Point of Departure

Chicago, IL to Minneapolis, MN

Chicago’s O’Hare Airport is a testament to man’s ability to modify his environment. In the case of O'Hare Airport, man has managed to transform several square miles of land into a hub of perennial gridlock where seething travelers trample each other in the continuing struggle to be the first in line for a delayed takeoff to God only knows what irrelevant corner of the globe. Travel as a competitive sport. Travel as a contest with winners declaring victory over losers based on boarding order and the privilege of cramming one too many carry-ons into the overhead compartment. “If it don't fit don't force it, baby,” counsels one chipper flight attendant, although I'm unclear whether she's doling out travel instructions or life lessons. At least there’s drama in the struggle to make my flight on time.

According to the latest statistics only Atlanta’s Hartsfield is busier…but thanks to sloppy administration and archaic infrastructure O’Hare takes the prize as the nation’s worst delayed airport. As it happens I find myself sitting in the regal atmosphere of the Cinnabon/Vienna Beef combo food court observing Labor Day travelers struggle with the ridiculously excessive baggage (roller carts and screaming children) of a three-day weekend. Normally I wouldn’t think twice about flight delays or leisure flyers or travel inconvenience, having served two solid years of a weekly LaGuardia commuter sentence, but the flight I raced out the door to make this morning departed without me from the Midway Airport on the other side of the city. It's fun to live in a town with two major airports because it affords the hurried traveler ample opportunity for hilarity when taking the wrong train to the wrong one. The last time I made this mistake I missed a good friend’s wedding so forgive me if I’m a little sore.

Frustrating foul-ups aside, in just a few hours I'll be back to Minneapolis to see Cherry whom I’ve loved and missed for two long years while living through an extended layover in Chicago. Cherry is special: she’s got dangerous curves you rarely find on girls like her nowadays. She likes to be pushed but snarls if you don’t treat her with respect. People used to call her cheap but she carries herself with that classic touch of class. She’s a dollar a dozen in the bay area as I found when I was scouting grad schools where in one hour I counted ten just like her.

Cherry is a red 1966 289 V8 vinyl top notchback Ford Mustang.

I bought Cherry six months after starting a restoration on Sally, another ’66 with more hidden rust than a Russian oil tanker. Found myself in a typical gumption trap, rationalizing all that cutting and spending and bolt pulling and sanding and welding in the name of “education,” and losing sight of my real goal: get the beast to run. Like most obsessives I dumped dollar after dollar into the project, seduced by details, pressured by competitive comparisons, and fantasizing of a mean machine that I consumed again and again and again in the recesses of my mind. Sally’s restoration project stalled at ninety percent done with ninety percent to go. So being the promiscuous boy I am I went hunting on Teh Internets and found Cherry in Klamath Falls, Oregon, a well-preserved and once restored doll that went for cheap. For good reason—Klamath Falls is God’s country with amazing mountain passes and a massive lake basin and absolutely no economic machinery of any kind. People go there to retire (or semi-retire) and take in the view. The guy I bought Cherry from wanted a 1967 Barracuda and had a lead on a deal, so if I covered the ‘cuda I got Cherry. Cash on delivery of course.

My love for Cherry may be easy to understand. She symbolizes the end of a very different life I led before coming to Chicago, a life of wedded bliss and workaday grind in a charming modern house that served as a retreat from the routine, my little retro modern architectural sanctuary with my cute little ex-wife and our cute little Danish modern furnishings. A restless kind of settled where I could invest my attention and energy into my immediate little concerns like rowdy neighbors and city zoning plans and school board elections. A happy kind of discontent in which regular business trips made it reassuring to come back home but a little uncomfortable to stay for long. Cherry took my retro aesthetic to the level of integrated fantasy—on my little plot of land life was still and timeless and perfect. Mix in a massive dose of existential angst, self-discovery, and life meaning questions to stir the pot and I’m left with a hot little car and some wonderful bittersweet memories.

Like a lot of guys I have a thing for cars. I really truly love them, particularly the American muscle-era classics that allowed backyard grease monkeys to make horses to the back axle and cruise for chicks any given Saturday on any main street drag. I miss Cherry and I'm anxious to see her again.

The details of my relationship with Cherry help establish a frame of reference for trip that I’ll be taking over the next several weeks. Growing up my dad took my sisters and me on holiday highway excursions every year. We saw the Grand Canyon, the Black Hills, Epcot center; swam in the pacific and the Gulf. But I stayed anchored to Pop Americanis with my trusty walkman and the relief of prime-time television in a Color TV hotel room (Free HBO!). These trips always made me impatient (I was a pre-teen, what didn't make me impatient?) and very introspective. Now that I live in Chicago it would be a sin not to take the advice of my fellow classic car enthusiasts and drive old Route 66 at least once before it's gone. It starts in Chicago and winds across the country coming to its end in L.A. Or so I'm told; I guess I'll find out. At any rate I hope to catch a more meditative version of that introspective bug and lay out in words some of the things that have been kicking around in my mental junk drawer for a while. So I’m going to do it one more time in a regress-and-progress attempt let my mind follow the car and let the car follow the road.

This trip clears time and space for me to explore a variety of puzzles and problems and paradoxes I’ve run up against while trying to make sense of how we interact. Interpersonal dynamics became a bit of an obsession with me and after sucking up so much self-help I got a little sick I went off in search of high theory. That search brought me to business school to study organizational psychology. While my much smarter business school brethren and sistern [sic] spent their days calculating game-theoretic equilibriums, modeling cash flow, and debating the grand unified theory of leadership, I found myself along with a few academic-minded grad students haunting Chicago’s psychology and sociology and philosophy workshops and auditing classes that caught my attention (like the “Sociology of Human Sexuality” taught by luminary Edward Laumann). An interdisciplinary undergraduate redo? I’ll take it. More to the point I’ll take, synthesize, and offer back up a perspective on the dynamics of attention, awareness, and social interaction. For this purpose I’m not interested in statistically valid science or in theoretical and grand literary flourishes but in an evidenced ethnography and useful account of what us smarter monkeys are up to in our beautifully gilded societal cage. I’m comfortable foreshadowing a picture of social life as arbitrary (or sociologically speaking, constructed) and in continual responsive, adaptive flux. If you pigeonhole me a narcissistic postmodernist you will be correct but I’ll still punch you in the arm for saying it.

If I were a better scientist I'd recruit an unsuspecting test subject to run my mind experiments on so I could maintain objective distance. Unfortunately my friends aren't fool enough to sign up for something like that and I have no kids to misappropriate as guinea pigs. I guess that leaves me to study myself, playing doctor and patient at the same time. That's cool, but in this experiment I think it's best if I personalize my observations without denying their generality. So when I say things like "I think [something]" or "I suddenly realize [something]," I do not mean to suggest that I'm the first person in human history ever to have thought that something, but merely that as the subject of my observation it has come into my awareness. That seems like a fun way to play with myself...hey, get your mind out of the gutter.

As to the general direction of the discussion: I’m interested in interest itself. More precisely, what catches our attention, what do we care about even when it's hard to care about anything at all, what makes something personally relevant to you or me or anybody, and what makes up "emotional investments" where we turn attention into passion, commitment, and drive. Shiny old cars can capture the attention of some people and go unnoticed by others, hold the fascination of a wannabe grease monkey like myself, merit the scorn of environmentally conscious activists, and fire the passion of drag racers. The broad idea of "emotional investment" may seem a touch abstract but as the idea develops I think it will come down to earth with a very forceful thud. Think about this for yourself: what has recently captured our attention, consumed your time and interest, compelled you to action. Why? In retrospect, did it really deserve your attention, time, and interest? Did it really matter?

Love and hate. Passion and fear. Commitment and indifference. I can’t think of a more interesting way to tackle the subject of interest than to go out in the world and see what happens. Maybe something interesting?

Thanks for your interest, anyway. Enjoy the ride.

Next stop: Catching Up