Mr. Heatmiser has been busy corrupting corruptible minds.

I hope and plan to eventually resume posting again. In the meantime, here is an update from the front lines. Four weeks in and things really couldn't be going much better. I think maybe I'm starting to get the hang of this teaching thing. Now if only I could figure out how to do it without sacrificing my life away. But the kids have been great, The Crucible has actually been interesting, and the football team has yet to be challenged. The only bad thing is none of the twerps has done anything dumb enough to blog about yet. (Or me, for that matter.) But don't fret; they are teenagers, after all, and it's really only a matter of time. Check back soon for tales of ignorance and angst.

- Mr. Heatmiser

The Manifest Destiny Tour - Day 16

4:48 pm - Los Angeles

I've never really understood our obsession with celebrity. Why do we idolize these people? Most of whom have minimal talent. Many of whom are alcoholics or junkies or adulterers or vain assholes or worse. Don't get me wrong. I was thrilled to see Elijah Wood on 6th Street last SXSW. And it was fun sitting behind Evander Holyfield at a high school football game in Georgia several years ago. I may have even fantasized about chance encounters with Kelly Kapowski when I was younger. But I don't care where these people are vacationing or what they're wearing or who they've knocked up or been knocked up by. I'm not saying that anyone who reads People or watches TMZ or surfs Perez is a fool. I'm just saying that I've never understood it.

Until today. Almost every place we've been, I've been struck by the separation, the loneliness, the disconnect, the distance in our eyes. Even when people want to connect with one another, we're not sure how. We lack a constant, middle ground. Something outside ourselves we can rally around and call our own. I guess hundreds, even thousands, of years ago, humans had their villages or tribes, the collective best interest to unite them. As cities grew larger and countries formed, as wars were waged, as great groups of people began migrating and the world shrunk, humans clutched at nationalism and patriotism and racism and religionism. But now that these things are all but dead, what do we turn to for keeping us united? The answer: celebrity. The comfort of celebrity.

I wouldn't have believed it, but walking down Hollywood Boulevard, stepping over the stars of the past and present, Gene Autry and Vivien Leigh and Dolly Parton and Pee Wee Herman and Keanu Reeves, I notice how excited everyone is, how joyous the spirit, the delighted pointing of fingers, the gleeful snapping of the camera lenses, the heartwarming charm of the children's laughter, and I realize that of all the places we've visited, this is the most unified, the most connected, the least lonely, because here is the heart of our new rallying point. Here is something we recognize as our own. Because believe it or not, celebrity was created by us, the common people, and not by the celebrities. We are merely using them to feel like we belong. And now I understand.

The Manifest Destiny Tour - Update

Just so everyone knows, Jordan and I are safely back in Texas in real life. In blog life we are standing on the beach of Playa del Rey contemplating the mysteries of the universe. In metaphorical life I suppose we're still doing that. The main reason for the delay is that I haven't finished documenting our travels. I have a few more entries planned and am just searching for the self-discipline to put them on paper. School starts back in a couple of weeks, so my plan is to wrap up the The Manifest Destiny Tour travelogue before then. Then, back to classroom hijinks. Thanks for all your thoughts and prayers while we were on the road; they were much needed.

The Manifest Destiny Tour - Day 15

Standing on the beach of Playa del Rey near Santa Monica and looking out at the Pacific Ocean, I get that feeling again. The one I get when I see pictures of deep space and consider the limitless universe. The one I get when driving through the Texas Panhandle or Central Nevada and wonder about the few inhabitants. The one I get when looking down on the Grand Canyon, at all those striations in the cliffs, designating all those millions of years. The one I get when listening to Stravinski’s Rite of Spring, or reading Bukowski, or hearing a woodblock. The feeling I get when smelling honeysuckle, or eating an apple, or looking through a microscope. The one I get when flying, or hearing babies cry, or thinking about π. The one I get when I try to ponder eternity, that there is no beginning and no end, no lines nor circles, there is no perfect center because there is no center, so there are no perfect halves, no equality, no compromise, no marriage and no divorce, there is no space and no time. It’s the feeling I get when I think about God. You know the feeling I’m talking about.

The Manifest Destiny Tour - Day 14

San Francisco to L.A.

486.7 miles/142 songs

Neil Young – Harvest
Okkervil River – Black Sheep Boy
Rolling Stones – Through the Past, Darkly
Eisley – Room Noises
The Blow – Paper Television
Dave Matthews Band – Stand Up
Colin Meloy – Colin Meloy Sings! Live
Low – The Great Destroyer
Simon & Garfunkel – Greatest Hits
The Smiths – Louder Than Bombs
The Beatles – Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
Spring Break Mix ‘06

9:27 pm

California intimidates me. I’m not sure why. Could be that I’ve never been here before. But I had never been to Nevada or Utah either, and they didn’t intimidate me. Maybe it’s because I expected all Californians to be beautiful and intelligent and rich and socially conscientious. And while the requisite handful might match that description, as I look around me, they all appear fairly average. Maybe it’s because of the Pacific Ocean. That might actually be part of it. We drove down California 1 today, from Monterrey to San Luis Obispo. And there was certainly something awe-inspiring about those cliffs and beaches and mists and endless blue off to our right. But I don’t think it should be enough to be intimidating. I don’t think there is anything physically intrinsic in California to make me feel this way. It’s more of the mythology surrounding the place. It’s the names and stories, the movies and celebrities, the music and fashion, the Steinbecks and Kerouaks, the Hepburns and the Nicholsons, the Merle Haggards and the Beach Boys and the Dr. Dre’s. I think maybe it’s how others might feel when visiting Texas for the first time. At least I hope so.

Of course, we still have L.A. to experience. If California is mythology, then L.A. is Mount Olympus. It may yet live up to the hype. We have several days to find out.

“Now let me welcome everybody to the wild, wild west
A state that's untouchable like Elliot Ness;
The track hits ya eardrum like a slug to ya chest
Pack a vest for your Jimmy in the city of sex.”
“California Love” – Tupac (featuring Dr. Dre)

[I had fogotten about this ridiculously awesome video.]

The Manifest Destiny Tour - Day 13

In San Francisco

8:49 am

While in San Francisco, we’re staying at my friend Lauren’s. She lives on the third floor of a townhouse overlooking Castro Street, the unofficial heart of the gay district. The gay district of San Francisco. I know. I’ve experienced enough world, especially living in Austin, to not be too shocked. Although my Southern Baptist upbringing did cringe slightly while walking past The Sausage Factory, I’ve been more amused than anything. Jordan, I’m afraid, whose Billy Graham sensibilities are still firmly intact (which, ironically, I’m glad of), has been a little more than weirded out. Last night, after skirting around the Moby Dick patrons, he muttered something about his concern for our safety. I reassured him, saying that we were probably on the safest street in America, that we could take anyone in a fist slap-fight. Of course, we were immediately passed by two large men holding hands. Not fair, I remember thinking. Gay men are supposed to be sweet and funny and small. But what do I know about these things.

11:37 pm

We went to the Giants game tonight. It was fun, a baseball game. Because parking can be a nightmare anywhere in the city, and especially at AT&T Park (will we ever go back to names like Candlestick? [sigh]), we decided to take the San Francisco Municipal Railway. Muni for short, it’s a sometimes underground, sometimes aboveground subway, trolley-car, light rail thing. Despite its confusion for tourists (perhaps purposely so), I believe San Fran’s public transit is extremely efficient.

And it’s diverse. All types were on board with us: different races, nationalities, religious affiliations, socio-economic backgrounds, personal hygienes. And all of us it seemed were heading to the baseball game. Packed in, sardine-like, picking up more sardines at each stop. Packed so tight that we can’t change position. So tight that there’s no need to hang on to the railing anymore, just squeeze forward or back. So tight that all our differences bleed and melt together. I become the Indian storeowner from Mumbai. He becomes the young black boy with cornrows and a hard face. The boy becomes the elderly Chinese woman clutching her groceries. His groceries. My groceries. We are ash-colored Agnostics from everywhere and nowhere. We are the Socialist’s quixotic dream. Only we don’t talk to each other, don’t even look at each other, just bowl unapologetically through and over each other and ourselves to get to where we need, disrupting the dream, alone again or not at all.

“Yeah, I heard a funny thing;
Somebody said to me,
You know that I could be in love with almost everyone;
I think that people are
The greatest fun.
And I will be alone again tonight my dear.”
"Alone Again Or" - Love

The Manifest Destiny Tour - Day 12

Reno to San Francisco

225.1 Miles/66 Songs

Led Zeppelin – IV
Bloc Party – Silent Alarm
Eagle*Seagull – Eagle*Seagull
Josh Ritter – The Historical Conquests of…
Smoosh – She Like Electric
Mates of State – Our Constant Concern

12:07 pm - 32 Miles Before Sacramento

Reno treats the interstate much the same way Austin does—by closing as many lanes as possible, slowing traffic to a standstill, so that 18 workers can lean against a guardrail and watch one guy operate some mammoth piece of machinery. Leaving Reno was something of a nightmare. We found ourselves in one of the lanes that was coned off and were forced to merge into the lane to our left. The car in front of us merged fairly early on, a couple hundred feet before the cones. I figured it only practical to use more of the merging space, so I motored ahead. There was a line of about seven or eight 18-wheelers. Not wanting to merge in the middle of them, I zipped ahead to the front of that line, but the trucker closed the gap, refusing to let me in. So I moved up to the next car, a Honda Element with Virginia plates, expecting a normal highway civilian to let me in, but as I moved into position, he raced ahead, also cutting me off. I looked to the driver to plead my case, but he responded by slowly shaking his rakishly scruffy, sunglassed head side to side. That pissed me off. I caught a glance at his wife/girlfriend beginning to slump sheepishly in the passenger seat, eyes lowered, as if to say that she was ashamed of the asshole she was married to/dating. I began to point emphatically at the closing space between his front bumper and the back of the car in front of him, meanwhile mouthing obscenities I hoped would shock his wife/girlfriend and piss him off.

In that instant I understood road rage. Guys like us—me and the Element-driving, sunglass-wearing asshole from Virginia—have no real territory to fight for. Not like in the old days. We can’t raid the neighboring village like the people of this area did hundreds of years ago. The only defendable/raidable territory left to us is the six inches of space between bumpers. We are men. We are hunters. We are road warriors. The slumping blonde in the passenger seat couldn’t understand that, couldn’t appreciate it.

I saw that I wasn’t going to win this particular battle, so I slid in behind him, which is actually the preferred position in this sort of skirmish. I guarantee he was feeling more unsettled with me on his 6. I didn’t do anything malicious or menacing beyond glowering at his side-view mirror and the back of his head. We maintained this position for several minutes, holding steady at 4 mph, exchanging cool asshole glances into his mirror. Several hundred feet later, our lane was again coned off and we were forced to merge left into the last remaining lane. I merged quickly, before the Virginian. This gave me the upper hand, and a decision—two ways I could be an asshole. I could race ahead, cut him off, exact my revenge, even the score. Or I could be more creative: hang back, allow him a wide berth, give him a sarcastically benevolent wave, show him how decent people behave on the highway. I like creativity, so I chose option #2. Judging by the smile in his side-view mirror, I think he was also impressed with my tactic.

Again we fell into a holding pattern, this time for 10-15 minutes. Long enough for the adrenaline to die down and for me to evaluate the situation with a calm and level head, to remember that road rage is dumb, that raiding the neighboring village is cowardly, that we have evolved beyond that sort of base barbarism, that the Element-driving, sunglass-wearing Virginian is my brother and I should be looking out for him, that the spark-plug anger in both of us is a product of the discontented culture in which we live, and that we can and must do better for ourselves and the ones we love.

After we passed the 18+1 work crew and regained our coned off lanes, we shot forward with purpose and speed, like babies newborn and baptized by fire and light into a new and knowledged world. And for the next 50 miles or so, the Virginian and I stayed within several hundred feet of each other; sometimes I was in front, sometimes he was, even after being slowed by the California Agriculture Department checkpoint. Our closeness was unintentional—at least it was for me, I can’t speak for him. It was probably just a matter of coincidence, both of us setting our cruise controls at nearly the same speed. But I like to think that maybe it was our destiny to have our lives tethered together for that hour or so, to remind us that we are made for love and not for hate, that our end is good and not evil. And each time I passed him or he passed me, I looked over at him trying to communicate that I was sorry, that sometimes the road makes us assholes for no reason and maybe it’s because we each carry the history of violent men, but that we can move beyond it because our lives have been tethered together and we are good now. I’m pretty sure with the proper facial expressions and hand gestures I could have done that. But he never looked over. I think maybe he was afraid that I would do something obscene, but all I wanted was to tell him I love him.

The Manifest Destiny Tour - Day 11

Hite Campgrounds to Reno, NV

698.6 Miles/157 Songs

Margot & the Nuclear So & So’s – The Dust of Retreat
Rilo Kiley – More Adventurous
Michael Jackson – Thriller
Islands – Return to the Sea
Franz Ferdinand – Franz Ferdinand
Fleetwood Mac – Rumours
Elton John – Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Elvis Perkins – Ash Wednesday
Coldplay – Viva la Vida
Bon Jovi – Crossroads
The Who – My Generation: The Very Best of the Who
Yeasayer – All Hour Cymbals
The Go! Team – Proof of Youth

6:37 am – Hite Campground on the shore of Lake Powell, Utah

Looking back over what I’ve written, I see a theme recurring. It was unintended and undesired, but nevertheless it is there, quietly pervading all other thoughts. Am I really so prone to loneliness that I don’t even notice it? Last night, lying in our tent, sweating, trying to sleep, it was bad. I felt terribly lonely. Why? Is it me—do I isolate myself from others, even those I claim to love, just so I can avoid attachment? Is it America—is that why some of us live so close together, stacked on top of each other, that we can hear each other breathing, in an attempt to smother or loneliness; while others of us spread so far out, miles from our closest neighbor, that we can’t hear him at all, in an attempt to further or loneliness? Is it humankind—have we evolved so far that we’ve outrun our need for each other, or think we have? It’s hard to say, but already I’m feeling better. This Utah sunrise brings me hope.

10:10 pm – Reno

As fate would have it, we drove most of the day on a highway dubbed “the loneliest road in America.” Between Ely and Fallon, Nevada, a span of about 257 miles and a grand total of three towns, lies a stretch of land that roughly 1200 people call home. That’s an average of 4.6 persons per mile. That’s lonely. Of course it’s very beautiful too. Isolated mountain ranges separated by sprawling valleys, so that our drive consisted of slow ascensions of mountain passes and then diving down and cutting through the open valleys. Up pass, down valley. Over and over, like an enormous roller coaster.

We drove a long way today, nearly 700 miles, more than 12 hours, but through some of the most beautiful landscapes I’ve seen. As stunning as Nevada was, southern Utah was more so. We saw rock formations I wouldn’t have thought possible, defying the laws of physics and the limits of creativity.

Finally in Reno. We’ll splurge tonight and stay in a hotel, hopefully get a good night’s rest to make up for last night. Going out to explore the city.

12:04 am

I’m not sure what I was expecting. I remember seeing a movie once where the principle characters drive into Reno in an old Cadillac convertible, and as they pass under the illuminated archway welcoming visitors to the biggest little city in the world, the camera angle changes to the hood of the car so that we can see the lit-up joy on the faces behind the iridescent reflection sliding up the windshield. I guess I expected something like that. And maybe it used to be that way. Before the rise of Vegas and the introduction of Indian casinos in California. Now, it’s a remnant of better times, a fossil of fun once had, a crucible where gold pieces are melted down and made into demigods. Despite all the flashing lights, the streets seem dark and glum, the faces cold and hard. The slot machines are busy but quiet. American Dreams are slipping away chip by paycheck. And I’m tired, so we go back to our room where I’ll try sleeping off today’s lonely images.

"This loneliness ain't pretty no more,
Loneliness, only taking the place of a friend."
"This Loneliness" - El Perro Del Mar

The Manifest Destiny Tour - Day 10

Wilderness Ranch to Hite Campground, Utah

414.8 Miles/125 Songs

Andrew Bird – The Mysterious Production of Eggs
Lou Barlow – Emoh
Marvin Gaye – What’s Going On
Of Montreal – The Sunlandic Twins
Waterdeep – Live at New Earth
The Decemberists – Castaways & Cutouts
John Cale – Paris 1919
Gnarls Barkley – St. Elsewhere
Modest Mouse – Good News for People Who Love Bad News
Arcade Fire – Neon Bible

9:41 am – 8 miles before Pagosa Springs, CO

Leaving is hard. We were only a week at Wilderness, but a week is long enough to make missing. A week of working and eating and playing and talking and being with others. A week is long enough. So as we drive away, I can’t help the hollow feeling in my stomach. But I think maybe the hollow feeling is good. Makes me think maybe I am capable of loving. It helps that my brother is with me. It helps, too, that these mountain roads share the valleys with mountain rivers. Somehow it brings me comfort, traveling the same path as these rivers, knowing that all those drops of water have a history, that they have traveled miles and miles of earth and air, taking the form of liquid, solid, and vapor, picking up pollution, pestilence, purpose, and pride, eventually joining other drops with similar stories, now communing in a common aim, choosing the path of least resistance, like millions of sordid souls, hurrying downward to that purgatorial shore.

2:08 pm – 2 miles past Durango, CO

Spent two hours in Durango. Ate a great lunch. Bought a Crazy Creek camping chair and a Nalgene bottle. Bought a CD [John Cale’s Paris 1919]. Tried to get sold a $300 basket. Went with $30 wooden wolf for Mom instead (surprise, Mom). Bought Jordan a 118-year-old silver dollar for his birthday (today’s his birthday). Now worried about the time, we still have a ways to go today.

7:15 pm – 36 miles past Blanding, UT

Despite my concern for our being behind schedule, we can’t resist stopping at the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings. We are both suckers for antiquity. And the thought of seeing the thousand-year-old dwellings of the native Americans is enough to bring out the nerd in both of us. So we pull off highway 160, pay the $15 (FIFTEEN DOLLARS!) entry fee, and drive 25 miles to the first ruins.

While driving, I can’t help myself from pondering—pondering about America. We’ve seen a good bit of her up to this point, and there’s one thing I’ve noticed. Actually I’ve noticed it before, have pondered over it before, but have been reminded on this trip. It’s that we Americans don’t really like the old. If a building gets too old, crumbling, sagging, dilapidated eyesore, we tear it down and build a new one in its place. If an idea or philosophy or religious thought becomes too old, rigid, stale, monotonous blathering, we forget it and think up a new one in its place. If people grow too old, decrepit, feeble, absent-minded, we ignore them and defer to younger ones in their place.

In the past I’ve never been able to pinpoint why we have such disgust for the old. But I think now I’m beginning to figure it out. It’s a feeling we get when we see something old. It’s the lonesomeness in every run-down and abandoned service station or garage, hotel or house, store or barn that we pass on the road. I think we Americans equate old with loneliness, and we hate loneliness, and we hate anything that reminds us we are lonely, and so we destroy it. Some things survive, sure. We set up a historical landmark sign or build a national park around the thing and then it’s okay. Because it’s someone else’s loneliness and not ours.

One thing I find ironic at first but now makes complete sense to me is that Jordan and I, while at Mesa Verde, are surrounded by non-Americans. Germans, Vietnamese, French, Brazilians, you name it. The only other Americans we see are a group of older women who are rushing through the exhibits because they are craving Diet Cokes. Really. I overheard them. I think maybe other countries, other cultures don’t get bothered so much by the old or by feelings of loneliness. I don’t know for sure, of course, I haven’t been to those countries, so it’s likely I’m just talking out of my ass. But it would explain a good many things I think.

Standing here, leaning against the railing, looking down on the ruinous remains of those ancient Pueblo people, I wonder if they ever thought about things like loneliness. Did they have questions of existence? Did they doubt their beliefs? Did they distrust their spirit helper? Did they wonder if they had the right power animal? The information placard tells me that they didn’t destroy the old and build in its place. No, they buried it and built on top of it.

“For every invention made how much time did we save?
We're not much farther than we were in the cave.”
“The View” – Modest Mouse

The Manifest Destiny Tour - Update

I apologize for dumping several posts at once. I'm sure it's overwhelming, and it's not optimal. But it's difficult finding quality internet time while driving through Colorado, Utah, Nevada, etc. Also, the video postings are not my first choice. I would prefer to be able to leave a link of the songs but have not yet figured out how to do that. If anyone does know and would like to share, please do so. Anyway, Jordan and I are doing well. Spent last night in Reno (more to come on that later). Driving to Cali today. More posts to come shortly.

-Heatmiser

P.S. Blogspot sucks. I can't format any two posts the exact same to save my life. Oh well.

The Manifest Destiny Tour - Day 7

Balmorhea – River Arms
Bonnie “Prince” Billy – Master and Everyone

10:15 am – Wilderness Ranch

My mother and sister have restless leg syndrome. It’s where the legs are locked in a feeling of discontent; they never quite seem to get comfortable. The feeling strikes especially at night, rendering the owner of the restless legs likewise restless and therefore sleepless. I think I have restless foot syndrome. Only one foot—the right one. I can never seem to make it happy. I’ve never owned a pair of shoes that it’s liked. The left foot is fine, content, wondering what’s wrong with its counterpart. The restless feeling strikes especially when driving, making a 2000-mile road trip aggravating at times.

I think maybe too I have restless soul syndrome. Sounds dumb I know, but like my foot, it’s constantly squirming around, seeking for some bit of refuge and rest, but finding only more discomfort instead. I feel out of place in every situation. In the company of sinners, I feel prudishly pious: in the company of saints, vagrant and vile. Among the socially adept, I feel timidly wallflowerish: among the taciturn, bawdy and annoying. I feel inept around intellectuals, brainy around imbeciles. Jockish when with the artistic, fruity when with the athletic. Perhaps in my attempt to be well-rounded in order to fit in anywhere, I’ve made it so that I fit in nowhere. A friend assured me that everyone feels this way, but I don’t know if I believe him.

"Why can't I be loved as what I am?
A wolf among wolves,
And not as a man among men"
"Wolf Among Wolves" - Bonnie 'Prince' Billy

The Manifest Destiny Tour - Day 4

10:55 pm – Wilderness Ranch

Some of my students arrived at camp today. They’re on the trail this week. I knew they were coming; it wasn’t a surprise. I was a little unsure if being here while they were here would be a good idea. It’s always a bit strange encountering students outside the classroom, and I’m sure the opposite is true. Stranger still when that encounter is a thousand miles from home. I was afraid that seeing me might freak them out. But if it did, they didn’t let on. In fact, they seemed genuinely excited to see me here. And truth is, I was excited to see them too. They hugged me and we talked for a while. I tried keeping my distance but it was tough. I wanted to talk to them more, but I also wanted to maintain an appropriate relationship. The problem is determining what that appropriate relationship is. Loving others is hard, especially when the love has to be curbed. Love has always seemed to me like an all or nothing ordeal, a sentiment free of limits and restrictions. In theory that might be true. But in actuality, there is no one that I love completely. There is always a restraint.

The Manifest Destiny Tour - Day 3

Glorieta, NM to Wilderness Ranch, CO

256.7 Miles/56 Songs

The Shins – Chutes Too Narrow
The National – Boxer
Midlake – The Trials of Van Occupanther
Led Zeppelin – II
The Dodos – Visiter

11:58 am – Tres Piedras, NM

If ever you find yourself in the middle of New Mexico, and all you want is a quick bite to eat, and maybe a little wi-fi internet access, don’t stop in Santa Fe. Last night Santa Fe pushed out Valdosta, Georgia as the official worst city in America. [My apologies to anyone from or in love with Valdosta, Georgia. I once spent a week there building houses for the Jimmy Carter/Habitat for Humanity build-a-thon. It was about 130 degrees, and it smelled funny.] I was a couple of hours ahead of schedule. (I thought I was a couple of hours ahead. Turns out I was only one hour ahead. But by the time I figured this out, I was 30 minutes behind schedule. I wrote a paper in college proposing we abolish all time zones and adopt a universal time. As Big Brother as that sounds, I’m still in favor.) So I thought I’d get dinner and, with the extra time I thought I had, check my email. Not ever having been to Santa Fe, I wasn’t real sure where to go to carry out this mission, but I didn’t think it would be too difficult. Living in Austin, turns out, will spoil an individual. The first exit claimed to have a visitors center complete with “free information,” so I took it, thinking I could find a finger pointing me in the right direction. I never found the damn visitors center. For all I know, the “free information” is a crappy joke on tourists and the friendly finger is anything but.

What I did find were the bowels of the city. Every building a brown, blocky log of a thing, tracts of them. And not a one, it seemed, offered anything to eat. I found a McDonalds, of course, and it might’ve even had wi-fi, but like I say, I was looking for food too. After traversing through damn near half the city with no luck, I decided to call the girlfriend to see if she, by way of the internets, could help navigate. Thirty miles from Santa Fe, this thought actually occurred to me, but I figured I’d be able to handle it on my own. She found several places in a matter of minutes. The Atomic Grill sounded the most awesome, so I followed her directions there. The Atomic Grill is in the so-called arts district of Santa Fe, and to be fair, I did pass by several galleries. One was even having an exhibit last night, and I could see in, and while waiting for several hoity toity patrons to cross the street, I got a chance to examine some of the pieces. From what I could tell, they all looked the same—varying shades of brown paint smeared vertically on the canvas, roughly a foot long and four inches apart. Looked like rows and rows of turds. Looked like Santa Fe. It’s the first modern art I’ve ever understood and appreciated.

The Atomic Grill is a trendy little open-air café, replete with gigantic charcoal portraits of American pop iconography: James Dean, Jimi Hendrix, Doris Day (or Marilyn Monroe), Bob Marley. After confirming with the waiter that they indeed had internet and food, I ordered an iced tea and, because I was wrapped up in the hipper-than-Tao atmosphere, a veggie burger. After the waiter left, I got out my computer and set up a little work station for myself, glad to finally be out of the car and all that lonely nothingness, surrounded by internet waves and pop culture icons. It gave me a certain feeling of comfort. And just as I was beginning to think I had judged the city hastily and unfairly and that there might be some redemption in it after all, it didn’t work. I could connect to the Atomic Grill wireless network, but nothing would load. I tried disconnecting and reconnecting and all the other tricks that sometimes work, but still nothing. Ten hours of driving, playing the fool to that God-forsaken place, and all I wanted was to check my freaking email. The waiter reset the modem. Still nothing. So in a last gasp effort, I restarted my computer. And lo and behold, the silver lining at last. The world at my fingertips. Go Gmail! Show me the love!

Nothing. Not one damn email. After several minutes of staring at the screen, unable to think of anything else to look up, I closed the computer, ate my veggie burger and left.

10:29 pm – Wilderness Ranch

Any attempt at describing Wilderness Ranch will come off sounding hokey and trite, so I won’t try it. I’ve been coming here in some capacity each summer save two for the past eight years. It’s a hiking/backpacking camp, yet ironically, I’ve never been out on the trail. I consider myself a base camp rat. Mostly I help with the maintenance of the camp and with various construction projects. One of my favorite things about coming here is that I get to see the product of the work I’ve done in previous years: a bridge, a porch, a roof, tile work, etc. All who return here get to see their work. It’s a satisfaction that our world doesn’t offer us much anymore, unless you are a carpenter, or a general, or a plastic surgeon. Most of us slave away at jobs that offer us no tangible measure of success. Not statistics or progress reports or evaluations. I mean real, physical actuality. And I can’t help but think there’s a problem in that. I think maybe we need to see the fruit of our labors. Maybe then we wouldn’t feel so purposeless and alone. Maybe it would give us something real to feel proud of and we could stop envying one another. C.S. Lewis wrote that he believed heaven to be a place where we could finally take pride in our creations without feeling ashamed. That’s sort of how I feel when I’m here. We’ll be here a week.

“All this workin’ just to tear it down.”
“Language City” – Wolf Parade

The Manifest Destiny Tour - Day 2

Ft. Worth to Glorieta, NM

636.3 Miles/134 Songs

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – The Lyre of Orpheus
Belle & Sebastian – Push Doorman to Open Old Wounds (Disc 2)
Jeff Buckley – Grace
Madonna – Madonna
Iron & Wine – The Shepherd’s Dog
Wilson Pickett – Don’t Knock My Love

12:38 pm - Chillicothe, Tx

I’m hoping lunch will help prepare me for what’s to come—the arduous journey through the desolate waste of the Texas panhandle. Stretches of vast nothingness, interrupted occasionally by the pockmark towns that serve as speed traps for tourists and truckers. It always makes me feel lonely, especially when I’m driving alone, as I am now. I try to imagine the people who live here. Why are they here? Why haven’t they left like everyone else? How do they cope with the immeasurable loneliness? How could they ever expect to find love way out here?

“I’ve heard of pious men
And I’ve heard of dirty fiends
But you don’t often hear
Of us ones in between”
“Us Ones in Between” – Sunset Rubdown

I stop for lunch in Chillicothe, pockmark #3. I pull in at a Dairy Queen but notice Love’s BBQ & Steakhouse next door. A bit riskier perhaps, but that’s sort of what this trip is about, so I leave my car parked in the DQ parking lot and walk next door, looking for Love, and maybe some answers to my questions.

9:43 pm - Glorieta, NM

Church camp. It’s been ten years since I was here. And I remember feeling much the same way these kids do now. I look around and I see eyes closed, hands raised, souls held captive by the emotional sway, and I wonder how and when I became so cynical. Ten years ago I was swept away in the tide of holy fervor; tonight, I’m the only one with his hands in his pockets. Ten years ago I swore to God Almighty that I would repent of my evil and negligent ways and never again drink or smoke the devil’s putrefaction. My promise lasted six years. Not real sure what’s significant about six years. Maybe that’s about the time the cynicism kicked in.
As I look around at these eyeless faces, I wonder how long it will take the cynicism to work on them. Six years? Ten years? Kids today are sharp; maybe it will take less time. I hope it takes longer. I hope they can remain blissfully unaware. Cynicism is lonely—lonely as hell.

“Ain’t a penthouse Christian wants the pain of a scab,
But they all want the scar.”
"Innocent Bones" - Iron & Wine

The Manifest Destiny Tour - Day 1

Austin to Ft. Worth

211 Miles/29 songs

Sun Kil Moon – April
Rainy Day – Rainy Day
Paul Simon - Graceland
Rangers Game

5:52 pm - Waco, Tx

For the first 50 miles or so, I can’t help but wonder what I’ve left behind. You always leave something behind—you just hope it’s not something too important. A toothbrush is fine. Pillow, headphones, best pair of undies. These can all be replaced on the road, likely at the next Wal-Mart. But charted map, contact lenses, phone charger—these things are harder to replace. A conversation, a hug, a proper goodbye. These things weren’t on my list. They never are.

These songs of loss and regret, they’re what get me thinking this way. I can’t seem to look forward without seeing my rearview mirror.

“She comes back to tell me she’s gone;
As if I didn’t know that,
As if I didn’t know my own bed;
As if I never noticed the way she brushed
Her hair from her forehead."
"Graceland" - Paul Simon

The Manifest Destiny Tour - Day 0

0 Miles/0 Songs

Tomorrow I’ll be leaving town for a while. Roughly three weeks. That’s the plan anyway. I’ll drive to my sister’s in Ft. Worth. Then pick up my brother from church camp in Glorieta, New Mexico. Then together we’ll spend a week at Wilderness Ranch, between Creede and Lake City, Colorado. Set in the San Juan National Forest of the Weminuche Wilderness of southern Colorado, near the continental divide, it’s one of the most beautiful places I know. When we leave there, we’ll hit the open road. West to California—San Francisco, L.A. On the way back maybe Vegas, the Grand Canyon. Then back to Texas. We’re keeping our plans purposely vague. We want to leave room for spontaneity. I hope that isn’t a mistake. Actually we’ve been planning this trip for years. As soon as he graduated from high school, I told him, we would go on a road trip, just he and I, to see America.

"Now there are many
Who will swear it's true
That brother all we are
And yet it seems there are so few
Who will answer a brother's call."
"Brother Where Are You?" - Johnny Rivers

I'm as Caged as a Bird Now

Here it is. It's sort of a long one. Making up for lost time perhaps. So, maybe wait to start it until you have about 10-12 minutes of uninterrupted reading time.

-heatmiser

The last time I was in a talent show I was eight. Three of my cousins and I sang a four-part barber shop Southern Baptist rendering of “Just Like John.” We didn’t win. And it was all my fault. Despite two and a half weeks of rehearsing in my bedroom, the backyard, the shower, and anywhere else I spent my adolescence, when the time came to sing my verse, I blanked. I froze. It was as though someone had stapled my tongue to the roof of my mouth—it was that painful. To this day, I still remember the lyrics (“Now, brother better mind how you step on the cross Walk in Jerusalem, just like John Your feet might slip and your soul get lost Walk in Jerusalem, just like John”). Well, I must have stepped on the cross in a bad way because my soul (and everything attached to it for that matter) was lost on that stage. I stood bleary-eyed and bludgeoned, tamed and trapped, regretting my eight years of life. And in that horrified moment, I swore that I would never show my talent again.

Fast-forward 20 years. Recently, I was approached by a fellow teacher who plays the drums (and hockey, incidentally) and asked if I would be interested in joining his teacher(slash)student band for the upcoming talent show. My tongue immediately felt a staple prick, my eight-year-old self reminded me of our on-stage promise, and I balked but coolly said, “That could be fun.” I didn’t really think it would happen. No students would be interested in playing with their teachers, and so close to the end of the school year, we teachers would be so busy that anything put together would surely fall apart. So you can imagine my surprise when, three weeks and two and a half rehearsals later, I found myself on the school’s Performing Arts Center stage with three other teachers and six students ready to tear into CCR’s “Fortunate Son.” Two drum kits, four guitars (two electric, one acoustic, and one bass), one piano, one keyboard, one bass saxophone, and a tambourine. Straight forward, pure and flawed, the way it should be. The way it used to be.

I had agreed to take part in this nonsense with the strict understanding that I would not be singing, just strumming my rhythm guitar, but since no one else could come quite as close to belting out Fogerty’s diaphanous strains, I was reluctantly forced into the position. With no monitors and the lead guitarist’s amplifier directly behind me, I had no idea what notes I was actually singing, so I tried channeling Fogerty’s pre-Fogerty spirit, howling my best cathartically visceral Joplin meets Plant shriek-sing-scream, which is really the only way to get that high without drugs. Even though I knew the lyrics, have known them since being raised on my father’s cassette tapes, the eight-year-old made me keep them on a security blanket music stand. Perhaps not very rock n’ roll, but neither is staring blank-faced and fat-tongued into oblivion. Our drummer’s adrenaline turned a two and a half minute song into a one minute and forty-two second romp that would make Megadeth proud. I didn’t mind, of course. Just get the damn thing over with. We finished to mild applause and a few catcalls, presumably from our students dotted about the audience. We were the last act, and while the judges were tabulating, we were asked to play an encore, sort of as a filler. We had rehearsed another song, but it was hardly ready for public ingestion. It’s a fairly complicated piece with a number of instruments and a tricky tempo change in the middle, followed by an incendiary guitar solo. The song: Freebird.

Coincidentally, I had heard “Freebird” four days earlier. At prom. I hadn’t planned on going but at the last minute decided it might be fun to help chaperone. I spent most of the evening outside the main ballroom, helping students get checked in, being surprised at how much older they seemed in their tuxedos and dresses, trying to ignore the awful music being played by the DJ. But as “Soulja Boy” faded out and the southern rock anthem of anthems faded in, I couldn’t resist the impulse to peak my head in to see how the dancers were going to handle this one. I reached the dance floor just about the time the ballad turns bawling, and just as I suspected, the kids were a little confused about what to do with their partners in light of the new rhythm. Most simply stopped slow-dancing, slackened their loose-limbed embraces, and stood gaping at each other. Others attempted to transition with the song, maintaining the same slow-dance sway, just speeding it up, so it looked like an old-timey video recording. Still others reverted back to the “Soulja Boy” dance they had butchered five minutes earlier. All in all, it was a pretty awkward scene. And not a humorous one either. I felt their pain. I’ve known public humiliation. But still, I’m grateful for the image—because to me, it’s a great representation of the teenage life.

“Freebird” as an expression of the teenage experience. I’m sure that’s not what Allen Collins and Ronnie Van Zant had in mind when they wrote it. But think about it. It’s a restless tune, the lyrics just as much as the music. (“For I must be travellin’ on, now, ‘Cause there’s too many places I’ve got to see.”) Remember how restless we were at 16? 17? 18? Also, the song really isn’t that good, but it’s iconic. The American pop culture landscape would contain a tremendous musical chasm without it. Likewise, our lives would feel a void if not for our wanting teenage years. (Of course, some might see those years as a spectacular ass-crack dividing an otherwise decent life.) And then there’s the song’s structure. It appears really complicated and erratic, but really it’s terribly simple. Van Zant himself once said, “If you can count to 4, you can play Freebird.” Of course, he also initially rejected the song when Collins brought it to him, saying it “had too many chords.” (It has six total chords by the way.) So maybe it’s actually very complicated and appears to be simple. Confusing? So is life at 17.

I’ve said before that teenagers are dumb. I don’t really mean that. They’re actually pretty smart. Some are ridiculously smart. That’s not to say that they’re without some sort of mental deficiency, however. They’re not. It’s just that it’s hard to pin down exactly what that deficiency is. I suppose in my laziness I’ve used the word dumb, hoping it would suffice. Confusion—like that experienced by the prom dancers—is closer. But even that’s not completely accurate; the real problem lies deeper than confusion. It’s the result of inexperience and immaturity. I think the real problem is that teenagers lack a realistic perspective on life. It’s why they can’t see even two feet into the future. I’m not sure why reality eludes them so. Maybe it is just inexperience. Maybe it’s the illusion of reality that’s peddled out to them by today’s insta-grat mainstream. Or maybe it’s all that self-esteem building, follow your heart crap that’s rammed into their heads during their developmental years. Whatever the reason, I’m convinced that it’s this that makes them appear dumb.

The only reason I mention this foible is because I am often the recipient of the assumptions it breeds. For some reason, my students have a hard time believing I’m an actual human being. They like to ask me how many parties I went to over the weekend or when the last time I smoked pot was, but then they’re shocked to see me drinking a beer at a music festival. Actually, they’re shocked to see me out of school at all, like I’m supposed to be perpetually behind my desk grading their essays. They can’t believe I have a Facebook page, like their generation invented the computer or the internet or something. It’s really a shock when they discover that I listen to “their” music, especially hip-hop, like teachers should only be listening to classical music. The other day, one of my students, apropos of nothing, of course, busted out with the opening line of R. Kelly’s “Bump ‘N Grind” (My mind’s tellin’ me No-oh-oh), so I finished it for him (But my body, my body’s tellin’ me Yeh-eh-ess). And they were baffled that I knew the song. A song that came out when I was in 8th grade and they were 18 months old.

The reality of things—and this is what the kids have difficulty grasping—is that I’m not all that different from them. I berate them constantly for their laziness and procrastination, yet I’ll wait until the last minute to grade their essays. (Some of you know about the time I was at school grading until 3:15 AM because grades were due at 8.) The students don’t know what they want to do when they grow up and neither do I. If they’re excited about an upcoming holiday, it is nothing compared to my own excitement. I’ve been looking forward to summer for two and a half months. But now that we are two days away from it, something strange has happened. I’m not ready for it end. How dumb is that? I’ve been craving a break for so long, and now that it’s here, I don’t want it. Why? At first I thought it was because of the kids, because I would miss them and their antics. And while that’s definitely part of it, I think there’s more to it than that. I’ve always put a high premium on wanderlust, on being able to pack it in and move away if necessary, shunning the sedentary life. A career is not something I’ve ever really been interested in. Even with teaching, I figured it would be a job I could try for a couple of years before moving on to something else. But not a career. My father is a career teacher, 30 years plus, and I always swore when I was younger that I would never be a teacher, especially an English teacher. But here I am. Now, I’m not saying that I’ll teach to retirement; like I say, I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. But for right now, this is what I do. Call it a job or call it a career; it doesn’t really matter. I’m a teacher. And I realize that doesn’t sound very rock n’ roll. Ronnie Van Zant would probably laugh at me and tell me it had too many chords. But that’s okay. I’ve lived the simple life of the freebird too, and all it did was make me a lonely asshole. I’m alright with being a caged bird, as long as the company is good, and there’s plenty of food and water.

Oh, and the talent show? We won it.

A Tip of the Slung

I'm sorry this post has been so long in coming (that's what she said), and I apologize in advance that it won't have been worth the wait. Eventually this blog will again supply its readers (all 8 of you) with the anecdotal quality it possessed in its infancy. Until then, read this:

I don’t know how it is in other jobs; I almost can’t remember ever having any other job. But I have a vague recollection of once being able to speak like a normal human being. I could string together words into complete sentences almost without having to try. And I think I remember being pretty good at it. I could say exactly what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it, and the other person would leave the conversation understanding exactly what I wanted them to understand. I took effective communication for granted. I don’t do that anymore—because for teachers, effective communication is a luxury, something that only happens when the fates allow or the stars align or you get a good night’s sleep.

Part of the problem is trying to work with a clientele that is flawed by default. We all know how stupid teenagers are and how stupidity has a way of rubbing off on others. But I can’t blame everything on the students. Even in those rare occasions when they are listening attentively (especially at these times it seems) I still have difficulty conversing. I find that my tongue’s main assailants are the Freudian slip (saying one thing and meaning your mother) and the spoonerism (tangling the beginning sounds of words—“it is kisstomary to cuss the bride”) and other such malapropisms. And the worst part is, these slips are typically sexual in nature. I can’t explain why that is. Maybe the tongue just gets tired of continual repression and self-censorship and, like a cork from a bottle of champagne, it just pops.

I was afraid at first that I had some strange perversion that was causing these sexual slips, but I’ve since talked to other teachers and found that I am not alone. Sometimes the slips are explainable. Like the time the usually verbally chaste teacher was one day hit by the Huck Finn bug. (That’s a spoonerism you sort of have to concede at least once when teaching Twain.) Sometimes the slips are unexplainable. Like the time another teacher inexplicably blurted out a slang for the female reproductive tract. (I won’t say the word here, but it rhymes with shunt.) Sometimes the slips are perhaps a product of some subconscious desire. Like the time the screenwriting teacher was leading her class in one of those “Who am I?” games where everyone wore a card with a different movie title on their foreheads and had to go around asking questions of others in an attempt to determine which movie they were, so she starts off with, “Is Brad Pitt in me?” And sometimes the slips are hopefully not a product of some subconscious desire. Like the time a student’s cell phone went off in his pocket with the ringtone of some booty-bumpin’ jam and I said, “Sounds like you got a party in your pants.”

Recently, I was going over a grammar review with my classes. Our main focus was the common uses of the comma. I was going through it pretty quickly because a) it was pretty easy stuff that they should have known since the 6^th grade, b) students’ eyes tend to glaze over if you take too much time with something like punctuation, and c) as usual, I was trying to squeeze 30 minutes too much into the lesson plan. About halfway through the review, we got to this sentence: “She was a pretty good cook, but her mother-in-law will always be better.” The common use of the comma here obviously being to separate two independent clauses with the help of a conjunction. So while reading it aloud, I felt it necessary to say the word “comma”: “She was a pretty good cook (COMMA) but her mother-in-law will always be better.” A completely innocent sentence, right? Unless you read it so fast that you get the words cook and comma tangled. Then it takes on a whole new meaning, albeit one that doesn’t make sense anatomically.

But my first, and probably best, sexual slip of the tongue happened on my first day of teaching. There was this kid named Frank. Right off I knew he was a weird kid: around his neck he wore a twine necklace with a rattlesnake head pendant. Yes, a real snake head—forked tongue and fangs and all. And this was my first class of my first day. I wasn’t sure if I should be missing my construction job yet. Well, as is often the case on the first day of school, students’ schedules were changed around, and so was Frank’s. So I had the pleasure of seeing Snake-boy twice that day. And because he had already heard all the first day rigmarole, while I was getting the other students rigmaroled, I told Frank he could just sit there and play with his snake.

And that’s the difference between teaching and other jobs. It’s not that other jobs are free of sexual commentary. Certainly not. It’s that the sexual commentary is on purpose. But in teaching, it’s always an unintended and embarrassing catastrophe. We try to play it off, but the kids know better. After all, if teenagers know anything it’s sexual banter.

Hatful of Hope

Lance’s first name is Devin. Lance’s middle name is Jackson. As far as I know, Lance’s parents had no intention of ever calling him Lance, but that’s the name he prefers to go by, so that’s what we call him. I’m not sure what’s so special about that name, why he’d rather use it than either Devin or Jackson. I guess it’s all a bit arbitrary really. I mean all things considered, the names Lance and Devin are relatively similar—same amount of letters, both fairly common but not too common, both of Anglo-Saxon etymology (I think). I can see no advantage—or any drawback—to using either name. I wish I could say that it didn’t matter to me, that I haven’t lost sleep brooding over it. I wish I could say that I’ve long since stopped trying to figure out the quirky motivations of teenagers. But it would be a lie.

Truth is I spend a great deal of my time trying to figure out this bizarre group of near-humans. I find that I am enthralled with them. I observe them—always with the scientist’s aloof objectivity or the birdwatcher’s eager gaze. My goal is two-fold: to discover their true nature and simply to marvel at the weird wonder of it all. One of the main reasons I’ve started this blog is to see if I could set down an accurate portrayal of today’s American teenager. The movies are wrong. They either make them too simple or too complicated, but they’re both, and neither. Stereotypes are useless and, consequently, so is attempting to flip those stereotypes. On Tuesday the star quarterback might be seen modestly yapping it up with the third-chair tuba player, and then on Friday, he’ll be the picture of detached coolness. The burnout slacker might be seen studying for a test because his Algebra teacher also likes The Grateful Dead. The mousy little art girl with the swooping bangs and hand-made jewelry might be seen yelling her rodent head off at a basketball game because the goal of getting the ball in the basket always seemed to her like a poignant metaphor for love. My point is it’s nearly impossible to pin down anything close to an accurate definition of what a teenager is. The best I can do is recount these various anecdotes and hope the empirical evidence speaks for itself.

Which brings us back to Lance. Lance would not fit well into any theatrical attempt at teenage life. The kid is a walking contradiction. He comes from a poorly educated, working class family, but he’s quite intelligent when he wants to be; he’s a veritable fountain of disparaging remarks, but he’s surprisingly understanding and tolerant of other students in the classroom; he’s a large kid, but he’s graceful in a way. He has a name that he doesn’t use. If I were writing the next Hollywood high school blockbuster, I would cast Lance’s character as an overweight bumbling redneck fool of a kid who gets wasted on cheap beer on the weekends and laces all his dialogue with vilifying comments about homosexuals, women, minorities, Democrats, little people, skinny people, and anybody else that wasn’t like him. And I would be about 90 percent accurate. But it’s the remaining 10 percent I’m interested in. That’s what the movies leave out because it confuses viewers. I can’t really blame the screenwriters; I wouldn’t want moviegoers to experience the same befuddlement I’m forced to live with everyday. However, the part of me that craves truth would like to see, just once, a movie that paints an accurate picture of a kid like Lance—10 percent and all. So for those of you who don’t spend half your waking life around teenagers, this is for you. Prepare yourselves to be baffled.

Lance loves America. When we are led in the pledge to the flag each morning (ironically, it’s by a British woman), he is the only one who ever follows along. There are days, however, when Lance prefaces the pledge of allegiance with the announcement that he will not be joining in that day because America is being overrun by liberals. So we all stare silently at the flag and listen to the foreign inflections of the familiar refrain. On one such occasion, Lance proclaimed to the class that, instead of pledging his allegiance to America, that day he would be pledging his allegiance to Puerto Rico. Sure enough, as soon as the intercom speaker began reverberating with the strains of patriotism, Lance joined in with his strains of sarcastic dissent. “I pledge allegiance to Puerto Rico and…” (mumbling, searching for something clever to add) “…and to Communism…” (more mumbling) “…and…to Castro…” I should have been the one to stop him here, but I was too entertained. Luckily the student next to him retorted, “That’s Cuba, you idiot!” I shot a glance in their direction to make sure that Lance’s feelings weren’t hurt or that they weren’t about to start some territorial dispute, but Lance wore his self-satisfied grin all through the Texas pledge and the minute of silence, his point having obviously been made. And I’m not so sure he didn’t know exactly what he was doing.

A couple of weeks ago, Lance wanted to talk politics, and since we had some time to burn that day and because it was the morning of the primary elections, I allowed it. Lance wasted no time in blurting out, “I don’t like Obama.” (For sixteen-year-olds, this is talking politics.) I applauded Lance for achieving the first step in rhetoric: stating his position. And then I told him what he needed to do was defend his position.

“Why don’t you like Obama?”

Knowing Lance’s proclivity for racism, I grimaced a little while waiting for his reply. And I exchanged concerned glances with the mulatto student at the back of the room—sort of a preemptive apology for what was certain to follow. His response, however, caught us off-guard.

“Because all he does is talk about hope.”

I was stumped. I’ve always considered hope to be a pretty damn good thing, and I assume that other people feel the same way. I knew I should have just let it go at that, but my curiosity was piqued. Remember, my ultimate goal is to try to discover what makes kids like Lance tick. Plus, I was pretty sure I could make him look like a fool.

“So are you supporting the despair candidate, Lance?”

Unphased: “No. I just don’t see the point in hope. What can it do? Nothing. What can you do with it? Nothing.” And taking off his cap for effect: “I could fill my hat with hope, and it wouldn’t change a thing. It would still be a hat. I could throw it on the ground and stomp on it. And then where would your precious hope be?”

Again I was stumped, but this time it was for a different reason. It was because I knew I had been beaten. (In my defense, it wasn’t really a fair fight because when Lance said he wanted to talk politics, he really meant he wanted to talk philosophy. I was equipped with the wrong weaponry: I came wielding a crowbar, but what I needed were brass knuckles.) At any rate, Lance was right. What good is hope? And why had I assumed it was a good thing? After all, it was at the bottom of Pandora’s box of evil. Hope might be nothing more than our futile and pretentious attempt at playing God, at dodging the inevitability of fate, at rearranging the very structure of the universe.

The problem, however, was not my misconception of hope. It was my assumption, but not my assumptions on hope. My mistake was assuming that all of Lance was contained in that aforementioned 90 percent. We all know the tired adage of what assuming will do to us. And if you need proof of its validity, then just go hang out with a teenager for a few minutes. Not only does Lance pass along backdoor axioms with the deftness of Yoda, the kid can also write a story like you wouldn’t believe. He may not have the most agile tongue, but give the boy a pen and paper and he will break your heart. He probably has more raw talent than any other student in my class. And if that’s not enough to confuse your preconceived notions of high school archetypes, Lance was voted homecoming prince by his classmates this year. You should have seen him down there on the 40-yard line with all the pretty kids. It was beautiful.

We recently started reading The Great Gatsby. Two pages in, Fitzgerald dispenses a major theme of the novel when he has his narrator state that "Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope." There are numerous cliches that express this exact sentiment: don't judge a book by its cover, beauty is only skin deep, all that glitters is not gold. Maybe Lance's refusal to accept his given name is his way of expressing this sentiment. By choosing a new name for himself he is refusing to be typecast into his expected role. He's saying he won't allow others to pigeonhole him. He's sloughing off the dead and useless skin of our expectations. Or maybe he just likes the name Lance.

In Memoriam M.L.K.

On the first day of each virgin class year, I have my students read a portion of the thirteenth chapter of Steinbeck’s East of Eden. It’s a fairly challenging excerpt in which Steinbeck bemoans the destruction of the individual at the hands of the collective mass. He tells of his fear of the future—a future where mass method becomes our way of thinking until we “have substituted the idea collective for the idea God.” It’s a frighteningly accurate prophecy that Steinbeck sets forth, but maybe it's just because humanity has been constantly moving in that direction since we were mere dust and ribs. Or maybe it’s just the tired strains of an artist championing the individual. Or maybe it’s the defiant decree of the punk-rock rebellion screaming “Damn the Man!” Whatever the reason, it’s a pathos that sixteen-year-olds can get behind. They understand, almost innately, the inundation of the mass upon their individuality. After all, at sixteen what have you got besides yourself? So we talk about this threat to their individuality and try to come up with some strategies to defend against it. For a while the discussion seems hopeless. I mean, what can any one of us do to escape the oncoming tidal wave of the mass and prevent our single voice from being swallowed up and drowned out?

Prior to reading the Steinbeck passage and planning our strategies for survival, I have the students write their name on a note card. As class progresses I have them add other various personal information that is fun for me to know—things like favorite color, extracurricular interests, and post-high school aspirations. When they are writing their names on their cards, I tell them it’s the most important thing they will do all day. Because they’ve only known me for about five minutes at this point, they don’t know whether or not to take that statement seriously, and most snicker a bit. But I am serious, gravely serious, deathly serious. I ask them why writing their name might be a matter of utmost importance, and at first, they’re stumped. So we talk about what a name means and what it does, and eventually they begin giving the answers I want: our name represents who we are and what we’re about, it connects us to our forebears, and it distinguishes us from one another. They begin to see a little of what I mean when I say that names are important. I, of course, take this opportunity to tell them that names in literature are doubly important. At this time I also impart to them the single most important piece of advice I give them all year: “If you don’t do anything else this entire year, don’t forget your name!”

Again they snicker. Because at this point they haven’t discovered the full impact of this advice. It’s not until after we've read and discussed Steinbeck, until after we've recognized our wretched condition and have gotten to the point where we have to save our damn-ready souls, and I ask, “Okay, so what do we do to escape the oncoming tidal wave of the mass and prevent our single voice from being swallowed up and drowned out?” And then I wait for it. And eventually the synapses fire and one of them remembers the silly bit of advice, and he or she says, “I know how to save my wretched and damn-ready soul. I remember my name.” I smile in gratitude and say, “Yes.”

This isn’t about the first day of school, however. It merely serves as a preface for what comes next. (And you’ll have to excuse any heavy-handed sentimentality that follows. It’s sometimes difficult to write with detached objectivity.) Nearly seven months have passed since that first innocent day, and things have changed, although I suppose they’ve basically stayed the same. Students have been crammed full of nearly seven months-worth of information they likely mostly will never use, except for when they take the state’s standardized test, which they’re doing now while I’m writing this instead of actively monitoring. We’ve had a successful athletic year: The football team won the state championship; other students have done well in the various arenas of academia. They’ve played video games and read books, made music and made love; they’ve gotten drunk, gotten high, gotten free; some have found God, some have lost Him; some have gotten smarter, others think they have; they’ve made good decisions and they’ve made bad decisions—in short, they’ve been teenagers.

And three nights ago we lost one of them in an automobile accident. Her name was Megan. (At least that’s what we’ll call her here.) She was driving home from work after having picked up some Easter candy for her family. The truck coming the opposite direction veered into her lane, the driver having temporarily lost control for some reason that will remain unknown, and Megan never had a chance to react. A head-on impact. She was tall and thin, she had straight blonde hair, and she was a good kid. She was quiet, a wallflower type, except when she was with her several close friends.

I had her in one of those classes that never seems to shut up. The last class of the day, when I’m getting tired and they’re just getting started. Megan was a remote oasis in a desert of noise. At times when I was particularly annoyed or frustrated with the unceasing drone of mindless prattle, Megan and I could exchange the furtive smirk of our shared empathy. Because of her demure nature, Megan advanced relatively unnoticed through her social stratum. Many students didn’t even recognize her name when we heard the news Monday morning. Our culture has a way of attributing value to people in accordance with how much noise they produce. But I’m reminded of a line from Whitman’s “Great are the Myths” that advises us to “forget not that Silence is also expression.” If this is the case, then Megan expressed more than most.

On the last test we took, about a week ago now, Megan forgot to put her name on her scantron portion of the test. It’s always a little frustrating when students forget to put their names on assignments, but exceedingly more frustrating on scantrons, especially when two or more forget. It’s virtually impossible to distinguish one student’s bubbles from the next. So when I noticed Megan’s nameless scantron, I was slightly annoyed, and when I showed it to her the next day, I can’t deny that there wasn’t a certain tinge of disgust in my voice. It may be that nameless assignments and tests bother me on a metaphorical level. Part of me sees it as reckless disregard for my first-day advice. Of course, I never miss the opportunity to remind students of this, so in my best pseudo-patronizing teacher voice, I asked Megan if she still remembered her name. She flashed me her sheepish grin and nodded yes. And after writing her name on her scantron, she shuffled out of the classroom. That was the last time I saw her; three days later she was gone.

I’m not sure I know what I believe happens after we die. Tunnels and lights and St. Peter at the gate and all that. Do we play harps and sing and ride on clouds? Do we scrape the caked and crackling earth-dust from between our toes and belly buttons? Do we return to Eden? Do we become what we'd always hoped for? Do we finally incarnate the individuality we strove so hard to attain? Or do we melt into each other like drops into some transcendent pool of the over-soul? If we could talk to Megan, she could tell us. But she’s busy conquering space and time. I only hope that during her journey from here to there, while the pall and shroud were stretched and the cosmos blurred in her rear-view mirror, while the steel and stone yielded to blood and bone, while her mother was pulling in the slack of her umbilical cord and her father peered ahead into the listless night, I hope she didn’t forget who she was and what she was about. I hope she didn’t forget her name. If she did, I will remember it for her.

Generation (me)Pod

“It’s a generation that’s lacking in decency and honor.” That’s the ubiquitous complaint, the archetypal brand, the rite of passage for authenticity. It’s what every generation must be dubbed by its predecessors before it can be found legitimate and reckon-worthy. All ingenuous generations eventually earn their stripes, and after their day in the sun, every indecent and dishonorable generation must eventually grow up and pass the torch of disrepute to the next.

I’ve been joking around for the past few years that I’m getting old. I could afford to do this because I knew that it wasn’t really true. It’s when I start denying that I’m old, that’s when I’ll know I’m in trouble. Now, I’m not ready to start denying anything yet, but I’m finding recently that my claims of being an old man are less jocular and more credulous. And it’s not because my knees hurt when walking up stairs (although they do); and it’s not because I’m more ornery than I used to be (although I am); it’s not even because I think old crap is cooler than new crap (although it is). It’s because I’ve started to notice a significant chasm between my generation and the one I teach. It’s because I can sense my generation passing the torch. And now I find myself saying the same things I rolled my eyes to just ten years ago: “Teenagers today really are lacking in decency and honor.”

The line between right and wrong, which was well-defined and deeply rooted when I was growing up, is now blurry and shallow. Whereas my friends and I stood on the solid foundation of the absolute, kids today are floundering in an ocean of gray relativism. They don’t even realize when they’ve done wrong. It’s not that we didn’t mess up from time to time, but when we did, we were riddled with guilt and misgiving. Today there seems to be no remorse, no contrition, no penitence. No mea culpa.

I wish I could say that this simple desultory philippic was unprovoked, that it was merely the result of my objective observations. But it’s not. Unfortunately, it’s the result of a tremendous betrayal I suffered this week—a betrayal akin to Judas’ kiss or Ollie North’s weapons. My iPod was stolen. And it’s not just that it was stolen; things get stolen all the time. It’s that it was stolen by someone that I trust, someone that I love and care about, someone that I have worked my ass off for. It’s bothersome, and not just on a substantive level, but on a philosophical one. I don’t care about the iPod; it’s an iPod. A complex configuration of plastics, metals, and nano-technology. I don’t even care about the 5,000+ songs it contained; I can recover most, if not all, of them. I care that it was taken by one of my students and that all I have striven to teach over the past six and a half months seems to have been for naught. The irony is that if this student had come to me and asked if he or she could have my iPod, I would likely have given it to him or her, plus the shirt off my back.

In a futile attempt to recover my stolen iPod, I’ve posted fliers in my room and in the hallway, and I’ve been uselessly informing my classes and hopelessly beseeching them to keep their eyes and ears open and to report to me if they see or hear anything. Knowing that this new generation of miscreants is motivated only by personal gain, I’ve even offered a thirty-dollar reward for any information leading to its recovery.

As of yet, I still have my thirty dollars. But a very curious thing has happened: my students have expressed genuine concern for my plight. They seem more disheartened than me. Several have formed investigative search and seizure squads, tracking leads and interrogating potential criminals. Others have mentioned their intention to start up a collection to purchase me a new iPod. All of them seem to be disgusted by this obvious atrocity. And somehow, none of this computes in my old brain. In the course of a day, I went from refusing to believe in the immorality of this younger generation, to wholeheartedly believing it, to unbelieving it. It’s your basic paradigm reshift.

What I’ve failed to notice while carrying out my torch-passing duties, and what all previous generations have failed to notice, is that there is still a lot of remarkable good left over from my generation. (I hope the sarcasm of that statement is obvious.) Now, I’m not saying that there’s not something terribly wrong with the zeitgeist of our nation, or even of our world. I think there is. Why else would we have college campus rampages, planes flown into innocent buildings, and garbage dumpster babies? I think we can all agree that there is something terribly wrong. But it’s nothing new. The world has always been depraved. We simply see so many examples of the depravity today because there are so many more of us than ever before and there are so many more ways to spread the news of these depravations.

But the world has also been terribly good. Day to day, I see far more good than I do evil. It’s just that I like to obsess over the evil and ignore the good. I had left my iPod in the same place, out in the open, for the entire year. I made it no secret that it was there and most of my students knew that it was there. I never thought it worth mentioning all those days that it was left unstolen. But according to the assessment made of this latest generation, that it is lacking in decency and honor, I should be far more amazed that my iPod survived even one day, let alone half a year. Now, I don’t want to buck the system, so I’ll continue muttering my disapproval of subsequent generations, no doubt becoming more and more vocal with each one, until my own dies out. But shame on me if I ever begin thinking that my generation was anything less than indecent and dishonorable.