Lessons Learned from the Road

Cross-Country Lessons from my 8,000-mile Odyssey

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If you’ve been following my other stack—Sincere American Writing—you know I recently completed an epic 8,000-mile jag across the country and back over an otherworldly period of two short, yet simultaneously and exquisitely long weeks. It felt both syrupy slow, like the early months of Covid in New York City, and profoundly, dumbly fast, like a very busy day of work at a restaurant wherein the time blurs and whirs by you as if eight hours are really 25 minutes.

Check out my other stack for the details but here’s the summary: My fiancée Britney and I left Lompoc, California, an hour north of Santa Barbara on the coast (where we live) on July 20^th and in a week had made it 3,000 miles east across the nation to Portland, Maine, where she devoured a very red, tasty-looking lobster. We then moved south to Boston where we spent a day and then separated; she had to go home due to work.

I stayed on solo and headed over 1,000 miles south a la I-95 to Florida and then headed west along I-10 through the American South, staying in Memphis and New Orleans along the way (I spent two lovely, ravishing, absurd days in NOLA). Finally I went north connecting to I-40 West which I took through several states including Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas and New Mexico. I stayed a day-and-a-half or so in Santa Fe and then, in one gigantic burst of spiritual and psychic energy, I did a 15-hour haul in one day from Santa Fe back home to Lompoc.

Many lessons were of course learned during my fifteen-day trek back and forth across America. The first was that: Wow, America is a BIG country. Most people sadly seem to not have experienced much of it. This led me to have a fascinating conversation with a bartender in an Irish pub in NOLA who agreed with me that if everyone traveled the country our national political polarization and mutual rage would totally dissipate. I’ve long known that most Americans are moderates, either center or center-right or center-left and that the mainstream media on both sides loves nothing more than to stoke our outrage and make everyone feel like civil war soldiers fighting some sort of comi-tragic war. But actually traveling the nation and speaking to people of all races and all cultures and all sets of mind makes you grasp with experiential conviction that we all have a hell of a lot more in common than apart from each other. This, my friends, is the truth. Remember that media makes a profit off our addiction to viewing. And our addiction to outrage.

The other clear, easy, obvious lesson was around that old bastard who’s haunted me all my life: Expectations. With Britney it was about me letting go as often as I could when it came down to doing A versus B thing. She wanted to do A. I wanted to do B. Sometimes we did her thing, sometimes mine. But I found it easier to let go and do her thing sometimes when really I wanted to do B. At the end of the day I felt like, Why not? Why do we HAVE to do my thing? The answer: We didn’t, at least not all the time. That was reasonable. That was fair.

Downtown Santa Fe, New Mexico

After Britney it was more around how many miles I swung in any given day of driving, or how expensive an Air BnB might be (too expensive almost always due to the dumb fees and taxes) or how people might be driving on the American highways (often fine, but always with those choice aggressive assholes who insist on riding your ass despite the fact that you’re doing 85 in the slow-lane), or wanting to listen to my Rousseau Audible book (his 18^th century memoir, Confessions) but grappling with the fact that it forced me to fall asleep and so I could only listen for an hour or so at a clip. And so many other issues which come up when on the road. Home repairs needing to be done at the house I own and rent out in the Bay Area (El Cerrito, north of Berkeley). Wedding plan stuff (barely any, very minor). Doing a book editing sample when I didn’t want to (the guy turned me down anyway in the end). Checking emails and having to respond. Ad infinitum.

I think partially because of age (40) partially because of having lived in NYC for 2.3 years, partially from surviving Covid in East Harlem, partially due to caretaking for my father for 23 months until his sad, untimely death from cancer, partially due to falling in love and being engaged, I have finally come to the place in life where, in general, I can more often than in the past let go of things. Expectations breed resentments in my experience. Life rarely works out the way we hope and want it to. This is why for perfectionists and control-freaks life can sometimes feel intolerable. This is why alcohol and drugs seem so attractive to people of this sort. They have to medicate their anger and resentment away because life didn’t work out exactly the way they’d hoped. To some degree I am one of these people, but my anger and control—though always waffling up and down—has generally over the past decade slowly trended down.

I realize more and more these days that when I stop trying so hard to get the expected outcome I think I “need” to get—aka when I stop acting entitled to some fantasy result—things go easier. And, ironically, things in this regard often work out much better and more wondrously than if I’d tried desperately to force my will on things.

It’s an odd, strange phenomenon, one of those “things happen for a reason” things which are, to me, unexplainable. I’m not sure, from a realistic, deterministic, scientific, physical, biological perspective, that I actually, genuinely think things in life really, truly “happen for a reason.” But it sure as hell sometimes feels like it. I can’t help but notice that when I let go of things, life seems easier and things tend to work out one way or another, though often not in the originally intended way. But when I’m in that sustained state of trying, when I can’t let things go, when I need people, places and things to be a certain way: Man, this is a painful, frustrating, angering place to be.

My mother and older half-sister are control freaks. Always have been. It’s a classic psychological Sisyphean problem: Their parents were both control freaks and angry, controlling narcissists so they reacted “against” this by…essentially becoming slightly less controlling versions of them. Funny, isn’t it, how little most people change? How much genetics, the way you were raised, what happened when you were three, five, seven years old ultimately determines your adult nature and behavior.

We are reminded constantly that we are nothing but silly, aimless animals living in a dumb, meaningless world and that we must merely create our own meaning ourselves by actions. But this requires a deep sense of self-awareness and most human beings do not possess this. Most people follow the herd. That’s okay. Many times in my life I’ve wished I followed the herd; certainly my life would have been and still would be now much easier. Being a deep, self-aware, sensitive, self-reflective thinker has generally caused me nothing but struggle and heartache. To be clueless and a follower is The Tits. Ignorance, as the wise say, is bliss.

Memphis near Beale Street downtown

America is an interesting place. Each state in the union has its own character and drive. Each city within each state there again. And each neighborhood within each city still. The microcosm within the macrocosm. NOLA, for instance, has the grotesque, thrilling energy of a crackhead searching for prostitutes on a Sunday morning at 7:30am, still drunk from the night before, red-eyed and hungry. It is a WILD city. I’d have died there were I partying in The Big Easy in my lurid, lunky drunk twenties. Whereas Memphis, say, had both a rock-n-roll energy (the piss-stink of wild blues dive bars on Beale Street) and the rundown urban ghetto energy and yet still the relaxed, kind energy of an old man in the throes of sickness. Portland, Maine seemed colored by trans women, young progressive lefties, and white-wearing tourists eating lobster. Boston was all about New England brick and the whiff of 18^th century politics and the foundation of the nation (ditto, of course, Philly).

Etc.

I loved driving on the American roads for hours and hours and hours, on cruise-control most of the time (usually 75-80 MPH), stopping every three, four hours at random gas stations, peeing and getting a massive big-gulp Styrofoam cup of green or black tea, listening to the Rousseau book or to the latest 5^th Column or Sam Harris or Tim Dillon podcast, or else pumping music (Tom Petty’s Greatest Hits when I finally hit Los Angeles two days ago, August 4^th, upon my final return), or else in total silence, just the sound of rubber on road and the internal noise of my own head, sometimes thinking deeply of my father, his sickness, his courage, loving him, saying my final words, telling him goodbye in my heart, seeing him those last few weeks and days and even hours, his withered, weak, starving and yet cancer-bloated body. A man who died loved deeply.

And of course I called people: Britney (every night), my mother, my senior-year high school English Lit teacher who is officiating our wedding (!!!), and half a dozen close friends around the country in various places. Time passed. The road unfurled regularly ahead of me like a determined, fierce devotion. It reminded me of my four weeks walking 450 miles across El Camino de Santiago in Northern Spain in spring of 2016.

You get out of the regular life routine. You find a new spiritual grounding in The Road. You feel nourished in this fresh endeavor. You learn how to love and let go and do things differently than you normally do. And that is all to the good. It feels original and important. Different. From a new angle, a new perspective. For me, adventure is crucial in life. This is not and was not a “vacation.” I don’t do vacations. Vacations, to me, are large pale Americans sitting around on chaise lounges in Hawaii. That bores me. I want adventure, risk, the open road, the potential for disaster. I want to sit on the edge between easy and hard, good and bad, fun and not, indolence and tough work, insight and determination.

In the end I learned the most about myself: I have both an immature, childish, needy side, and yet also a manly, ancient, self-caring, highly independent side. These two polarities play with each other and tug an internal rope within me. Neither side ever fully wins or concedes. This is the inner tension I carry. It's a good tension, I think. It makes me fully human. I am neither better nor worse than anyone else, obviously. We’re all tragically human: Flawed, weak, dependent in our myriad ways. And yet we all have our own unique characters.

I look forward to traveling again soon. Ideally with Britney. We’re now obsessed with the idea of moving to Chicago, by the way. Affordable. Kind people. Basically by the ocean since Lake Michigan is like an ocean. (They even have beaches.) Culture. And it’s close enough to New York City, Boston, etc. My mom would hate it. But we’re talking in a year from now, not right this moment. We’ll see. Life itself is one grand adventure, and each moment it’s own microcosm of that, just like the neighborhoods within the cities within the states within one grand union called the United States of America.

Yes.

Downtown Memphis