Depardieu

Am I crazy, or is there some substantial degree of resemblance between my buddy Dan and a frazzled, older version of French actor Gerard Depardieu?

On Los Angeles

I regret that I have not been able to post for most of my trip. I was incredibly busy in LA, so busy that I was engaged in activities all day and often did not go to sleep until 3am or 4am (quite late for an old fogy like myself), and I lacked access to a computer on the bus and in Las Vegas. About 2 weeks have passed since I last posted, and I've traveled by bus from Florida to LA, LA to Las Vegas, and Las Vegas to St. Louis. I have so many stories to tell and so many reflections to share, certainly too many for a single sitting and perhaps too many for half a dozen.

I'm currently sitting in a poorly lit office in a drab section of St. Louis. This has, on the whole, been an invigorating and exciting trip, and--though I've been stressed out occasionally--today is the first time I've felt a bit down since I boarded my flight out of JFK Airport.

My time in Los Angeles was phenomenal. Joe was a superb host and shares my norms of hospitality, or perhaps embodies them to a degree to which I can only aspire. My visit to LA had many highlights. I rode a bike for the first time in about seven years, in the most spectacular setting in which I've ever done so. In Santa Monica there was a very flat and long bike path, conducive to novice bikers like myself, that stretched for miles along the beach and reached a point where the beach was bordered by mountains on one side and (of course) the sea on the other. Joe and I were able to gain access for a day to his girlfriend's aunt's house on Malibu Beach. Joe's girlfriend's aunt was a well-known actress in the 1940s and 1950s, and her now-deceased husband was a prominent producer. The house looked like something straight out of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. I've never been in a house that was simultaneously so luxurious and tastefully put together. The house was right on the beach, and the side of the house facing the beach consisted of a huge glass window. The bedroom was designed to consist of a balcony overlooking the main living space of the house, so that both floors faced the huge glass window. The house was densely packed with books on art history, and there was a hot tub in the basement. The place was absolutely stunning, so much so that I walked around fearing that I was going to damage something. We spent much of the day and the evening drinking wine and ale, eating cheese, bathing in the hot tub, and watching the sun lower itself toward the beach and eventually submerge itself in the waves. Joe and I also had the opportunity to eat shabbat dinner at the house of a relatively young orthodox rabbi. While I am not at all religious myself, and I indeed consider myself an atheist, it was an intriguing cultural experience to see how a person nearly of my generation lives a life centered around Jewish law and tradition.

Although we engaged in a range of interesting and enjoyable activities in LA, the highlight of my visit was observing the enormous personal growth and development that Joe has undergone since we befriended each other seven years ago at Oxford. Joe was always a great guy, sympathetic, giving, keenly aware of his personal faults, and possessing a robust understanding of the personalities of others. When we were at Oxford, Joe lacked the requisite self-confidence and maturity to fully utilize these traits to the benefit of himself and others. Over the last seven years, Joe has developed that confidence and maturity to the point that his personal strengths not only emanate from him but also rub off on those in his vicinity. It is a sign that someone is a good person when those around him are immediately and unambiguously aware of the strength of his character. It is a sign that someone is a special person when those around him are not only aware of that person's merits but also feel better about themselves as a result of being around that person. In the past, Joe seemed to admire me (in some respects) and sometimes looked to me for advice or emotional support. After my experience in LA, I can say humbly that that situation is reversed, and there is much I observed in Joe's character that I wish to emulate. It is utterly refreshing to be around someone who is so unshakably confident in his ability to meet his own needs that he almost takes this for granted and focuses on understanding and giving to those around him. Joe's dad, a Holocaust survivor who came to America as an orphan and earned a PhD in economics and who recently died, was the same way. I remember that when I first met Joe's dad as an undergraduate junior, he made me feel like my ideas and perspectives were important to him and he took them very seriously, despite the vast disparity in our levels of education. Despite the brevity of our encounters, interacting with Joe's dad gave my own self-confidence a substantial boost, in a time when my life was otherwise in shambles. It honors his memory that Joe has internalized his dad's most salient positive personality trait. I hope I too can emulate this trait and nourish the egos of my students and friends in the same fashion as mine has been nourished by being around Joe's dad and, now, Joe. I also was impressed with the rigor with which Joe had followed my cues regarding what he might do to enhance his intellect. Surprisingly, he independently worked his way through Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and seemed to possess a basic understanding of its arguments, something I could not attain without studying this book in a classroom setting. If everyone took those around him or herself so seriously, the world would be a much better place, since people would feel a deeper sense of self respect and importance and would not need to disparage those around them to feel better about themselves. Of course, Joe is still a spoiled brat, is obsessed with superficial aspects of his appearance, lacks a deep understanding of the socio-economic conditions of the underclasses, and thought that we could leave chopped vegetables on his kitchen's counter for 3 days until the maid arrived to clean them up. But none of this does much to diminish the admiration I felt for him, for the first time, during my recent visit.

More later....

I'm 5 hours from departing Florida on my transcontinental bus ride. Today I rented a motorscooter and rode around the area for an hour. I've had a great time in Florida. Katy and her father are wonderful hosts. He owns a nifty pool table, on which I have been playing frequently with Katy's grandpa Noltan. Noltan is 82, but he is almost as good as me at pool. He beat me in 2 of the 5 games we played. If you look below, you can catch a peak of us playing pool.

While in Florida, I had the privilege of meeting Katy's sister Stephanie. Stephanie is one year younger than Katy, and although Katy and I dated for about 2.5 years, this was the first time that Stephanie and I ever met. Stephanie is shy and introverted and always smiling. Katy is an emotionally complex person who makes no secret of how she is feeling at any given moment. Katy's emotional depth has always made her a compelling person for me. I'd imagine that Stephanie has a similar degree of depth, given that the two of them grew up just a year apart in the same household, but she does not show it. Someday I'd like to write an angsty Victorian-style novel, in the vein of Wuthering Heights, about these two, where they both fall madly in love with the same inaccessible, raving, brutal individual and both go mad, in apparently contrasting but ultimately similar ways, as a result.

Currently I'm reading the collected works of W. Ronald Fairbairn, the founder of object-relations psychology. Fairbairn worked as a psychotherapist rather than an academic, and it is obvious from his writing. The questions and concepts driving his work are derived not from existing theory but from his interactions with his patients. It is refreshing. It is also refreshing to read work that tries to theorize regarding something as impenetrable but central to the human condition as love. Most academics would never care to be so ambitious, if they could more easily advance some existing but arcane debate within their discipline.

Fairbairn posits that some people, after being rejected a lot, come to believe that the love emanating from them is tainted, dirty, foul, polluted. They therefore turn this love inward and seek fulfillment in a self-contained fashion, through distance running or becoming attached to a particular theory or the like, rather than directing their energies outward and seeking fulfillment from the world and people around them. Such introversion was considered abnormal, somewhat unusual, and definitively pathological at the time when Fairbairn was writing (1940s), but I believe that it is thought to be normal, even optimal, nowadays in much of America, and certainly in NYC.

Look how many New Yorkers are more concerned with successfully running the marathon than with developing emotionally rich, mutually caring relationships with friends or significant others. I'm not saying that people should define themselves through others. But there seems to be something cold and inhuman about a city where, for so many people, "me" is mostly a set of relationships with inert objects (most predominantly money) and activities rather than a unique set of ways of reaching out to others. I reject this model, and I look forward to crossing the country and back again to pay homage to some of the most rewarding and deepest friendships I've developed over the years. I've already done so successfully, I think, in Florida. I'm also looking forward to some hot hands of blackjack in Vegas!

Currently listening to REM's Out of Time with Katy's father and getting ready to work my way through Thucydides's History of the Peloponessian War on the bus. I've been assigned, for the spring semester, to TA a class on the sociology of war. Hopefully this will help.

I'm in Florida now. My bus from Florida to Los Angeles leaves in 52 hours. This will be the fourth time I've crossed the country by ground transportation. The first time was when I was eighteen years old, fresh out of high school. I took some of the money I had saved from my Bar Mitzvah and bought an Amtrak pass that allowed me to stop in any three places in the US or Canada. I chose Montreal, Vancouver, and San Francisco. It was my first trip out of the country. I grew up in a rather drab, highly atomized middle and working class suburb outside of Philadelphia. Family outings consisted of going to the mall, or, if we were really lucky, to a buffet in Lancaster. Family vacations were always to Disney World or to my paternal grandparents' condo at the Jersey Shore. I went to Disney World five times as a kid. Once would have been sufficient, and twice more than enough for me. My dad believed that it was inappropriate to take kids on vacations to anywhere but theme parks. Actually this was his excuse for avoiding vacations to culturally significant locales that bore little interest for him. I enjoyed the vacations to Disney World only because they were among the few times that my dad put his abundant anxieties aside, along with his incessant and harping criticism and voluminous rage, and acted like a civil and decent human being. I mean, once he lit up a joint on "It's a Small World," which precipitated an announcement on the ride's PA system alerting patrons to extinguish any lighted cigarettes immediately. But we would all have been relieved if that was the worst thing my dad did during the course of a 7-day period.

My upbringing took place within the confines of a cultural vacuum. At dinner times we were forced to watch whatever television program suited my dad's fancy at the moment, usually vapid shit like Married With Children or The Rockford Files, and mealtime conversation was strictly proscribed, except during commercial breaks, lest my father be disrupted in his boob tube induced reverie. Every once in a while we were granted a reprieve when my dad would take an interest in something mildly stimulating like All in the Family or Taxi. But watching All in the Family in silence was about as stimulating as my home environment ever became.

By the time I was 18, this environment was constricting me to a degree I could no longer tolerate while maintaining my sanity. So I bought a train ticket, stayed in some hostels and other dingy accommodations, drank a ton, and got away from my family for 36 days.

My first destination was Montreal, where I had reserved a room for 5 nights in the McGill University dorms, which were (and probably still are) rented out to budget travelers when the university was not in session during the summer. The air-conditioning broke during the train ride to Montreal, and it was the middle of summer. When I got to my room, I opened the window to cool down a bit, only to find that there was no screen and immediately below me was a flood light that attracted every Francophone gnat in the North American continent. My room flooded with these noxious beasts, the dorm reception desk had closed just after I arrived, and I would not be able to get another room until the next day. Being a resilient son of a bitch, I bought myself a liter of red wine, on this my first day outside of the USA and the first day on which I could legally purchase booze, and I drank myself into a gnat-infested oblivion. But I remember even more poignantly than this uncomfortable night the exultation I felt at being able to wonder around the streets of Montreal, free to do with myself whatever I pleased, liberated from the confines of my home environment.

I started crossing the country not in order to get somewhere but in order to get away from somewhere. Within myself, getting away from that place was never as simple as hopping on a transcontinental train. When I was 18, I wanted it to be that simple. I thought that if I worked hard, got high grades, and gained admission to a first-rate college, I could make a clean break from my place of origin. I equated physical with mental space. Life's journeys are never as simple and straightforward as hopping on a train to get from Point A to Point B. And they have an odd way of bringing you back, unexpectedly, to the place where you started.

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.