The Post Road Trip Blues

We just recently came back from two glorious weeks on a road trip through Canada's Maritime Provinces: up the center of New Brunswick onto Quebec's Gaspe Peninsula and then back through Acadia, then over to Prince Edward Island and then back into New Brunswick. Two glorious weeks of stunning landscape, great food, and some of the warmest, most friendly people you can imagine.

Then back to Boston. We literally went from this...

 ...to this...

...in 24 hours. The picture of the deer and the images of Boston's Friday afternoon rush hour were taken almost exactly 24 hours apart. One day we were in a small, quiet woodlot by the side of a road in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, watching three deer forage (and they watched us, too) and the next day we were negotiating smelly, hot, noisy Boston.

I have a love/hate relationship with Boston. It's been my home for 35 years now. There are things I absolutely love about it. I appreciate that I live in a place and experience the architecture and history that people travel thousands of miles to visit. I love the nearby ocean and its smell. I love hiking the Blue Hills on a weekday, and being so close to Cape Cod, the White Mountains, and New York City. And while I may not actually love the the city's subway system, locally known as the T, I do like it a lot. But, my nickname for Boston is AngryTown. People here are always seem so angry with one another and the effect is not pleasant. In Canada I realized I was always leery about approaching a stranger, and every time I found the person to be friendly and helpful, willing to share and be open without a hint of malice. I've traveled the world, so I think I'm qualified to say that Boston is not a very friendly city. I will even go as far as to say I've found New York and New Yorkers to be friendlier.  And Boston drivers are abysmally aggressive and sometimes even dangerously so, but the kicker is they actually take pride in that. In Canada, while it only happened about three, maybe four times, but when someone learned we were from Boston, their response was, "Oh, I'm sorry", said humorously, but that's the way polite Canadians get their point across.

So, coming off a trip that was so relaxing because we constantly found ourselves in contact with not only some of the most stupendous natural vistas, but people and a society who right from the get-go shared the same values about the environment, socialism vs. capitalism, and the role of religion made me very nervous about crossing back over the border. Granted, we were mostly traveling in predominantly rural sections. But I honestly can't remember one store or restaurant where there was a television screen, which is so prevalent in the United States, even in rural areas. People, for the most part, eat in restaurants, like they do in Europe, sans phones and television. Occasionally you'd see a young man, withdrawn in his hoodie, hunched over a phone in a Tim Horton's, but that's really about it. And once I do remember in the town of Gaspe--this is the big city in that region, mind you--having breakfast at a delightful combination of store/cafe and a woman, probably coming up on her thirtieth year, upon the waitress placing her breakfast in front of her, pulling out her cell phone and taking a picture of her food as naturally as putting the napkin in her lap. But understand that these examples were definitely not the norm, which made them stand out.

So, I repeat, I can't say I was looking forward to being back in Boston and to a greater extent the United States after decompressing from American society where porcupines were as common as squirrels in the park.  There's the current election. "Three hundred and nineteen million people and those two are the best you could come up with?"asked a former Montreal police officer and a liberal who struck up a conversation with me while I waited to pay for gas. There's the violence, and the threat of violence that I feel everyday. There are the racial and gender issues that are so prominent in the news and my Facebook feed that I think are important but still generate so much fighting and accusation without seeming to resolve anything.

I wondered if what I was feeling upon re-entering the United States was akin to what a person feels upon leaving detox, now clean, but again out on the streets without any real defense against threat or temptation. 

The pace of life jangles my nerves in Boston. It's too fast, too loud, too argumentative. People don't discuss things. They wait for you to stop talking so they can poke holes in what you've said, a legacy of all the colleges and their Aristotelian culture, I think. I do everything I can to defuse it's effects, starting with traveling like we just did, taking road trips on backroads and camping along the way. Sometimes you just have to get away from it all.

In Canada I thought of all of things I do to slow time or create peace in my life. I realized the things I do to connect with my dead parents. The list sounds like a recipe for a commune or a Luddite or even a Buddhist. I don't own a cell phone, nor do I want one. I haven't owned a television for over 10 years; we get all of our information and entertainment through a laptop. I wear an analog watch, long before it was hip and fashionable to do so now. We drive late-model vehicles that are paid for, and I'm certainly not the most fashionably dressed person in the room with old Levis and cowboy boots being my "style", as one of our daughters put it. Sue buys most of her clothes in consignment shops. I run to relieve stress and to think. I bake our own bread, cook our meals from scratch, and air-dry our laundry, just like my mother used to do. I take the train into Boston to especially buy locally grown organic meat and vegetables at Boston Public Market. I shave with a double-edge razor, which reminds me of my father. Every day I offer incense to the Buddha, the minute or so it takes me to do that reminds me there's a spiritual life for me to consider.

Right before we left for Canada I realized I was spending a total of upwards of two hours a day on Facebook. More if you included other social media sites like Twitter and news sites. Two hours a day is 14 hours a week, which is almost two full work days. Imagine, I thought, of what I could have written if I had used that time more prudently. I could have finished a play, started a new one, or worked on short stories. I could have improved my music ability or written more songs.

It always happens after traveling. You try to hang on to what life was like when you were free, thinking this is the way life really should be. And we rarely do that. For now, I'm going to leave this post with that thought. Let's see what happens.

Thank you for listening. And please share your ideas for a more peaceful life, and for combating the day-to-day stresses in your own life.

I Need A Change In My Life

Something is very wrong in my life. Changes need to be made. It was one week ago today that Sue and I returned from a wonderful adventure in Nova Scotia, but I didn't know it was a week ago until I checked a calendar. I thought it was about a month, maybe three weeks ago. When the life we returned to here in Boston, with all of its "challenges,"  can overwhelm the feelings of peace and serenity, of being, that we felt there, some drastic changes need to be made.

We started out just heading north from Boston, not knowing where we'd end up in two weeks. We had a tent and a car, and some camping gear. That's about it. But Acadia National Park proved too crowded. Too loud. Americans are loud people. So are French-Canadians who cross over to see the sights on this side of the border. And it's all family-oriented there, it's a safe little national park that Edward Abbey would have hated, and we realized it's us who didn't belong there with the parents with the wee ones who couldn't keep their voices down and the parents who were so stressed from their own life choices to not realize that they and their wee ones who pushed and shoved were rude. Sue and I looked at a map and headed for Cape Breton.

We realized when we got home that something had changed in us there. Something deep, like an earthquake that rumbles deep inside the earth, but it's barely felt on the surface yet a real, significant change occurred.

For me, my soul, that thing captured in this container called my body, began to make itself known again. I began acting and thinking like a writer. And just like I used to be when I lived away from the ocean and didn't know how much I missed the sea until I saw it again, I realized how long it's been since I acted like a writer. These internal dialogues between made-up characters, snatches of words, phrases, descriptions, exposition, all floated around in my head like dust mites in a sunbeam. All I could think about doing was finding a dilapidated old house set in the fog, heated by a wood stove, and get up every morning and put on my favorite old flannel shirt and worn baggy jeans, and write. And the creative spark burst into a creative flame that unfortunately seems to have been extinguished now that I'm back here in Boston.

I'm seriously questioning if the choice I made in 2008 to work in the theater was the right one. I co-founded Boston Public Works because of the hassles of getting a full-length new work produced in Boston, especially if you're a white man like I am. Especially if you're an older white man like I am. Boston is an extremely young, white city. The fringe theater scene, where a new playwright like me would get first produced, is populated for the most part by young, white theater graduates who came from families who could afford the expensive universities like Boston University and Emerson. They graduated, stayed, and formed theaters, and they pretty much cater to the younger population. I actually had the artistic director of a theater--a young man who I like and respect very much--tell me he likes my plays, but they can't cast them because of the actors in the ensemble they pull from, the oldest is about thirty years old. They don't understand the themes that I write about, don't understand older characters, don't understand people who live on the fringes of society, don't understand life events like death and adultery and loneliness. (If any of you are reading this, don't argue: You don't. You think you do on a surface level, but live the life you've lived one more time, commit a few sins, and you'll see what I'm talking about.) Anyway, Boston continues to be the most racist place I've ever lived in, and I grew up where the KKK was evident and real. Boston theater is as white as rice, all the way down through the production teams. I don't want to go so far as to say that the theater community in Boston is racist. I don't think it is. But I do think it acts in a racist manner. For example, gender parity is a topic the leaders in the local community is always promoting, but what they're really promoting are white, female playwrights. I've been to the meetings where all but three or four in room of about 40 to 50 playwrights are white women. If you're not young and white of either gender in this city, you might as well stay home.

And I try to fight the segregation and racism that I've seen for the 34 years I've lived in Boston, but even that--the formation of Boston Public Works--has been wearing me out. The cast and design team of Turtles is diverse, but within Boston Public Works, internal disagreements, members who feel they should have a vote in the way the company operates (if you want to run a company, then start one of your own; really, how do people grow up thinking they get a say in everything?) members who feel their productions should be supported but they don't feel they should have to support the other members, makes me feel as if it isn't all worth it and makes me want to throw up my hands and yes, pull a J.D. Salinger to Nova Scotia. We literally would drive for an hour and see maybe three cars. Heaven! No one preached about gender parity while tabling the racial side of the issue (just for the time being, they say) or cultural appropriation (another popular cause) because there were real issues to deal with, like feeding your family. Friendly, quiet-spoken, polite. Yet keeping just the right amount of distance, giving space to an individual because space was one thing they had plenty of.

Get away. It's always been my modus operandi. (Is that the correct usage of that term?) Sue and I have a short trip to an undisclosed location next week for a couple of days. After Turtles closes in November, we're leaving for London and Paris.  In the spring, more travel. Sue and I are wanderers. Seekers. We know that. Traveling allows us to take the souls entrapped in these human containers out for a spin. We find our American culture humorous, but in small doses. Americans are always trying to tell people how to live, how to think, how to behave, and after awhile we both reach the point where we say, enough is enough, it's time for a change.

A Dangerous Business: really sweet travel blog

I'm a vagabond by nature, and being ensconced on this couch, mending my sacroiliac, I have to resort to travel blogs and sites while even my plans go on hold.

Lucky me that today I stumbled on Anjel Van Slyke and Connal Hughes' blog about their travels around the world, A Dangerous Business. (Tagline: It's a dangerous business going out your door. You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to." --J.R.R. Tolkein.)

I love their tagline. I'm assuming it's The Hobbit. It sounds like something Bilbo might say.

I've always wanted to do exactly what these two have done: travel around the world and write about it at the same time: record and share the experience. I'm a writer, no doubt, and when you are a writer you have this craving to write down and share everything. It's almost an obsession. Kind of sick, actually.

This is still doable in my world. Maybe not a year's worth, but three months maybe. Cross your fingers. I know mine are.

We're leaving on a trip; why am I depressed?

We're counting down the days we when we leave for Spain and North Africa. Doing all the little errands, paying off the Amex so we can put more on it for more frequent flier miles for future trips, buying presents for the people we'll be meeting for the first time, putting finishing touches on our itinerary, which basically amounts to when do we leave Spain for North Africa; Sue and I are very loose.

There's something about traveling, in the leaving, that makes me a bit sad, though. I've noticed it all my life, and I'm aware of it, the same way I'm now aware of the letdown that I'll have when a play that I'm in closes. I know the drop is coming and I'm prepared for it. It's like being depressed in the spring. Everyone thinks you're supposed to be so happy in the spring, just like you should be so happy when you're leaving on a trip. But I get depressed in the spring, just as I've learned so many other people do, and yes, I've read about people, serious travel writers, who have identified the depression that occurs in leaving.

And for anyone who thinks I'm overly sensitive, you know what you can do. I'm so tired of people--usually ones who are thick and dense as a block of wood who experience life with all the vigor of a sea slug, telling me how I should or shouldn't experience life.

It's all in the leaving, and guilt that I'm doing something really nice for myself, a problem I've had all my life thinking that I really don't deserve nice things. (Try growing up poor in the working class; it isn't all a Matt Damon movie.) There's the guilt that I'm leaving behind responsibilities (for awhile, at least) that may need my attention.

It's awfully decadent to be traveling in this economy, isn't it? Even though Sue and I live so frugally in order to travel, and pretty much backpack wherever we go. It's the life we want to live, and it's the life we set out to live. Still, there are all the shoulds: I should be saving my money. I should be spending my money on something more practical or saving it for an emergency. I should be concentrating on looking for permanent work or even a really good contract. Even the play I'm in makes me guilty because last night the cast and director met for the first time and it's a really tight group of people, and I'm leaving and we could be rehearsing when I'm away and I want to do a really good job for the director who I really like, and I don't want to let my cast members down, whom I like and have a lot of respect for.

It's all in the leaving. And I learned a long time ago, on my first really big trip, that you can't look at it that you're leaving, but that you're going somewhere. Never look back (and never look down, either!) But look to where you're heading, and you'll do fine.

Life's little ups and downs

It's been a while since I've consistently blogged. A couple of people have mentioned it to me now, and say they enjoy reading this. It would have been a lot of the same old, same old. Being unemployed sucks. It still sucks, but like everything in life--or at least the way I experience it--it's always a roller coaster ride with continual ups and downs every day.

Yesterday I woke really bummed. It all came crashing down on me. And today? I was called in for an audition for a viral video, which I think is really cool to begin with, and I know I nailed the audition. Whether or not I'll get the part remains to be seen, but it's nice to know that I can actually do the work.

Just like I know I can write. I haven't been blogging because, along with looking for work and a job, I've been submitting to Trazzler. They've accepted a few of my stories, and hopefully some of those "user stories" will turn into Trazzler stories. (BTW, become a friend of mine on Trazzler. I think it will help my odds of getting freelance from them.) That's the plan, anyway. I honestly believe there are things in this world that make it better. Actually make the world a better place. And I think travel is one of those things. And if I can use my promotional writing talents and skills to induce people to go travel, then I don't think I'm doing such a bad thing. Someday--and hopefully that someday is sooner than later--Sue and I hope to travel around the world. Big dreams? I don't know. What's wrong with big dreams. If you shoot high, you may miss, but you'll still probably hit higher than if you aimed low.

And Sue and I are leaving for southern Spain and north Africa in three weeks. I was laying on our bed in our guest room, where you can look out the window and see the planes coming and out of Logan, and I thought to myself, what the heck are you doing lying here? Get moving. Decisions sometimes are made quick, and Sue and I can't wait. The economy can go to hell. I found a cheap flight out of JFK. We're taking the Fung Wah bus out of South Station to Chinatown. The subway to JFK. And I can live on fifty cent burritos. I know I can. I've done it.

And one more thing about Sue. God love her. Easter is Sunday. Some of her family is scheduled to come. It's still up in the air. My Kathryn is coming in tonight. I came home from my audition to find Sue here at the apartment on her lunch hour, vacuuming. She said she wanted the place nice for Kathryn. Now, we have a really crummy vacuum cleaner. So I told her if I got this part, we'll buy a new vacuum cleaner. One that works. Her response? She said, I'd rather have an amp. You gotta love a woman like that.

Az

Yesterday I was freezing on the T platform in Wollaston, but less than 48 hours before that I had been on the Third Mesa on the Hopi reservation in Arizona, talking in a low voice to a Hopi who was dressing an elk he had shot. We're back, and I wasn't prepared for the jolt because I never saw it coming.

One minute you're driving a road on a mesa, flat as the ocean with the horizon 360 degrees around you. Then you're reflectively ducking, always looking up scared something was going to fall on your head, it's so claustrophobic here. I used to think I couldn't live without the ocean. But I learned that it's the open I like. It's the space I like. I want to be able to see them coming.

One minute we're shifting from foot to foot in the shadow of the Rain God butte in Monument Valley, the sand crunching underfoot, or picking our way along an edge in Canyon de Challey, our footsteps knocking on time, our ears hearing the universal sound, and the next I want to stick cotton in my ears to block out the unrelenting scream of a CNN reporter.

Time and space. It's there. It's connected, but we don't notice it because our planet is too little. But if you listen to the rocks, they will tell you not to hurry. (Time and space are connected because it takes time to move through space. It takes time to step from here to there, it takes time to fly to the edge of the universe.) The rocks didn't hurry and look at what they accomplished. The Indians seem to understand this, the ones who are still trying to maintain their culture. Imagine living out there all your life, and by life I mean the sum total of all the people who lived before you, learning and passing their wisdom to generation after generation.

It's so quiet out there. And everything is so subtle, hidden, but like the trickster coyote it's concealed right there in front of you. Words don't work there. Everything speaks a different language: the land, the people.

First Stop: Phoenix

11.24.08

Continental Airlines continued to impress us on the final leg of the trip between Houston and Phoenix.—although I have to admit I raise an eyebrow to a $5.00 Coors light. Again, though, I wish I had gotten the name of the flight attendant who just added a bit more fun to the trip. If anyone from Continental is reading this, it was an older woman—sorry, darling, I don’t know how else to put it but you were put together really well and had a lot of life in you—on Flight 1705.

The surprise about Phoenix is how big of a city it is. I had no idea. Someone told us it’s the fifth largest city in the United States, and it just goes on for miles. You can see it from the air that it just sprawls. Sue and I found the hostel after about an hour wait for the bus at the airport. We’re trying to do as much as we can on a budget (that means as cheaply as possible without compromising our trip), and when we learned that Phoenix had a bus system we thought we give it a go, saving ourselves two days’ of rentals. But the sad reality is that the bus system in Phoenix, as it is in most American cities, is woeful. We spent more time waiting for buses, and therefore wasting time, than we really wanted. Sue and I figured there are maybe three cities in the entire U.S. with decent public transit systems: New York, Boston, and Washington. It seems that with the Big Three begging for money in Washington, and President-elect Obama promising jobs and a greener environment, a large scale, nationwide public transportation system would be just the ticket. It’s green, it makes jobs, it promotes a healthier life, grows industry. Good idea, right? So why don’t I think it will happen?

We got to the Central Station in Phoenix and missed our connection--that particular bus had stopped running for the night--but the hostel was within walking distance anyway, at least walking distance for us. We walk a lot. We ended up finding the street but couldn’t find the actual hostel, going down this dark street looking at house numbers. Suddenly we hear this friendly voice out of the darkness, “Are you looking for the hostel?” It was Antonio, a young student who lived upstairs at the hostel. He said we had that hostel look: backpacks shouldered, and a lost look.

The hostel in Phoenix is a safe little hippie haven hid behind a stand of bamboo. Sue, a gregarious, helpful woman with a very liberal bent, runs the place, and there was the usual assortment you’ll find at a hostel. A serious young man was eating a sandwich made of bread that appeared to me to have bits of straw in it. He was riding a motorcycle down to South America, and said he was going to stop in Costa Rica and learned some sustainable living skills. Okay. An older woman traveling alone.

The room was neat and tidy. Phoenix on a Sunday is a bit weird. A bit of a ghost town, with the only denizens being the homeless, the down and out, and crack addicts. We figured everyone was out in their homes in the suburbs, but upon leaving the next day it didn’t seem much better. Antonio told us that the recession hit hard there. Construction is the main work, and that pretty much went bye-bye.

We hit the Heard Museum, a great place to learn about the local Native American culture. We stayed in Phoenix for a day, thinking we’d hit the Heard Museum and the Botanical Gardens to learn more about what we’d see up north in Flagstaff and Sedona. More waiting for buses, and a long bus trip to the Botanical Gardens proved fruitless. No one seemed to know where the Gardens were—a curious thing. It seemed a lot of people we talked to in Phoenix, aside from the crazy crack addicts, had no idea where anything was in the city. And if they did, they gave us directions using the points of the compass. It was always, you have to go west, or east. The Botanical Gardens required a reservation, something that wasn’t in the guide book. It would have been nice to know since we wasted hours getting there, wandering around looking for the Gardens including getting on the phone with them (walk north, when later I figured out she meant south) and riding back to the hostel again.

Another note on Phoenix. It kind of looks like what the world may start to look like if this recession really takes hold. Kind of a ghost town. It was all neat and clean,, but everything was empty. The streets, the museums, just a lack of any vitality or energy. The urban area itself wasn’t very people friendly. And there are a lot of homeless and/or very poor. A lot. Again, on Sunday, that was pretty much all there was on the streets. Kind of a weird, Road Warrior kind of world.

I'm not complaining. Sue and I don't always have to have pretty when we travel. We travel, as much as anything, to learn about the world, and believe me, you can learn a lot sitting on a bus loaded with the down and out. You learn what's out there. You learn a bit of their lives. You can see their desperation. Their mistakes. Their meanness and their kindness. They'll reach into their pockets for a quarter a young mother doesn't have, and they'll stroke the head of their sleeping boyfriends. They look mean and irritable and sometimes downright scary. You see the demons that infect and inflict their minds, and you can't help but have a little pity for them.

Spam in a can

Airbus built a super jumbo jet that can carry 550 passengers. Just the thought of being cooped up in a freaking metal tube with 449 sweating, smelly, crazy people blasting along at 40,000 effing feet gives me the fantods.

I'm claustrophobic as it stands. Most of the time I'm okay, but once I spent just about an entire trans-Pacific flight standing back by the bathrooms talking to other passengers and with my face pressed against the bulkhead porthole marveling at the Alaskan glaciers. I could have been taken for a freak, but I actually made a few friends on that flight. It was either that or get jammed smack dab in the middle of the center section and start hyperventilating.

But, I don't know what I'm grousing about...I don't have the money to go anywhere that thing's gonna fly, anyway. If I do get out of this country, I'll end up on some puddle-jumper airline run by some ex-pat who sells your ticket in a Quonset hut, loads your pack, flies the plane barely missing on takeoff the top of the volcano where the native population sacrifice virgins, bounces you to a landing, screeching to a halt at the end of a dirt runway with two tires blown in the middle of a banana plantation, and drinks tequila with you that night.