfuges of Olmsted and Vaux, I enjoyed the park. Its paths twist enough that I couldn't see any other people a lot of the time, which was fine with me. The trees smelled like trees should, and I followed tree-smelling trails down the watercourse until I lost it. People were enjoying themselves all over. I found myself at an exit to the park; I wasn't going to use it, but then I noticed that a sign across the street said "Brooklyn Botanic Garden". So I crossed the street in an only slightly dicey maneuver, and went into the garden. I walked past trees with signs on them and found myself at a greenhouse. In there I saw what a coffee tree looks like, and saw lots of cactuses, and smelled a citronella plant that I never saw. There was a delicious-looking cafe that I didn't buy soup from because I'm aiming to enjoy New York for as cheaply as it can be enjoyed. I enjoyed the park plenty without that bowl of soup, following a trickle of water upstream until I found it flowing out of a pond full of big luminescent Japanese carp. I tried to follow it further, past a torii gate on the pond and a Shinto shrine in this very Japanese area, but there were fences blocking me off from where they're building a new visitors' center. I still feel cheated that I didn't find the source of that stream, but it was probably the tap anyhow, so I'm not too sad. Eventually I turned around and got back to Prospect Park. I tried to find my way back to Darwin's house, but not with a great deal of dedication, and so I ended up going the exact opposite way, to the very farthest point in the park from where I needed to be. As I went around the Lake, it started raining, but that didn't bother me too much. I kept walking and walking and at last I stopped making wrong turns and got back to where I had come in. I hopped over the wall, as I'd done to come in, and walked back to the house.

Darwin's mom had now come home. She has a little fat dog—a French bulldog—that snorts when it breathes, and two cats that refuse to have anything to do with me. I haven't really talked to her much; instead I've spent most of my day after I got back working on my fonts, and fooling around on the internet, talking to people and such. I've been pretty unproductive, actually, but I'm going to try to be a lot more produtive tomorrow. I might buy some better groceries, too. I bought lots of rice and some noodles too, and for flavoring I have diced tomatoes and tomato sauce. But I think I'd better find something that's not grain flavored with tomatoes. Perhaps something cheesy? Perhaps some meat? I'll think about it!

I'll also write my first rejection letter. I got a novel that was submitted to my internship company by email before I left, and I read the whole thing yesterday. I was afraid coming in that I wouldn't be able to find anything to pick on in a novel written by someone who's not a college student, someone who's trying to get paid good money to write a book. But it turns out I can pick a book apart in a way that's probably at least satisfactory. This one wasn't that good. It was repetitive, and not terribly gripping, and the writing style was like an overdone exaggeration of Hemingway's short sentences. (Fun fact: not all Hemingway's sentences were short and jabbing. Loads of them were long.) I think I'll be able to do this job. I start on Friday. I'll keep you posted. Maybe by then I'll have had a bubble tea too, and I'll be able to say something abouth that. They're supposed to be the greatest thing ever, if some people at the college are to be believed, but I've never had one yet. I'll let you know if the rumors are true.

New York, New York

At the end of the school year, once I got all my projects done and I was free and clear, I did some fun stuff. I went on two camping trips. One of them was at the end of an 18-mile bike trip to Newton, Iowa, with my friend Ethan. The weather was perfect that day, and I finally got to exercise my legs after making them stay tame and asleep for most of the semester. I got all the way there with no problem except that I was slowing down toward the end. Ethan's a cross-country runner, so he was fine the whole time. We camped in a farmer's field, hidden by rises from view of the farmhouse or the nearby road, and tested out a woodburning camp stove that I made this winter out of tin cans. It toasted our bagels rather nicely until we ran out of sticks. We were disinclined to burn the undoubtedly chemical-ridden cornstalks on the ground. In the morning we got up and I went to the train yard and saw only the back end of the morning train as it left. So, sadly, I had to follow Ethan, who'd left about 45 minutes earlier, back to the college. On the way, my bike broke a lot and I had to walk it up the hills. But there are few things I would rather have done than gone on that trip.
One such thing, though, might have been the camping trip I did the night before it, because on that camping trip I was with a girl. We lay in the grass and looked up at the stars. About this no more will I say. It's just a shame that we had our first and only camping trip so late in the year. I mean, classes were already over. Now it's summer and I won't even be back in college until next January.

To the present day: I finally got everything worked out. I'm leaving for New York tonight by Amtrak at 3:29 a.m.. Then I'm staying with a guy I know from college, Darwin. He's a first-year and works for the newspaper. That's his given name. I'm staying with him for all but 16 days; I don't know where I'll be then, but I have 24 days to figure it out starting when I get there. I also emailed the company I'll be working with, and got my first assignment, one that I'll have done when I come in for my first day of work. I believe it's about the same thing as I'll be doing for most of my time there. I'm given a novel that was submitted, and I have to report back about it and say why they should publish it, or, far more likely, why they shouldn't. I also write a rejection letter about a paragraph long that the company sends to the agent who submitted the book for its author. And then I get a new novel. I don't know how many novels I'll be dealing with per week. I'm working two days in the office (Mondays and Fridays) and two days from home (Tuesdays and Thursdays). Which means I'll have free time. I'll use some of that on a side job that I'll get—I'm still planning on trying out being a bike messenger. I imagine that if I do that I might want a little time to get used to the city before I go asking for such a job. People have told me that New York is incredibly hostile to biking, but I searched online to verify that, and I found that an agency of some sort ranked it as the 8th most bike-friendly city in the nation out of 50 that it examined. So maybe I'll do okay.
I think I'll have fun in New York. Park Slope, where I'm staying, is supposed to be a really nice part of Brooklyn. Apparently Prospect Park has plays in it just like the more distant Central park does. And other fun stuff. I'll have plenty to explore there. I don't know quite what to expect there, but the 5 million people there must be staying for some reason. I imagine it's pretty bearable, even though Dad says, "I'd rather chew broken glass than go to New York."
I've also had a fun, oh, five days at home. I caught up with Aaron and Keith and we went out and acted like loons on Thursday. I'm not sure, but I think Keith probably always acts like a loon. What's a good example quote from that day? We passed a large woman on the street and Keith said, "That's how I like 'em! Large and afraid of their own shadows!" No one could figure out why he compared her to a groundhog. I doubt he knew.
I also got to go out to eat with Grandma & Grandpa at the Grand Finale, which was delicious and too much food. Grandma gave me some ginger snaps to make New York a bit more tasty. I've been reading a little, and spending time with the folks. But it's really not much time to spend here. Micah and I didn't even get to take a creekwalk that we were going to take—but we're going to do it in August.

By the way, I'm out of school for the longest I've been out since I was four years old. Fun commences tonight with my Amtrak journey. People say I'm always talking about things I'm going to do in the future, and I don't do things in the here & now. But I did those camping trips, darn sure, and now I'm going to the most active city in the country, where I'll never lack for something fun to do. I do have fun, and now that I have eight months of time with nary a college obligation, you'd better believe I'm going to be having tons more.

Further evidence of my insanity

No, I don't believe I'm actually going clinically insane. But from the perspective of normal people, it must look like I'm just trying to find all the possible ways there are to be very, very strange. What's really going on is that I keep finding things that look like they'd be a lot of fun to do, and deciding that life is finite and I ought to do them while I can. The latest thing that this means is polyphasic sleep. This isn't something you're likely to have heard of, but it's an interesting concept, and one that's been put into practice. The idea is that, instead of sleeping for eight hours out of every 24, which is an entire third of your time, you follow one of a few different sleep schedules that people have worked out that manage to give you just as much energy and wakefulness, but require as little as two hours of sleep. It sounds insane and impossible, but there are lots of people who've successfully made the switch to one of those schedules. There are three main ones, but actually there are just two, because I can't find any evidence that the third one's been adopted successfully by a real person. Suspend your disbelief for a moment while I talk about them, and then I'll get to what you'll be thinking at that point. So, the first one, the one that was invented first, is called the Überman sleep schedule. It consists of taking six twenty-minute naps, spaced exactly evenly throughout the day (and night). One problem with this is that it only allows you to be awake for 3h40m at a time, before you have to take a nap. You can take naps in all sorts of weird places, but it can get inconvenient to have to nap so often (and you have to follow the schedule to a tee), so another sleep schedule evolved. This one is called the Everyman schedule. You sleep four hours as opposed to the Überman's two, but it's a lot more workable around normal daily schedules. It consists of a three-hour "core sleep", and then three twenty-minute naps spaced about evenly through the day. (The third schedule is the Dymaxion schedule, supposedly followed by Buckminster Fuller and not successfully by anyone I've read about since then; on Dymaxion you take four evenly-spaced thirty-minute naps, which allows for more flexibility because you've got 5h30m between naps. But like I say, it's apparently the chimera of polyphasic sleep, in that no one or almost no one has done it.)

So right now the obvious question is, If you're only sleeping a quarter or a half of what normal people sleep, why don't you get unbelievably sleep-deprived and turn into a quivering pile of goo? The general theory goes like this. In monophasic (eight-hour) sleep, you go through several stages of sleep, which go something like Stage 1, then 2, 3, 4, back to 2, then 1 again, and finally the important one: REM sleep. That's the kind of sleep where you dream, and it's also the kind your body needs in order to feel rested. In the polyphasic cycles, you get your body to skip past all those other stages and go right into the REM you need. There's an alternate version of the theory that says you still do go through all those other cycles, you just blaze through them at lightning speed—but the difference isn't too consequential. And you can in fact get REM sleep on one of these schedules; I've read lots and lots of sleep logs ("plogs"?) by people who've done this, and they definitely report dreaming.

The tricky part is adjusting to the new schedule. You can't just go straight from monophasic sleep to the Überman schedule without a bit of jarring. For at least the first week, and more often for several, you're not getting that REM yet, because your brain hasn't come to terms with the fact that sleep isn't going to last as long as it used to. You just kind of wake up in Stage 1 or 2. Sometimes you feel refreshed, but it's maybe just as likely that you'll feel like crap. This goes on. Also, you have to regiment yourself really well when you're in the adjustment period. If you take a nap an hour late, you'll get thrown off for several cycles and get set back. If you sleep through one of your alarms, your brain will try to reset itself to monophasic mode, and you'll be set back. But if you manage to keep it up—and all the sources I've read say it takes a lot of willpower—you make progress. Gradually you stop feeling so tired. In the later stages of adjustment you might feel some "brain fog", as a few people describe it, that knocks you down to maybe 80% of your normal intellectual functioning. And then somehow after about a month you've adjusted completely. You're on the Überman schedule, and you have six extra hours in a day. Or if you're on Everyman, you have four extra. And that's like gaining another quarter or third of a life, for however long you can keep up your nap schedule reasonably well. People who adjust to Überman report feeling like time has gotten a lot slower, like everyone else is moving in slow motion except them. And they also say they have, strangely enough, more energy than they did with monophasic sleep. It's not as pronounced with Everyman, but it's still there.

So, as you've guessed by now, I want to try this. It won't be for a while; right now I'm thinking I'll try starting this winter around Christmastime, when I'll have a month until school starts and nothing terribly important to do. I haven't decided which one I want to try yet. What I've got in mind is starting out trying Überman, and then if it turns out I just can't do it, I'll fall back on Everyman. And once I get to school, I'll have no problem doing all my homework and having fun too. As it stands I tend to have room for only one of those, and they both seem to me crucial parts of college, so I'd love to be able to do both.

Since I'm waiting so long to start, I guess I could've written this closer to the actual start date, but I've been reading a lot about it lately, so I figured I might as well. Not much else to report for this last week. We had one of our book releases for Press, the cookbook, and our other two are tonight—the first one's in half an hour. Also I wrote a lot and didn't sleep much. I think I'll be able to sleep a little more (still in a vaguely normal way) starting now. Also I'm going to be going on maybe three camping trips, so that'll be fun.

Okay, see you again soon.

Would Buy Again

I think I have evidence that the time is ripe for me to start writing my book. I found the time—where, I don't know—yesterday to leave some seller feedback on some books I bought on Amazon. One of them was this year's 365 Stupidest Things Ever Said Page-a-Day Calendar. I said a little before 2010 started that I was done with this calendar, because it just wasn't as funny to me as it used to be. But I had to buy it anyhow, because the authors emailed me after I wrote that and told me that one of the quotes I'd emailed them had made it into the calendar. It was from our dining hall here, and it said,

TODAY'S BREAKFAST PASTRY

TRAIL MIX MUFFINS

*CONTAINS MUFFINS

Clearly, they meant to say "contains nuts", but they sure didn't. The other book I got was Relearning to See: Improve Your Eyesight—Naturally!. It's exactly what it sounds like: a book that tells you ways to sharpen your eyesight without the aid of glasses. In fact, what little of the book I've read so far rails against glasses pretty hard, saying that they're bad for your eyes in a variety of different ways. The main one is that when you look through glasses, your eyes don't have to work to focus right, and they get lazy and after you wear them awhile you find that you can't see as well without them as you could before you started wearing them. This claim is backed up with evidence, as is pretty much everything in the book. It's not a vanity-press thing put out by a pseudoscientist quack (although the author's name is Tom Quackenbush); it's a compendious 500-plus–page book full of technical diagrams and foldout eye charts. For this reason I haven't yet read even past the background into the part that actually tells you how to improve your eyesight. But once I do, I'll definitely keep you all updated on how I'm doing. Frankly, I'm not happy about the idea of wearing glasses, and this book sounds like a pretty legitimate way of making them unneeded without an expensive surgery that uses lasers to cut my eye. (Think about that description and tell me if it sounds like a good idea when you read it. I haven't found this in the book yet, but I've read reviews that said the book is against LASIK-type things as well, because they amount to having your current prescription permanently emblazoned on your cornea.)

Anyhow, the point I was going to make was that I wrote seller feedback for both of these books. You know, saying whether the seller was prompt and the package got to me on time. But instead of that, I decided to spice it up a little bit.

Review number one: "Not only did the calendar arrive instantaneously, appearing on my desk with a small 'puff' sound after I clicked the button to place the order, but the pages had been edged in fine gold leaf. The ho-hum standard cover art was gone and in its place was a 3-D hand-done painting of a metallic dragon destroying a zeppelin. If you ask it nicely, the calendar will also read itself aloud. Would buy again."

Review number two: "This book arrived just in time for me to use it to defeat my arch-nemesis in hand-to-hand combat. I threw it at his face with a supersonic swirling motion and the power of one hundred thousand papercuts overrode his miracle healing power just long enough for me to jab my poison spur into his secret weak spot below his sternum. Thank you to the delivery woman and to this seller. Would buy again."

These are why I say it's probably high time for me to start writing stuff. I have some things planned. First off I need to write something for myself, a kind of essay that lets me clear up to myself what I think about primitivism and civilization, what my standpoint really is, what's reasonable. If I didn't hate the word "manifesto", I'd call it a personal manifesto. That's something I've wanted to write for a while, although I don't expect anyone but me to find it fascinating. I'll probably end up putting it here, and maybe I'll turn out to be wrong about whether people besides me will like it. The other thing I plan to write is a novel. This is roughly the same novel that I've been wanting to write since about eighth grade. I've started writing it four times now, each time better than the last, none of them really usable. I figured out the problem with the latest one, which is the one that I started writing in National Novel Writing Month (November). I didn't really know who the characters were. There are two main ones, and they both basically thought the same and did all the same things and did them only to push the plot forward. Also, they were both pretty much me. I still don't have a firm grasp on them, but I at least realize that I'll need one. Probably in order to get a hang of writing characters, I'll rewrite a short story that I wrote in my Craft of Fiction class. That one had a pretty flat main character as well. Part of that is that the point of the story is how very, very flat he is—probably "lifeless" is actually the best word—but I'm sure I could make him seem more real even at the same time that he's lifeless. And the rest of the story could seem more real too. And it could just straight-up be better written.

The writing will take place while I'm on trains and waiting for trains and hitchhiking and regular-hiking and all that stuff. I would start while I'm in New York, except that I want to go to a wilderness skills school before I start writing the book. Not only do I want to know these skills, but my characters will definitely need to have a grounding in wilderness skills. So I guess in New York I'll focus on my short story, the one about Tim, and maybe my personal writing thing too. Probably some of it will take place on top of buildings. This is a recent addition to my plans. It started when I found out that a couple people I knew a little bit, but not much,* like to climb buildings in their spare time. (Let's call them Shortstuff and Ninja.) I invited myself to their next excursion, and we went downtown. We went to the back of a foppish bar where yuppies buy drinks, and, with no prelude, Ninja climbed up it: on top of a dumpster, up a shed connected to the building, and progressively up architectural stairsteps until he got most of the way to the top. I was right behind him, and when we got there, Shortstuff—she had a hurt leg and wasn't climbing today—took a picture of us, and we climbed back down. Incidentally, this was broad daylight. We wandered around town, then started heading back to campus. On the way, we found another short building and climbed that, and then when we got back to campus we climbed the arts building, without even really trying very hard to be secretive.

After this outing I realized how well climbing buildings would fit into my plans for next semester. I've read a lot online about the parts of a train journey that don't take place while you're physically on a train. One part of a trip that you have to consider is where to sleep, and a lot of people online agreed: if you're in a city and don't want to be seen while you sleep, and you can't find a nice forest in a park somewhere, and you don't want to pay for a motel room (which will always be a given for me), you can just climb on top of a building. No one will ever look there. So I've been practicing more with Shortstuff and Ninja. Lately, we climbed a bunch more buildings, and we're hoping to climb yet more that we ran out of time for. One of our excursions will probably end in one of the three potential camping trip that I might be going on before I leave town. It's going to be a pretty well packed two last weeks here. And then I'll be out of school for eight months. That's a pretty interesting thought. I'm about to embark on the longest stretch of free time that I've had since I was four, and it'll be considerably freer, too, since when I was a toddler I could hardly roam all around the country and climb buildings and hike mountain trails. I suspect that while I'm doing it, I'll discover that I'd prefer to live my entire life like that. And, barring physical limitations, anything is possible with the right mindset and willpower. So anything is just what I plan to do.

*Not the same people I climbed up the arts building with once before.