Introducing Mr. Todd

I am a PhD student in sociology and a lawyer too. I graduated near the top of my class at some elite blue blood mother fucking law school. Durkheim was trained in law. So was Weber. So was Raskolnikov. Mitchell Dunier quit my law school when he was one course away from graduating, and he became one of the greatest ethnographers of our time. I make $20,000 a year as a sociology graduate student. I could be making six figures as a lawyer. But $20,000 buys plenty of bus tickets.

My name is Michael. Some people call me Mr. Todd for short. When I was 4, I was a toddler model. I looked like Billy Idol Jr. Then I went to kindergarten. Then I started riding the Greyhound Bus. And I never stopped. Riding the bus is more fun than having flash bulbs clicked in your face incessantly.

Once I took the bus from NYC to San Diego, flew to Bangkok, took a train to the Thailand-Malaysia border, took a bus to Singapore, took a ferry to Batam island in Indonesia, took an overnight ferry to Jakarta, sung karaoke with a bunch of Indonesian cops and the "free sex girl" on the overnight ferry, took an overnight bus to Bali, and finally took a rickshaw from the bus stop to my hotel. I barely stopped in between. The hotel had a terraced garden with a pool at the bottom. It was fucking beautiful.

Once I took the bus from Philadelphia to Mexico City, and I took another bus to the Yucutan.

Once I drove across the US and Canada with my girlfriend Katy and my mom Betsy. We saw the northern lights and ate delicious maple cookies. Katy is not my girlfriend anymore. But she is my dear friend and brought me some of the best years of my life.

When I take the bus, I'm kind of like Mr. Badii in Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry picture, minus the suicidal tendencies. Look at the pictures in the left margin. I even look kind of like him.

I still call movies "pictures" and refer to men as "fellows," and I'm only 27.

Anyway, I'm about to depart on a trip where I'll travel ~7000 miles around the US, mostly by Greyhound Bus.

Katy and I are going to fly from Newark to Orlando and visit her dad in the Daytona Beach area. He's a really nice guy, and his name is Lynn. All his brothers have androgynous or girly names too, except his brother Phil, who has a nerdy name, which is appropriate, because he is a rocket scientist. But Lynn is not girly at all, even though he's named Lynn. And even if he were girly, I'd punch you if you made fun of him, because he's a real good guy and you should not make fun of real good guys, nor should you make fun of people for being girly. If he weren't so nice, he might arrange for other people to punch you as well, because he used to be big shit at a major corporation and could easily afford to hire a goon squad. Who knows, maybe I'm kind of girly too sometimes, but I couldn't afford to hire goons to kick your ass you if you made fun of me. I'd need to do it myself.

I'm staying with Katy and Lynn for 3 days, then I'm taking the bus straight from Daytona to Los Angeles, where I'll hang out for five days with my friend Joey. Joey and I lived together for a term, when we were both pseudo-students at Oxford University on some chincy sham of a study abroad program. Joey almost died that term. A big lump grew from his neck and was constricting his breathing. I visited him in the hospital almost every day. Joe's father shelled out some big bucks and got him away from the NHS and into private health care, and he somehow survived.

After I visit Joe, I'm taking the bus to Vegas and staying there for a night, and I'm going to overindulge in tackiness and kitch.

Then it's off to St. Louis, again by bus, where I'll visit my high school friend Dan and his lovely wife Carissa. Dan is doing a PhD in microbiology and Carissa does some environmentalist crap. They are both very Christian but not the evil kind. They even voted for John Kerry. Dan used to say that homosexuality was a sin toward which every man was tempted, which made me think he was gay and fucking ignorant too. Then he met Carissa and she was all liberal and open-minded and shit, and he changed his tune and became accepting of homosexuality, and I became convinced that he's probably straight, or bi- at least. I guess that getting pussy can have that effect sometimes. Anyway, Dan is a dear friend and has always been a wonderful person, even when he was steeped in ignorance. We've spent many New Years together, and I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to spend another with him.

After St. Louis, I head back to Philadelphia and then to New York City a few weeks later, to resume writing the fourth volume of Capital.