There'll Be a Slight Delay (Because of the Cops)

Also: Cartoons, What's Left After the Fire, and NOTES TOWARD AN ITINERARY!

The worst thing about planning is the arrogance involved. As if I know what’s going to happen and we can agree at a time and place to smugly watch it unfold. This was brought home to me a few days ago as I was just minding my business, driving around, when I was pulled over by a cop. Turns out my license plate has expired, and I need a new one before I leave town. So instead of leaving town on or around the 27th, (my original plan) I’m stuck here until (counts on fingers) the 22nd—when I went to the DMW—plus “7 to 10 days,” which is when the mail sends me my new plate sticker. So maybe I’m out by the 29th. Maybe I stay till the 3rd. Maybe something terrible happens and I’m trapped here forever with no explanation, waiting like Estragon for mail that will never arrive just so the audience will leave angry and confused. Since my actual stint where I’m housesitting ends on August 1st, it feels like there’s a 50% chance I’m going to have to crash with a friend before I even begin, just to have a place to wait for the mail from.

By the way, “being pulled over by a cop” is the only way I’ve ever been able to remember to get new plates. Does anyone actually buy a license plate and then go, “Well, while I’m thinking about it, I’d better put a reminder on my calendar for next year!” Who are you people? Where do you store your future calendars and isn’t that a form of hoarding?

Anyway, I said I was just “minding my business,” but of course what I was really doing was looking for places to dump every extraneous thing I own, because it now has to all fit in my tiny car. It forces a lot of brutal decisions, which is summed up by this napkin cartoon I drew at a P.F. Chang’s the other day.

I’ve had a few days to wield the shovel. Here’s what the carnage looks like so far:

BOARDGAMES

All gone. All of them. They’re bulky and I never played them. Not that I’m saying goodbye to the hobby. I just have to trust that wherever I land, if they have boardgame nights, other people will bring the boardgames.

DVDS

I own over 200 DVDs which fit into seven light 30-disc carrying cases. I have left 5 of them with a dear friend and am limiting my collection to two cases: One of classics I might need for comfort watching, and one for things I’ve purchased but need to watch at some point so why not now. (With a little overflow from the favorites case.)

ROLE PLAYING GAMES

Again, I have eight little square storage boxes of games, and I’ve only taking three—which is still way too much, and a sign that this is more about addiction than practicality. If I’m coming by your place, I might drag you into a game of Magical Kitties Save the Day, and this whole storage nightmare will be worth it.

BOOKS

The biggest surprise in this round of reduction is that I have almost no wiggle room. After twenty moves since 2000 where I eliminated academic books, childhood favorites, reference volumes, series I finished and was happy to display, all consigned to the flames, I’m left with still too many books, and yet I can’t seem to get rid of any of them. If I couldn’t kill them twenty moves ago, they’ve proven their durability.

Rather than show you what I’m taking (I think they can all fit into a large bin), I wanted to show you the most annoying pile in my collection: Books I’m Keeping Around Because I Keep Thinking I’ll Need Them For a Future Essay.

The most impossible-to-get-rid-of books are those that you had to track down and aren’t commonly digitized—especially if you need them for research and can’t count on having access to a local academic library. This pile reflects five obsessions that I hope I can dispatch at some point.

1.) Actual Lives of Actual Writers. Lives of the Novelists is a fascinating reference because it proves, in article after article, that most of the world’s great novelists were either rich to begin with or were terrible with money and died broke. (Focusing heavily on midlist English novelists who don’t even have Wikipedia pages.) Very, very few made a living at it, and this seems worth knowing ahead of time. So one day I’ll go through this whole volume, depressing arc by depressing arc, and summarize it in an essay that’ll be very useful for people who want to know but have better things to do.

This might be the most important essay to finish, because once I do I don’t have to lug that volume around anymore, and I can donate it to the local Home For Tedious Obsessives.

2.) Quaker Stuff. I’m going to need these books for this very trip. I don’t know why so much Quaker writing goes undigitized, but even stuff that’s in the public domain—such as John Woolman’s journal—hasn’t made it into Project Gutenberg. So I have to grab what I can and read it in physical form. At least most of it is short.

3.) In His Steps Stuff. There are four or five novels in the In His Steps cycle—a genre of pious Christian literature where a community decides to really ask “What Would Jesus Do?” for about a year and then the plot reports (usually glowingly) about the magic results—and I always find each new version fascinating. [Still needed: What Would Jesus Do? by Glenn Clark (1950), and In His Steps Again by David Heeren (2012). Not pictured: Jesus Is Here (1913) by Charles Sheldon, a sequel by the original In His Steps author.] I’ve written a long unpublishable essay about my own research on this topic (it’s too niche a topic to support 40 pages of a magazine), and I keep wanting to do a sarcastic parody novel of my own someday, which I hope to call WTFWJD. Until I finish the goddamn thing, these are coming with me everywhere.

4.) What Is Literary Fiction? I’ve long been fascinated by the distinction between literary and genre fiction (because they’re marketing categories that only really arose in the 20th century), and I’ve long wanted to do a close reading of Housekeeping, because it seems to me quite possibly the Platonic ideal of a literary novel: whatever literary fiction is trying to do, that’s what Housekeeping is getting at. So what counts as a literary plot? What do literary characters do? All I know is twenty years ago I read 50 pages and stopped when I realized I couldn’t remember a single thing that had happened, nor recall a single line of dialogue. I could probably toss it—there’s no shortage of copies around—but what the hell: I landed the fish and it’s not very big. Just seeing it reminds me that I need to write that essay.

5.) Novels In Verse. This is just an obsession—or, as autistic people like to say, a special interest. I’ve always wanted to write a novel in verse—one that actually rhymes, and has genuine action sequences—and in the meantime I just like to have these others around. It’s a small collection at the moment, but only because they don’t show up in bookstores very often. If I see Toby Barlow’s Sharp Teeth anywhere on my trip, it’ll be an instant buy. (That’s the first novel in verse about werewolves. Alas, it does not rhyme.) Would love to have Elizabeth Barrett-Browning or Arthur Hugh Clough on the shelf with them, too. In Victorian times, this was an actual genre!

CARTOON BREAK
I promised “cartoons,” and that’s plural, so here’s number two. Things are in such a state that I can’t even find my black dry-erase markers.

Anyway, I’ve gassed on long enough. Let’s get to my actual trip.

NOTES TOWARD AN ITINERARY
I took way too long on the graphics for this, but here’s a map:

This is the extremely rough itinerary I have in mind. I will be playing it by ear, following whatever muse flutters through the car window, and I’m not always sure how long I’ll stay. But I’m budgeting one day of travel between places, and about three days of stay in each town (one to do stuff, one to write about it, one to hang out with my hosts). Two days if I don’t know anyone and want to save on hotels. Even though I know this is rough, I already know it’s delusional. But this is the best I can summon. NOTE that it already optimistically assumes that I’ll have my tags by August 1st.

August 1 — transit from Tucson to Roswell
August 2-3 — Roswell
August 4 — transit from Roswell to Austin (probable stop in Houston)
August 5-7 — Austin
August 8 — transit from Austin to New Orleans
August 9-10 — New Orleans
August 11 — transit from New Orleans to Tallahassee
August 12-14 — Tallahassee
August 15 — brief transit from Tallahassee to Atlanta
August 15-17 — Atlanta
August 18 — transit from Atlanta to Nashville
August 19-22 — Nashville
August 23 — transit from Nashville to Kansas City
August 24-26 — Kansas City
August 27 — brief transit to Chicago
August 28-29 — Chicago
August 30 transit from Chicago to Pittsburgh/Philly/Wheatland area
August 31-September 3 — Philly area
September 4 — transit from Philly to New York
September 5-8 —New York City
September 9 — brief transit from New York to Boston
September 10-13 — Boston
September 14 — transit from Boston to Burlington
September 15-16 — Burlington

After Burlington I have no idea. I’d like to do a quick jaunt into Canada for a lark, but realistically I’ll then just circle back around and see what seems like the best city to try to build a new life for the next few years. NOTE: If you’re signed up for this newsletter, you’ll be getting an update from the road from every one of these cities, since “writing about it” means Substack.

”SOON”: BROUGHT TO YOU BY COOKIES

I can’t close without sharing a picture of the three fortunes I got from the cookies at the aforementioned P.F. Chang’s.

Two out of three isn’t bad, as predictions go. And who knows? Maybe my license plate tags will come with a sympathy card. In the meantime, I’m going to be keeping an eye out for fortune cookies that aren’t in the pocket of Big Soon.

And now I have to go hurl more things into garbage bins. Thanks for your time! I hope this has made your day slightly more pleasant.