It uses gasoline

As I was nearing Dayton, I noticed that the gas light was on. What was worse, I had no idea how long it had been on.

It was the steering wheel’s fault.

I find the Element to be quite a well-designed car generally—in fact, I’m a little obsessed with it and am already dreading the day that we will have to trade it in, because I don’t think I’ll ever find a car I like as much. However, there is a problem with the steering wheel, namely the fact that there is no perfect angle to adjust it to—at least not relative to the field of vision of someone of my height (six feet, for the record).

When the steering wheel is tilted all the way up, the upper part of it blocks the top of the speedometer dial. I can see the angle of the needle but can’t be sure exactly what number it’s resting on. 60 mph is at high noon, which is straightforward enough, but let the needle incline much to either side and—with the steering wheel all the way up—I can’t just glance down and see whether the car is traveling at, say, an unremarkable 70 mph in a 65-mph zone or an asking-for-it 76.

Because of this, when I am driving at highway speeds I tilt the wheel all the way down, exposing the upper third of the speedometer dial so that I can easily gauge any speed between about 40 and 80 mph. The downside is that the fuel gauge is now blocked in this position, something I don’t remember ever noticing until on this very drive, as I hurtled along the country roads somewhere between Xenia and Bellbrook.

There are long stretches of the drive between Elkins and Dayton where gas stations are sparse, but fortunately this was not one of them, as the needle was closer to E than I’d ever seen it before in this car.

I quickly found a BP, ran my credit car, inserted the hose, and—while the pump was running—took the opportunity to shed my knit pullover and don the button-down shirt I’d left hanging in the back seat so as not to arrive at my meeting in an excessively wrinkled, bedraggled condition. I used my reflection in the tinted side window to knot my tie, noticing as I did so that traffic had come to a halt on the road behind me, because of a stopped school bus, and I enjoyed imagining the reaction of anyone who noticed my little display.

The realization of how easily I could have run the tank dry reminded me of a time, back when Amy and I were first dating, that I’d had her Cabriolet for a weekend while she was out of town and the car just stopped running one evening.

At first I’d had no idea what the problem was. I was rounding a corner somewhere in Baltimore’s Mount Vernon neighborhood, where I lived at the time, when I noticed the engine lurching and straining. I was able to pull it into an out-of-the-way spot in an alley before it died altogether. I tried and tried to restart it without success.

This was in the last year or so before absolutely everyone had a cell phone—and I certainly didn’t—but fortunately I was near a friend’s apartment and went there to call and wait for AAA. It was a long wait until the call came back that a tow truck operator was on his way, then a longer wait out in the alley before an old-fashioned wheel-lift tow truck appeared in the rearview mirror and eased to a stop ahead of where I’d parked the Cabriolet.

When the mechanic walked up, I told him I had no idea why the car had stopped running. I suppose a mechanic probably assumes that, if you’ve run out of gas, you’ll know it, so his mind did not at first leap to that possibility. He told me to turn the ignition on and pop the hood so that he could start some diagnostic step. Flustered for some reason, I first tried put the key to my own car into the slot, and it promptly became so jammed that he needed to hand me a pair of pliers so I could wrench it back out.

“And I’m the one who’s been drinking and playing cards all night,” he said, laughing, in a rasping, wheezing, startlingly Tom Waits-like voice, before disappearing under the hood.

Tried this, tried that. Finally he stuck his head back into view.

“I think you’re out of gas,” he told me, in a tentative tone that suggested he was beginning to suspect he might be dealing with a stone cold idiot.

Nonsense, I thought. Only an idiot can’t tell whether they’re out of gas or not. I’m not an idiot. Although… how much gas DID I have?

I scanned the instrument panel so that I could tell him he was wrong, that the gas gauge was showing half a tank or something like that.

Then I realized: There was no gas gauge. I could see the speedometer, the tachometer, and, in the lower left of the little window directly behind the steering wheel, a thermometer, but—now that I was looking for it—I could find no gas gauge.

Then my eye fell on Amy’s rock.

Growing up, she had from time to time joined a friend’s family at their vacation home in Maine, and one summer she had kept, as a souvenir, an unusual looking rock, speckled grey and white or, in some lights, almost orange.

This rock now lived on the little ledge of the instrument panel, and the combination of the particular shape of that ledge and the particular shape of the rock and the particular forces of acceleration and inertia that the car’s motion tended to apply had resulted in the rock almost always coming to rest in the lower right corner of the panel—directly in front of the gas gauge, as it turned out.

I snatched it up.

Sure enough, the gauge’s needle was buried below the E.

That was the only time I’ve ever run out of gas. I’m glad to be able to say it wasn’t my fault.

Oh deer

I never saw the deer coming.

One second my lane was clear. The next, there was a deer spinning across it.

At first I couldn’t decipher what I was looking at. I was piloting the Element through the wilds of eastern Ohio on Route 50. There there the road is a divided highway with a wide, grassy median. At this particular point, the eastbound lanes sit considerably higher than the westbound.The median is rolling terrain, essentially the foothills leading up to the high slope along the shoulder to my right.

I was keeping vague pace with a maroon SUV in the left lane, about 50 feet ahead. Suddenly, a deer was describing a sort of pirouette across my lane—but it was faster and more incomprehensible than that. It had the effect of freeze-frame photography, a series of shots showing off the deer from different sides.

Click.

First the left side of the deer.

Click.

Instantly the right side.

Click.

And then the deer was on the shoulder, in a pose that at first looked almost relaxed: rear legs folder under its hindquarters, front legs extended.

The posture of a sitting dog. at rest. All was frozen for a split second, in which it was possible to believe the deer might just be pausing to collect itself before bounding off into the woods to the north.

But of course deer don’t sit.

Then I registered that the deer was scrabbling with its front legs, struggling to rise, and I understood that this deer would never stand again.

The maroon SUV was pulling off onto the left shoulder and then I was zooming past, all of this registering and understanding over in seconds, and as I zoomed past I was understanding more, the meaning of the dents and cracked plastic on the SUV’s front right corner, that fact that its side mirror was dangling against the side of the car from a bundle of wires, surely not the way it had left the factory or even the driver’s garage this morning.

And then the whole scene was in my rearview mirror, a quarter mile distant, a half, and I was rationalizing why it wasn’t necessary for me to exit, turn around, and go back to see if the driver needed help. Not that much damage, the car was stopping in control, everyone has a phone, what kind of help could they really need anyway.

Other than maybe mercy-killing that deer.

I thought of all the times I had been distracted on this drive—trying to update my meal-tracking app with the bag of cashews I’d bought at a gas station, researching whether anyone else had already registered the URL I’d dreamed up for the podcast I was planning, answering a text message—hands-free, of course, but that’s only pretend non-distracting. Finding the little microphone button, leaning closer to shout clearly and distinctly at the phone’s little microphones over the road noise, glancing at the screen to see how mangled the dictation was… God.

Driving is the kind of activity where, by any reasonable measure, we should constantly be thinking about how imminently we could die. In seconds the car could go from comfortable chariot into jagged, piercing torture instrument, bouncing and rolling down a steep hillside, suitcases and floor mats and the Maglite ricocheting around, pin balling against our soft, weak flesh and bones.

So easy, so relatively likely—and yet I only ever realistically consider that I might be about to die on planes, where the odds of the slightest thing going wrong, much less actually dying, are something like that of being struck by lightning while standing on one’s left foot singing Yankee Doodle. I look out the window, consider the nice things people might say about me at my funeral, steel myself to stay calm as the downward plunge begins, eye the person next to me and get ready to offer a comforting arm.

I shook my head to clear it, looked at the clock. Two hours until home.

I kept a careful eye for deer. For at least the next ten minutes.

Imagine a carpenter

A quite competent carpenter.

Just fine at understanding plans, working efficiently and accurately, and adding nice touches to her projects—touches that may sometimes be more subtle than what a non-carpenter might notice, but which give her great satisfaction.

She has spent her career for the most part working to plan, on projects commissioned by and designed for others. She has given good value, and the people who hire her once are very likely to call her for their subsequent projects. She has every reason to think of herself as a good carpenter. With each passing year, she feels a little better at it.

Nonetheless, she has never been able to shake the feeling that she wants to build… something else. She is proud of her craft, proud that her clients value her work. But being valued for her contributions to other people’s projects increasingly feels like… not enough.

She feels—has always felt—a desire to build something that feels like her, something that she can sign her name to and that will tell people who she really is. She knows, in other words, that there is a difference between being good at the specific tasks of her craft and using that craft to build something that is uniquely hers, something that no one else could have built

* * * * *

This is how I feel about my writing. Seemingly my whole life, I’ve been told—first by teachers, then professors, colleagues, and clients—I’m “good at” writing. I make a good living from it—well, a good enough living.

The good living, and the being good at writing, all mean nothing, of course.

They do not scratch the itch.

Somewhere I read a quote I cannot now locate that goes something like this:

You must write many books before you write the one you can sign your name to.

I am 44, and it feels as though I’ve been doing something like the first part of this quote for most of my life at this point. I actually haven’t written any “books,” but I’ve filled dozens or maybe even a hundred notebooks, I’ve kept blogs, I’ve published a little journalism, I’ve explored in so many directions. And I’ve let myself off the hook again and again.

For the last year, I’ve experienced something of a creative awakening. A greater level of commitment to at least practicing my writing. Up every morning at 0430 so I can get in a couple of hours every morning. This practice and the flow I experienced was initially unlocked in the fall of November 2017 by what I experienced as the suspenseful banality or maybe the banal suspense of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle.

For much of this last year, I tried to write like him. It was the first time time that I had engaged in personal writing projects that were sustained over weeks and months. But I ended up abandoning everything I wrote last year, or at least putting it aside. Who knows, perhaps I will discover something there later on.

In my fascination with Knausgaard—a horrified fascination, at times, to be sure—I discovered in myself a desire to find a way to process life in writing, more or less as it happens. Although blogging might seem a natural way to do this at first glance, early last year I decided I had abandoned blogging forever.

Perhaps I was aping the way KOK (as I abbreviate Knausgaard’s name in my journal) seemed to cut himself off from the world, to care not a whit for what the world thought of him or how his writing affected others.

Certainly this way of working strikes me as brave, and, for KOK, clearly essential—and I could readily see how, in my past blogging, I had at times been hampered too much by thinking ahead to how what I was writing might affect or be received by my audience.

So I plugged along, in private, helping my words to flow and myself to be utterly honest by telling myself over and over that I didn’t know or even care if any of it were ever published.

Suddenly, a few days ago, something changed. There are too many inputs to that change to list here or even identify for myself. But something of the sentiment can be found in, of all things, an Austin Kleon blog post from about a week ago, reflecting on why he has produced the particular body of work that he has.

All I ever wanted to do was be part of the world I loved. The world I discovered in books and art and music. I want to be part of it. I don’t care how or in what capacity.

…

What’s the point, here? Why do I even write books in the first place?

It’s just to join in the fun. To be part of that world that I love. To be in a chain that goes backwards and forwards, no matter how puny my link.

Nathaniel Hawthorne said in his 1851 preface to his Twice-Told Tales, that they were “not the talk of a secluded man with his own mind and heart… but his attempts, and very imperfectly successful ones, to open an intercourse with the world.”

That’s it.

That’s what I want.

I do, after all, want an “intercourse with the world” via writing (and via photography and podcasting). I want to run a blog that is, itself, something of a work of art, a rendering of my experience with the world.

Even in the few days since I’ve had this idea, I have felt something happening to the way I look at the world, I have felt yet another unlocking of some part of my creative self.

I want to engage with the world in writing. No time like the present, and why not every day.

My goal is to exceed your expectations

Back at the hotel, around 0515, as I was throwing things back into my bag and preparing to decamp for Starbucks, I had decided to have a second cup of coffee.

The room featured one of the little one-cup brewers you see everywhere now. You tear open a little packet containing a disposable plastic tray and a tissue-papery pouch of grounds. The tray slots into place on the coffee machine, and you pour enough water for one cup into an opening on top, put your cup in place, and press a little silver button to start it brewing.

I grabbed one of the three remaining packets. Decaf, which I don’t mind later in the day but wasn’t what I was after now. I flipped through the remaining two and discovered my room had apparently been stocked with three packets of decaf and only one of regular. For a second the thought jumped to mind that that made it okay that I’d forgotten to bring cash for a tip, but of course it didn’t.

It had snowed the night before, just enough to coat the car under a half-inch of white, but the parking lots were clear and wet, no doubt percolating under some sprinkling of anti-snow poison. I started the car warming with my spare key, walked back into the lobby to get the luggage cart, and loaded all of my bags onto it in the room.

No formal checking out is ever required anymore, at least not from the hotel’s standpoint, they have your credit card information, they’ll get their money. But it feels weird to me to just leave the key cards in the room and walk out without saying goodbye.

I parked the luggage cart by the side door leading from my hallway out into the parking and walked back to the lobby.

There was no one at the counter, but I could see a sliver of a man’s oxford-shirted shoulders back in the office. I ahem-ed, and immediately regretted bothering him. He was up like a shot and hurried out to the counter, his hands together in a supplicatory posture in front of his chest, and actually apologizing for “making you wait.”

This excruciating awareness we carry around of how vulnerable, how expendable everyone is these days.

My mind went back to the laminated letter I’d found waiting in my room after I’d checked in the night before. It was from a man named Potts, the hotel’s general manager, the man—the letter informed me—who is “directly responsible for the room [I] have been given.”

It went on, in a tone I found uncomfortably abject:

“My goal is to exceed your expectations. If you feel that this is not the case or if there is anything I can do to make your experience her [sic] more enjoyable please contact me immediately, so I may have an opportunity to correct the problem and address any concerns.”

About a year ago, as I’d been checking into a different hotel, the manager had tried to hand me a chocolate chip cookie. According to a little plastic placard standing on the counter, which alleged that the cookie was “fresh-baked,” this was a standard Hilton practice at check-in. If it happened that I weren’t offered a cookie, I was apparently supposed to get some sort of discount. After I had demurred, the manager went on to make some similar points to those in Mr. Potts’s letter but ended with the direct request that—if there turned out to be anything I didn’t enjoy about my stay—I should tell him directly and not “write a bad review on Yelp.”

Mr. Potts’s letter didn’t mention online reviews explicitly, but I felt his terror of them emanating through the letter’s protective layer of plastic. As it happened, in the course of the evening, I did find myself somewhat unsatisfied with the hotel, namely because of two fruitless trips to the little alcove next to the front desk where snacks and beverages were arrayed for sale.

On the first trip, I was after almonds, which I’m almost always triggered to eat when I travel, especially when I’ve reached the discomfiting plastic environs of yet another hotel and feel the blank isolating anonymity pressing in on me. No almonds, so I went back to my room empty-handed.

Then, a little later, it occurred to me that some gum or mints might be just the thing, but after I’d walked all the way back down to the lobby again they turned out not to have any of those, either.

I went back to my room and made do with two hard-boiled eggs left over from the lunch I’d brought along in a little cooler. As I peeled and ate them with a little of the salt I carry with me in my possibles bag, I imagined being the kind of person who would contact Mr. Potts and ask him to “address” his lobby shop’s lack of non-legume-based protein and/or means of breath-freshening.

The strategy that came to mind was to mention the ennui and existential despair that had come over me as I’d walked up the long, empty, dimly-lit hallway toward my room, transfixed by the dizzying, amoeba-like patterns worked into the carpet, but then to let him off the hook by saying I’d forgive it all if he could run to the store and bring me a tin of Altoids, preferably the invigorating and life-affirming cinnamon-flavored variety.

I enjoyed imagining this phone call as I undressed, got into bed, and hoisted the immense weight of volume 6 of Knausgaard’s My Struggle onto my belly.

But back to checkout. I had handed the clerk my key cards and, thinking we were done, was already turning away, my mind on my unattended luggage at the end of the hall.

“Want to sell your hat?”

“What?” It had been off script, unexpected, so at first I didn’t understand what he’d said.

“Want to sell your hat?” he repeated, with the slight awkwardness of someone repeating a joke. “That’s a great hat.”

“Oh,” I mumbled. “Uh…thanks!”

“Have a great trip!” he said, with a great big cheerful smile.

“You, too!” I replied, trying to match his cheerfulness, not noticing what I’d said until I’d turned away and started down the hall toward the luggage cart.

You, too?

Well… How did I get here?

“Maybe I’m fascinated with the middle class because it seems so different from my life, so distant from what I do. I can’t imagine living like that.”

David Byrne

I’m not living in a shotgun shack, but I am living in another part of the world.

Elkins, West Virginia is just a few hours’ drive from the city of my birth but mere driving time doesn’t paint an accurate picture of the real distance between the two places. Elkins couldn’t be more different from that place, from Miami, Seattle, New York, Berlin, Istanbul—all of the big international cities where I either lived or at one point in life would have considered it entirely likely that I would end up.

Instead here I am, a settled burgher who has now lived in this little speck of a place longer than any other spot on earth. A homeowner, a member of the local planning commission, the president of the board of a local do-gooding organization. The former city clerk.

Beautiful wife (and kids). Large automobile. My parents up on the hill, a five-minute walk away.

“We’re largely unconscious,” David Byrne told NPR in 2000. “You know, we operate half awake or on autopilot and end up, whatever, with a house and family and job and everything else.”

The twentysomething version of myself would have been shocked to learn how it has turned out by this point—shocked, and, dare I say, disappointed, perhaps even paralyzed by dread. I cannot express enough how opposed I once was to this kind of life.

What would really shock that earlier version of me is how much I have come to love it—this life, this strange little town.

I think it’s a mistake to compare how our lives have turned out to how the twenty-something version of ourselves would have wanted. That’s when we knew the least, that’s when we were trying on beliefs like shirts we couldn’t afford, turning this way and that in the mirror, imagining what if.

From the moment I first heard “Once in a Lifetime,” I suspected it had something important to tell me. Back then it was a prospective message—in fact, the way the song is worded suggests it is being spoken by an older person to a younger one. The cascade of lines beginning with “you may…” evoked the wide-open possibilities of the future.

I heard a note of warning. At the age of, say, 16 or 18 or 21 I certainly had no use for the idea of beautiful houses or large automobiles or any of the other well-chosen totems of a square, settled, middle-class existence. But that was all right, the song also held out the possibility of escape and reinvention.

Into the blue again, after the money’s gone.

I listened to this song most frequently during my four years before the mast, my shock-resistant Discman velcroed to the yellow metal wall of my little coffin-sized bunk as our ship labored through the rough waters of the Bering Sea. I was in my early twenties, I’d left college halfway through, no one back at school would answer my letters, I’d been unlucky in love. My life felt as wide open and unimaginable as the water stretching on all sides to the horizon. I carried around the feeling this song gave me like a sugar cube melting on my tongue.

There is water at the bottom of the ocean.

Like a tightrope walker, sometimes it’s not a good idea to pay too much attention to what you are doing. One second you are striding along confidently, then you look down at your feet and the ground and go all wobbly. What am I doing all the way up here?

How do I work this?

The person I was in my early twenties had a cartoon conception of the writing life. Brooklyn apartment, stubble, cigarettes. Need I say more? For a long time I felt like I shouldn’t write anymore, because I didn’t have the right kind of life to write about. I had let the days go by, I had ended up in the wrong place. It wasn’t that I didn’t love the people I’d ended up with. I just couldn’t love the person I’d turned out to be, the things I’d walked away from, let drop, failed to follow through on.

But words kept bubbling up in me anyway. I realized, I have the life and material that I have. There is nothing stopping me from writing about it.

There is water underground.

That’s the project here. Letting the days go by, finding bits to hold up and brush off and show to you.

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was

Thanks for reading.

If you like any of it, maybe you could share it with a friend.

If I do it at all, I must delay no longer

“[H]ow few of life’s days and hours (and they not by relative value or proportion, but by chance) are ever noted.

“Probably another point too, how we give long preparations for some object, planning and delving and fashioning, and then, when the actual hour for doing arrives, find ourselves still quite unprepared, and tumble the thing together, letting hurry and crudeness tell the story better than fine work.

“At any rate I obey my happy hour’s command, which seems curiously imperative.”

-Walt Whitman, Specimen Days

And we’re off.