Foyil, OK to Chicago, IL
Aggressive schedules and leisure attitudes don’t mix. I’ve been on enough vacations where we’ve struggled to cram ten amazing things into three stressful days I’d end up screaming, “Let’s hurry the hell up and have fun!” I do not like that. I prefer certain things to take their own course, not to be rushed but to experienced and appreciated. Missing out on some must-do activities isn’t a problem because we did whatever we did with enthusiasm. I wasn’t half-gone sweating over the next thing on the list.
I oversleep in Claremore and make no haste getting on the road. I’d like to make Chicago by tomorrow, the arbitrary return date I established when I left. I’m flexible about when I get back home in that the bills are caught up and I don’t have pressing appointments. Being back home tomorrow feels about right. I’m having fun and the ride has mostly taken its course. If I get to southern Illinois by the end of the day I’ll consider that to be good progress. It takes ten hours to drive nonstop all the way to Chicago according to the guys I met last night at the motel’s front desk. I’d prefer to tear through Oklahoma and take Missouri leisurely to catch the Jesse James Wax Museum and maybe peek into the famed Meramec Caverns. We tourists love our traps.
The characters on this road trip have been fascinating and the drive has given me plenty of space to turn my attention to number of unexpected things. Yet somehow I don’t feel I cleared my head the way I intended. Something is missing, incomplete and I’m bothered that the trip will end without my dredging up…something I can’t put my finger on. I have this sinking sense that there’s unfinished business and I can’t say quite what it is. It’s remarkable what comes to mind when I let my guard down, suspend my own judgment, and let the thread unwind. It’s freeform and chaotic like excited conversations with good friends and like excited conversations often involves successive approximation of meaning built on utterances, miscommunications, and clarifications using words and body language in an effort to converge on apparently mutual understanding. Communicating with oneself in meditation, contemplation, and writing has the excited expressive quality of conversation, at times veering clean off the road and stumbling back again. When I drive the bright white lines guide me and ditches make it clear I’m off track. Taking the side roads through my own head doesn’t include historic brown highway signs or gigantic “Here It Is” billboards.
With a light breakfast and a packed car I trade pleasantries with the Claremore Inn attendant, a nice Indian woman who believes like me that discrimination by old white racists accounts for the “American Owned” signs spreading across Route motels. By 10:00AM I’m on my way north to Foyil, the nearest nowhere town along OK-66, the original alignment and the alternative to the turnpike out of Claremore. It doesn’t take long to find a row of boarded up ghosts of Route 66 past. The shell of a garage labeled “Cox Motor Co” once proudly sold Goodyear tires imposes itself alongside a Dairy Queen drive through that makes excellent backdrops for photos of Cherry, who appears right at home alongside the picnic benches under the nostalgic malt shop signs. The sun is intense and hot, the paint on every building in sight is peeling. Stifling. Even though it’s Sunday I’m surprised at how desolate the place feels. No cars, no kids playing, no dogs barking despite houses in the area. It’s just hot and quiet here with these relics.
Cherry feels the heat too. The temperature gauge is touching the red line already so I check the coolant, top off the radiator, and take things slowly. There’s no need to rush and seize the engine. It isn’t clear whether the fan is kicking on or if the thermostat is flakey and I wish the car would adjust itself for changes in heat, altitude, speed, and all that.
Most things don’t simply fix themselves, though. Most things require maintenance. Cars, houses, roads, buildings, relationships, bodies, minds, you name it. For the longest time I suffered from the delusion that basic adult competence involved doing everything only once, doing it the first time right, and never worrying about again. Dad installed that in me: If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing right. True if you know exactly what you’re doing, then doing it right is more sensible than screwing it up for the drama of it. Doing something right is not so easy when you’re figuring it out as you go. I should only need to explain an idea to a coworker once and my statement should fully and permanently transmit the details of the situation. Funny though that with product design, as with a lot of things, changes are a bitch to keep track of. Complex systems just don’t behave like simple tools. Hit a nail with a hammer and the nail goes into the board. Hit a computer with a hammer, though, and the computer doesn’t spring to life. Software is a complex system. People are complex too.
This incessant need for communication and clarification gave me a headache for a year on a product overhaul early in my career. I was spending two weeks each month away at corporate headquarters making a slew of interrelated product changes. Then I’d go to Minneapolis and tell the person in charge of engineering the essence of these changes, expecting him to figure out the details and propagate the necessary information to the right people. Of course it never occurred to me that I’d been immersed in this for two weeks but somehow I expected him to catch up in a few hours and catch up the team in a day. Inevitably someone wouldn’t hear and before I knew what was happening we had a broken product. So out of frustration and I’d call a staff meeting and make sure everyone was “on the same page” (managers love to talk in clichés because it makes us look like we’re in some kind of elite club for vacuous double-speaking idiots). A few days later a similar problem would surface, not because everyone had a different idea but because they had the same wrong idea. I would have left out some detail or a dependency that tied this or that a change to another product in a different department. I hadn’t anticipated all the little the connection and didn’t think it was worth mentioning. Disrupt everyone’s job, throw out a week’s worth of work and start over.
This happened more often than I care to admit. After the project ended I was having a beer and catching up with Tyson who was one of the programmers involved. He told me that about half of the time the engineering team expected that things would break but they did what I said anyway. “Really? Why didn’t you say something and save us all the hassle?” I asked. “Well,” he said directly, “you always seemed to know what was going on so we figured you anticipated all the consequences and told someone in the other department to adjust their design. When it broke we figured we must have done something wrong. And besides, you never asked what we thought.” That was tough to hear. I maintained an image of competence and control but didn’t maintain the relationships that would have made this complex project much more pleasant and productive. I had become commanding at the cost of being approachable. I was lucky to hear this from someone I trusted and respected, because I could actually hear it. I didn’t need to defend myself from it. I could work on my own maintenance. Revising dad’s maxim: If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing wrong. Learn from the mistakes, though. Pay attention. Notice the details. Then do it right.
Catching sight of a bizarre folk sculpture in Chelsea I pull to the shoulder to let the lone car behind me pass. I’m confused at first as to whether this is a museum or a gift shop or some abandoned art project, and I realize it’s a mechanic’s garage. There are random objects d’art, sculpture, and miscellaneous signage. The letters above the rusted corrugated garage door spell “CARAGE” (which for some reason I find hysterical) and a giant barrel mounted on a flagpole in front advertise “Rotors Turned” and “Welding” in irregular block letters. It’s a service station circus and I wonder if they get much business on this stretch of road before I catch the “For Sale By Owner” sign in the front overgrown grass.
It’s not much farther to White Oak. I cruise quite slowly through town and come upon an unusual junkyard. Here are not your typical late-model wrecks but an assortment of classics left to rot in a desolate grassy field. Chevys, Packards, Plymouths, a Firebird, more chrome and rust than I’ve seen in one place in a while. Near the main office I spot an old black Mustang poking out from under a tarp. 
I leave Cherry running and get out for a closer look. From a distance I can tell it’s an early model year notchback. Standard package, not equipped with the Pony upgrades. Three-prong quarter panel ornament on the side. It’s a ’66 just like Cherry and it’s been in an accident. The rear quarter panel is smashed in what appears to have been a rear-end collision. The front fender is crumpled, presumably from being thrust into a pole or another car. Moving around the back I see the rear end is demolished. This is a wreck. I peek inside the open window to find aftermarket racing upgrades: bucket seats, a compact rubber steering wheel, chrome accelerator and brake pedals. An air scoop has been butchered into the hood. Someone beat this car up and got a little joyriding done before it met its end. Wandering across the field I browse a row of old chasses for other fascinating finds and realize that most of these machines have been picked over, harvested for engines, wheels, body parts, whatever was eligible for salvage. A gutted ’67 catches my attention, it’s that putrid vomit green that no one ever liked but they seemed to buy. Across from it is an ugly black Mustang 5.0, mid-80’s vintage with that horrible Fox chassis (“Can you make a Mustang that looks like an Escort please? Thanks.”). It’s hot and quiet here, peaceful. And dead. The stillness is like a graveyard but instead of being midnight and windswept it’s midday and humid.
Peaceful. Dead. They go hand-in-hand. When people disclose their desire for peace and tranquility I can’t help but to hear it as a kind of death wish. “Why can’t we just live in peace and avoid conflict?” Life, precisely by being alive, resists peace and tranquility. Life gets excited, surprised, irritated—it disequilibrates. Life survives. When that stops, by definition, life dies. Survival requires ongoing maintenance. Maintaining the individual means acquiring resources (like clothing and calories) often at the expense of other life forms. If I were a lion I’d eat a gazelle and end that particular gazelle’s life. I might not like that lions are carnivores and I may judge them to be ethically repugnant, but my critique is not likely to turn them into gazelle-loving herbivores. Maintenance of the species factor into life, too. Nothing personal, but in the ecological scheme of things your life doesn’t matter if your species doesn’t continue. If I were a lion I’d do my worst to mount a pretty lioness and fend off those other lions vying for her affection (so to speak). We’d snarl, bite, scratch, and fight…not to mention what might happen if I actually stumbled upon another male lion. It’s sloppy, messy, violent, and chaotic. Survival of the individual and survival of the species. The core themes in the dramatic performance of life.
Of course we happen to be humans not lions. We can plan and organize our way out of these primitive modes of mere subsistence and imagine an agrarian society whereby we farm the land so as not to kill animals and propagate the species through some prearranged mating scheme. No contests, no competition, no conflict, no drama.
Peace. Relentless peace. Interminable peace. How mindfuckingly boring.
That seems to be the crux of it. There’s a reason that the Christian conception of Heaven is rendered as some idyllic springtime meadow stolen straight from the myths of the Elysian Fields. Peace, tranquility, stillness, eternity. That describes the direct and immediate perception of the eternal ever-present and unchanging Godhead. That’s the freedom from drama, the freedom from suffering, the freedom from life. And that’s the point: it is freedom from life, it is not life. It comes before and continues after; life’s suffering not a delusion but a design. Survival of the individual includes at the very least the potential for competition over resources. And where the potential exists, the law of large numbers says the inevitable will follow. Conflict will arise because life, this planet, and the resources that cover it are finite and their acquisition benefits living beings. If I’m alive it’s a matter of time before I step on someone’s toes and we tussle.
Life sparks this ridiculous drama of survival. For millennia we as a species lived in small tribes like the small towns that dot Route 66 where my private business was everybody else’s soap opera. In these small tribes we worked together to stay alive, and when a couple of young boys became men they would fight for the attention of a young girl. Drama! And when one of the tribesmen confronted the tribe leader for dominance factions formed and infighting over “good leader/bad leader” erupted. Drama! And when years later someone remarked about the deposed leader old wounds surfaced and curses uttered. Drama! It’s part and parcel of social life. It’s the foundation for human life.
Eternal peace is something we will each achieve, of course. Just wait a while; none of us are getting out of this life alive. It’s just that we don’t live in peace; we die into it for all eternity. “Rest in peace,” the gravestone will implore as if there were a choice in the matter.
Cherry’s idle becomes irregular as I daydream about eternity in this godforsakenly hot podunk junkyard. At first I suspect she’s overheating. Then I realize we’re thinking along the same lines and she doesn’t want to be left here to rot in peace like all these other forgotten wrecks. She doesn’t see this as eternal paradise; rusting in the sun never to roll again is her concept of hell. I love her spark of life. As long as she’s alive she’s going to put up a fight. I crawl into the car and we make our way back to the turnpike, slowly though. This overheating concerns me. The radiator has overflowed several times in the past few days and if I push her I’m worried that Oklahoma will be Cherry’s Elysian Field.
Vinita is the last little town we cruise through before making our way off the old two lane alignment back onto the expressway. It’s a sleepy town with its very own downtown stoplight. I take it slow to soak up the scenery and see if anything catches my eye. Nothing does. We pass through town almost on the entrance ramp when a white ’66 passes in the other direction and the driver waves his hand slightly in recognition. I smile and nod back. Cherry’s healthy sister, I joke. She doesn’t think it’s funny—she’s still mourning Blackie back in the graveyard. Crossing the border into Missouri has become a minor self-imposed goal and I’m anxious to see if driving faster cools her down, in which case I suspect the fan is not pushing enough air at low speeds to cool the radiator. The sky turns cloudy but not overcast, just dark enough to make for a long and dull drive through the Ozarks.
Derelict autos and final resting places. Abandoned convenience stores and rehabbed service stations. The cycle of life and death is all around all the time, but I’m usually not giving it much attention. Here it’s brought to my attention and disrupts my awareness. No wonder poverty and Christianity correlate throughout the Bible belt. Without those precious few positive distractions like a good job and an annual vacation and a neurotic obsession about what college your kids get admitted to, then what drama gets created in life? The negative, destructive, existential kind. Life can easily become unstable like a pendulum swinging between sin and salvation, seeking drama and seeking peace in turn. There’s a natural tension between the two. Boredom tempts negative, destructive, existential activity like wanton sexuality and thrill aggression, self-destructive escapism, or main street drag racing. As biological animals we’re not perfectly suited for deciding when enough is enough, so sex turns into assault, fighting turns into manslaughter, alcohol turns into intoxicated collision. In failing to recognize it as drama self-imposed the quest turns to repentance, redemption, and rejoicing. Peace, tranquility, stillness. Until the boredom sets in again…and that repentance loses to repetition. Sin again. To and fro it comes and goes.
Of course it’s easy for me to cast aspersions from a distance as though all these human foibles are the shortcomings of idiots. I like to think I’ve got my shit together. I like to think I’m above average. It turns out that about ninety percent of us do too. To clarify: when asked about how attractive, intelligent, talented, or interesting subjects were with respect to a given group (their coworkers, classmates, etc.) who were also ask the same question, ninety percent thought were better than the group being considered. This is not about having incomplete information, since everyone knew who else was involved and who was being compared. The result is of course statistically impossible since the definition of average is that half the people in any given population are above it and half are below. Psychologists call this a self-serving bias and it leads to illusions about uniqueness and inhibits basic empathic function.
Cherry’s sister in Vinita and her dead cousins in the bone yard gets me thinking about what it means to be special. Cherry is different and unique and gets lots of attention when I stop at motels or restaurants. And yet they made half a million like her the year she was born. What makes her special? Hell, what makes me special? Or you? Or any of us? A deep sense of what makes something special helps combat the destructive implications of a self-serving bias. In short, we are each one of a kind. There’s nothing touch-feely about this fact. We are each one unique being with distinctive personalities, histories, tastes, values, preferences, cares, concerns, families—all the things that make up an individual. And at the same time we are each of a kind of creature that loves, fights, thinks, feels, survives, succeeds, fails—all the things that make us members of a species. That is the meaning of the word. We are special: members of a species. It’s convenient to forget that fact when it suits a purpose. Labels are useful tools to strip people of their status in the species, to turn a human being into a “nigger” or a “faggot” or a “hillbilly” or a “polack” and collapse the other into a single dimension of contemptible evaluation. As the hammer effortlessly drives the nail so the slur effortlessly eliminates the humanity.
The insight in realizing that we are “of a kind” is that it removes the basis for denying the intellectual, emotional, and experiential capacity of another mature human being. Children differ from adults because they are at an earlier stage of development, and people with neurological or physical defects may underperform the general population. Yet most normal people are like most other normal people. None of us have telepathy (sorry to burst any bubbles but subconscious perception is not “extrasensory”); none of us can leap buildings in a single bound; none of us can transform into lions. We all have human not superhuman strengths and abilities. Some are more talented in some areas than others, to be sure; Tiger Woods wouldn’t be remarkable if he had my handicap of 113. It is no surprise then that the demonstration of unusually strong talents and abilities tends to induce spectacle and celebration not for their alienation from human experience but for their familiarity. Tiger Woods is a celebrity not because he is the only person who ever played golf but because we each can in principle play golf (even if I happen to be awful) and he does it exceptionally well. There’s no denying the basic capacity; the degree of proficiency varies. It’s as if we all paint the unique portrait of our lives from the same basic palette of colors or compose our unique score from the same eighty-eight keys or choreograph our unique dance from the same collection of muscle movements and steps.
Empathetically connecting to other people involves the apparently incredible task of examining their interior world. How does someone get into the interior world of another? Absent conflicting evidence there is no reason to believe that other people are incapable of thinking, feeling, and acting like me even if they choose not to (or at the moment are not doing so). For example in a bout of depression it’s tempting to declare, “Nobody understands me! You don’t know how I feel!” While it’s true that an arbitrary person is probably not feeling the same way right now, the fact is that each of us have been depressed, many of us severely, in some cases bordering on suicide. What if everyone has known those depths of depression even if they are not experiencing it right now? To deny this is to deny help driven by unregulated emotion. Emotions are wonderful, even the awful ones, because they provide the palette for life’s drama; unregulated emotions create drama at the cost of social and interpersonal connectedness. Another example: “This is so amazing! She couldn’t possibly appreciate the genius of this artist.” While one may not be informed about this artist’s genius that does not suggest the person lacks the basic capacity for appreciation. What if everyone has known the heights of ecstasy, even if what produces it for me now doesn’t do it for them? Declaring her so shallow that nothing in her life might be savored is a social disclosure that reveals the speaker to be an elitist snob. I may not like what triggers these heights of ecstasy or depths of depression in another, and by that criteria I can judge them if I choose. Empathetic communication is still about meaning making, fraught with miscommunication and built on successive approximate. Built more solidly if we allow each other this kind of depth.
This realization itself does not suggest that I had better get along with all the other members of my species or treat them with undeserved dignity and respect. What is true, however, is that like it or not I’m stuck with them. Being one of a kind means that being “one” and being “of a kind” are both true at once. Cherry as one when we’re cruising in the Arizona sun or making small talk at a gas station with a classic car enthusiast. Cherry of a kind when I’m looking for replacement parts or comparing notes with other Mustang owners (or trespassing in Oklahoma junk yards). I am one in virtue of my unique combination of up and down experiences. I am of a kind in virtue of having the capacity for those up and down experiences. Naturally I can deny this fact when it suits me (we all can since it’s a human capacity not a James capacity). I can denigrate and mock for the sake of degrading others or for an evening of recreational hostility. The point is that if I want to get into the interior world of another the best way I know of is to understand the hell out of my own interior world and give the other person the benefit of the human experiential doubt. In this way I have the potential to relate to the other. Then differences of tastes, values, or beliefs aren’t a threat—they become points of comparison and contrast, of deeper, richer, more compassionate mutual understanding.
Stotts City, MO claims a few hundred residents whom I would likely never have encountered in my life if it weren’t for the gigantic “Adult Super Store” sign demanding my attention from I-44. It would be a hoot to ask the owner how inevitable conflict and the dramatic propagation of the species plays out in his sinful business here in the buckle of the Bible belt. The interstate exit sports the adult superstore on one side of the road, a gas station/liquor store on the other, and a church just across the overpass. This has all the makings for a drama economy: a shop to titillate the senses, a medium to inhibit judgment, and a church to beg forgiveness. I earn a suspicious glance from the proprietor of the liquor store as we cross the gravel lot and I park Cherry proudly in front. The video store and arcade itself is a large pole barn. I go inside not sure what to expect and get a toothless grin from the guy at the counter. He looks to be retirement age and he’s on the phone giving someone directions. I wait for him to finish and look around at the vast assortment of tits and ass, find a trucker and a young couple shopping inside.
When he’s done on the phone I tell him what I’m up to and he eyes me suspiciously and says, “Y’ask a lotta questions. Be bedder if y’ talk’uh thuh owners.”
“Okay, I’ll do. But what’s your take on it?”
“We run uh honest bidness, we cross er T’s and dot er I’s. I ain’t had no trouble in thuh time I been here.”
Not very informative. I leave with a business card to contact the owner and on my way to the car a young couple smoking and cuddling on the hood of an old Taurus at the edge of the parking lot catches my attention. They look at me suspiciously as I walk across the lot kicking up dust in my trail.
“Guys I’m passing through and I’m just curious, what do you make of a church and a liquor store and a porn shop all on the same block.”
“Fucked up, ain’t it?” the girl chimes.
“I suppose you need a place to sin if you’re gonna be saved,” the guy snickers.
That’s what I was thinking, I don’t say. “You guys live around here?”
“No, a shitty little hole up northern Missouri,” he says taking a long hard drag. He’s got narrow James Dean eyes and British teeth. “Until we get a chance to move the fuck on.”
I get a better sense of their style: inked, pierced, and punked out. The stage of rebellion following independence. The finding-my-way stage. “How’s life in the Bible belt?”
“Man it sucks!” she says enthusiastically. “I’m from Detroit and I just hhh-hate it here! But we’ll get out, I’m working on my mechanics certificate now.”
“I was in Portland for a while” he adds. “Had to come back for family. That’s the way it is here. Wages are just enough to keep you alive but not enough for you to save. Keeps you tied down, you know?”
“Yes, I think I do,” I say. “Now you guys seem clever and resourceful, she knows about cars…”
“Me too,” he cuts in, “but she does the engine and I do body work. Now, I mean. Used to work at a tattoo parlor.”
“You got any interesting ink?” I ask. The both flash knowing grins before getting half naked, hiking up their pant legs and rolling the sleeves. Very solid work. He’s got the face of The Predator on his leg and she’s got “Latina” written in cursive across her not very Latin-looking upper back.
“Back in the day I had eighteen piercings, ten in my ears alone!” he brags. I notice his shirt reads “Skin City Tattoo--$20 piercings above the waist.”
“I need a picture,” I blurt and ask them to wait while I get my camera. When they see I’m headed to Cherry they follow like baby ducks.
“That’s the hottest car ever!” she says.
“You ain’t kidding. Been overheating the last day or so and I can’t make out if it’s the thermostat or the radiator or what,” I grouse. “Care to take a look?”
“Hell yeah!” she says and I pop the hood and make them show their skin to the camera before she dives in and pushes, pokes, and prods the engine like a pro.
The boyfriend and I bullshit while I try not to leer at her khaki-covered ass but it’s uphill because (a) I’m in the parking lot of a porn shop with naked ladies on the brain, (b) she’s a female under the age of 60, and (c) she’s mechanically inclined which triples all other hotness. “No clogs and your gauge leads look about solid. But your manifold covers are brittle and rusted to hell. I wouldn’t be surprised if you have exhaust problems. When’s the last time you had the exhaust checked?” she asks. “Never,” I confess. “But if the headers are brittle I’ll replace them when I get home.” “Manifold covers,” she corrects. “This doesn’t have headers.” “No obvious reason for the overheating then?” I ask. “None that I can see, I’d need to get it on a lift to be thorough,” she says. “And you ain’t doing that here,” he laughs looking around at the porn shop parking lot. We chat a spell before I figure it’s best that I get across the rest of the state. I wish them well with the rest of their trip, not only through Missouri but through their finding-my-way stage.
The next couple of hours are dull. Clouds obscure the sun and I wonder if that sours my mood. Driving through Springfield I keep looking for some interesting excuse to exit that never comes. I go for over an hour pushing on the straight aways and pulling back on the hills to regulate Cherry’s temperature before I have to stop for gas. The Flying J faithfully provides ample fodder for cultural criticism when I step into the men’s room only to be stunned by the poster above the urinal promoting a delectable assortment of deep fried fat that passes for foodstuff targeting the intrepid traveler who needs an ungodly caloric excess to sustain himself through eight hours of vigorous sitting on his ass keeping the steering wheel steady. Thinking food cannot get any worse, a life-sized display of two-for-one King Size Elvis (get it?) Reese’s Peanut Butter and Banana Cream Cups (‘member Elvis’ favorite sandwich, honey?) with a free mail order diecast Elvis racing car proves me wrong. This is a hillbilly’s wet dream: Elvis, Nascar, and sugar. I feel a little nauseous and a little guilty because if they replace the disgusting candy with Ursula Andress circa 1963 it’s my wet dream too.
Another hour and I’m craving something to disrupt my attention and distract me from the peace-death of these eternal Ozark hills. Every few miles there’s another sign reminding motorists that Meramec Caverns is a hundred and fifty miles away, a hundred and forty miles away, a hundred and thirty miles…then finally rounding a turn I catch a rundown retro service station barely discernible in the overgrown weeds. It takes a while to exit and backtrack; the crumpled old shanties on the service road show why there’s no demand for a mechanic around here. None of these cars actually run. This time it’s not the building but the mountain’s effort to tear the building down that fascinates me. Nature has proven relentless in its reclamation of this plot of land for her own purpose. Every crack in the old pavement is saturated with tall reedy grass. Vines smother the signpost latticework and nearby electrical poles. Every bit of glass is shattered, every light bulb broken, every exposed inch of metal rusted. The former arc light that illuminated the filling island rocks back and forth in the gentle breeze waiting for the base to give so it can collapse under its own weight. It’s as if nature were saying, “Oh, you’re all through with this now? Fine then, give us a minute and we’ll make things whole again.” Maintenance has not been done here in a long while.
Inside conceals the usual signs of vagrant life: a small fire pit, empty plastic water bottles, chemical containers, and trashbag bedding scattered with all form of debris in the corner farthest from the elements. Have the folks who once staked a claim here have moved beyond a primitive mode of mere subsistence? Could the government design an entitlement program to help them do so? Is that the point of the church, community groups, and nonprofit organizations? I swell up with this desire to give whoever slept here a meal and a couple of dollars. I can spare it. My frustration with poverty is that it can’t be fixed all at once. Starvation, scarcity, inequity, these are deep and perennial forces that have been with the species for as long as the species has been. That it can’t be fixed all at once is no excuse to do nothing at all, and right now I’d just like to help out the struggling soul I imagine keeping warm at night around this fire pit. But there’s not a soul around to help so I take some pictures of Cherry and the abandoned gas station and get back on the road.
The hazy sky makes the afternoon drag on. Around 5:00PM I make it to Bourbon, MO where I got to see Sammy Hagar’s Mustang and the area is carpeted with Jesse James and Meramec billboards. I’m more interested in the wax museum than the caverns since there’s some daylight left and I don’t feel like coming out of a cave after dark. We ease our way around the gentle curves into Meramec State Park and along the river that leads to the cave entrance. I’m surprised when the friendly attendant at the information desk/confection stand tells me I’ve overshot the wax museum and need to go back up out of the river valley. I decide to peruse the gift shop for a trinket or souvenir. Nothing worth parting with a few dollars. I’d rather give it to the next struggling homeless person I find.
Disappointed but hardly devastated I wander out of the cave entrance and along the river. A group of good looking teenagers are landing their canoes. A family is enjoying a picnic along the shoreline. A lady opens her truck door and lets out an excited Labrador who plays fetch with a tennis ball. The gentle sound of water and the voices of children playing are about the only sounds to be heard. It’s a peaceful and lazy afternoon with the sky now clear to let the sun shimmer through the trees as it falls lower in the sky. Crossing the open and empty parking lot I think right here and now is a little taste of heaven. I can’t imagine the Elysian Fields being any more beautiful than this.
Hustling back up and out of the river valley I spot the enormous Jesse James Museum sing that only a hasty idiot could miss. The very same sign I missed going in. The museum is closed of course being almost 6:00PM on Sunday. Oh well, visiting this afternoon was a self-imposed and arbitrary goal and I figure that to really enjoy the sights I’ll need to come back next summer and spend a few days. For now I’m satisfied with a few pictures as evidence of my brief stop. I feel fortunate to have taken my time through Missouri and got a second wind along the river valley, it was refreshing. If I’d have raced to get to the museum before its 5:00 closing time I don’t think I would have enjoyed myself. I’d have been frustrated and short tempered. Aggressive schedules and leisure attitudes don’t mix.
Before I make it back to the freeway a remarkable roadside attraction jars me into a double take. A huge billboard proudly proclaims “Fireworks Outlet: Gas – Diesel – Beer” which gets me thinking that if they added guns to the mix that would be a recipe for just about every major felony I can think of. Who thinks it’s a good idea to distribute fireworks and gasoline and beer in one convenient location? People looking for some self-imposed and arbitrary drama I suspect. Kareim would call it market efficiency, Jean would call it an unsafe travesty, and Tyson would laugh it off as southern culture. I’m not sure what I make of it. It just seems…remarkable.
I decide to push forward into Illinois until I get tired and then call it a night. The state line isn’t far and I take in a beautiful sunset several times behind me as the orange orb hides and reappears while easing up and down the rocky rolling hills leading into St Louis. Cherry is still running hot so I stay in the right lane and cruise along with traffic, thinking what other people that come to mind would make of the fireworks liquor store, then what they would make of getting to the museum after hours, and what their overall impressions of the trip so far might be.
Then it cracks wide open. It’s so obvious and so subtle. I get a flood of adrenaline, the taste of pennies in my mouth, and I have to pull over to snare the thought.
And like that this issue I’ve struggling to uncover makes itself clear.
Liking Alike
- Paris is a bitch.
- God, I love your car!
- What do you think of living in Missouri?
Consider the question, “What do you think of living in Missouri?” If I were to ask that openly and without any intentions or biased I would accept the other person’s opinion as a journalist, identify it but not identify with it, refrain from comparing it with my own, and move on. In everyday conversation we do the exact opposite. We don’t solicit the opinions of others for the sake of academic reportage; we make small talk in an effort to build and reinforce relationships. When I ask someone here, “What do you think of living in Missouri?” the connotation is usually “What do you think of living in Missouri? Because I hate this humid Bible belt bulge and if you socially disclose your dislike of it by bitching then I’ll know you hate it like I do.”
If I can trust the general evaluative capacity of another person then I feel confident I can trust that person when it counts: when my life is at risk or when I need a favor. Trust is a basic survival instrument for complex organisms that congregate into complex societies like us humans. Why then discuss opinions in particular? Likes and dislikes serve as a naïve depth probe of the evaluative capacity of another person. This is partly due to self-serving biases and partly due to the halo effect. As a psychological being I regard my likes and dislikes as disproportionally well-reasoned and insightful. This lulls me into believing that people who share my configuration of likes and dislikes are particularly intelligent individuals. Similarly I tend to color in those unknown attributes of a person favorably based on a few likable attributes, so if they hate Missouri like I hate Missouri (based on particularly insightful experience and in no way merely my preference) then they probably despise hillbillies, vote Democratic, are pro-life, and whatever else “hating Missouri” connotes for me. Of course these implied factors were never discussed explicitly but that’s okay, I rationalize. Any “reasonable person with common sense” would feel the same way.
{Side note: I’ll be the first to admit, having practiced this myself for years, that there are times where I’ll ask for an opinion to provoke or tease or mock someone. Usually I’m expecting those opinions to differ from mine so I can indulge in an ironic game of demonstrating my own scathingly smug wit. I’d like to regard those cases as a particular use of humor because more often people who we feel merit such contempt don’t receive the attention required to uncover their opinions. The devil effect generally disqualifies people we decide we don’t like in the first place from any continuing interaction, although redemption is a genuine phenomenon.}
Notice that the valence or direction (positive or negative) of preference doesn’t matter. Hating alike is just as much a bonding experience as liking alike. Notice further the implicit externalization of personal preference. The continuum would intuitively progress like this:
Subjective (interior to me): I hate living in Missouri.
Objective (exterior to me): Missouri is a bad place to live for me or you or anyone.
Normative (how we should act): Nobody should live in Missouri.
What prompts the social disclosure in the first place? Just about anything that catches my interest: giant road signs, fat truckers, soccer games, vintage cars, short skirts, rock concerts, news reports. Collectively these can be described as attentive disruptions because they enter into awareness at least long enough to get noticed. They may not interest me for very long and may not merit commentary or consideration, a fact that itself could be telling. My friends who confuse music for religion (and vice versa) are overjoyed by the announcement of a concert tour and infuriated by a good review of a bad band, having seen fit to elevate their subjective tastes to normative reviewer status. What bothers them is not that we might disagree, but that I couldn’t care any less—what constitutes an attentive disruption for them is often for me not worth the mental calories it takes to give it consideration. What catchers my attention is largely beyond my ability to consciously control. What I remark about socially discloses my interest and hints at my general evaluative capacity in that my ongoing response (or silence) to stimuli suggests what bothers me and what I can just let go.
It would appear that matters of taste (such as music, fashion, and movie preferences) and matters of conviction (such as political, religious, and cultural affiliations) are fundamentally distinct in how they get adopted, compared, and evaluated. Yet I can’t seem to find significant conditions where in which they differ that much. Personal relevance plays a part but what makes a particular thing relevant to me is idiosyncratic. “I grew up doing this” applies to classical music and Catholicism. “This experience changed my life” applies to ocean cruise tourists and Hare Krishna converts. “I’d kill for this” applies to European football fans and Eurasian freedom fighters. My intuition suggests that the degree of commitment may vary between tastes and convictions (I may be willing to die for freedom but not for Nike…at least not on purpose) but there is no clear demarcation. If it is a continuum, and I suspect it is, then using taste to approximate sexual, political, and religious convictions is reasonable.
Some insights can be gleaned from all this. First, most attentive disruptions carry a positive valence and a negative valence—they have both, not just one or the other. A soccer match pleases the winner’s fans and frustrates the loser’s. Second, attentive disruptions may be interesting regardless of their valence because they are unusual, dramatic, or reported. The Hillary Clinton campaign is interesting in that a former First Lady running for president is out of the ordinary regardless of whether I like her political views. Third, social life can be characterized by the continual arising of attentive disruptions coupled with the disclosure and comparison of personal values through evaluative communication (i.e., self-disclosure, social disclosure, and silence).
Furthermore, faction cleavage can be characterized as the collective (group) evaluation of an attentive disruption where some individuals receive or perceive a principal benefit and other people receive or perceive a principal detriment. Hot-button politics, sensational news stories, and controversial artists often promote collective evaluation and “taking sides”. A faction incorporates the disruptive issue into its identity, rallies around it and advocates for or against its position. The news media has built an industry around deluging readers and viewers with controversial issues only to sit back and watch the emotional energy escalate into hostility. Adversaries compete, fighting about the pros and the cons as if debate trumped understanding. Which it does, of course, when this spectacle draws in the viewers and the networks collect the advertising dollars.
Factions formed upon the collective evaluation of divisive issues permeate social life. Polarizing complex, personal, challenging issues by rendering them as black-or-white, pro-or-con is an excellent technique for inducing single issue and litmus test factions. The Republican revival in the 1970s that led to Reagan’s election was built upon the issues of social conservatism adopted to redefine the party which had previously identified primarily in terms of fiscal conservatism. By elevating social conservatism to a pro/con decision and owning the pro agenda the party could polarize voters and induce a self-selected identification that hadn’t existed before. Those who stood in favor of socially conservative issues then signaled their convictions at the ballot box.
Why should politics (in the civic realm or at the office or among close friends) make strange bedfellows? Being complex, multifaceted, and idiosyncratic creatures we will tend to be in favor of Issue A (along with Tom, Dick, and Harry), opposed to Issue B (along with George, John, and Tom) an in charge of Issue C (up against Dick and John). The choice of which issue to raise highlights similarities or differences. Our tastes, shaped by personal experience and interwoven histories and peculiar dispositions, make each of us difficult to classify away by those stereotypes group affiliation suggests. Why is it considered rude to talk about religion or politics? Because they are rife with the prospect of personal disagreement. And disagreement is a problem because respectful consideration of our differences is not how we consume opinions. We compare and judge them. We establish or forfeit trust.
Pay attention the next time you are with a friend or in a group and keep track of how often an attentive disruption is brought into the conversation for critical evaluation. If it’s groups of people habitually seeking confirmation of their common values they're likely to be shocked, threatened even, by dissenting attitudes. If you happen to know that two people disagree strongly about something they consider fundamental (be it the art of religion or the politics of sex), watch how circumspect or silent they fall. Unless they’re the kind who loves to provoke and tease and mock, in which case strap on your helmet, toss your grenade of dissent, and jump into the nearest foxhole.
By Jove, this is it. Why am I irritated by the judgmental proclamations of certain people yet with gleeful hypocrisy I issue judgmental proclamations of my own? Because the social disclosure of these differences reveals something about our values—and the difference is unsettling. The more personally I take it the more unsettling it is. If I identify deeply and profoundly with some of my values or beliefs and someone is hostile to them then almost mechanically and without my conscious control I feel that person is actually hostile to me. Recognizing this fact simply doesn’t refute it. Even though I happen to be intensely curious and accepting of the varieties of human experience, my naïve intuition tells me I’d be a hell of a lot happier if everyone thought and felt and acted just like me. In practice I think that would be worse than hell. I’d go insane with boredom, despite what sheer instinct suggests. My intuition bristles at the notion that we should differ on certain core, basic, fundamental, self-defining values. I just don’t like it when we don’t like alike.
I don’t like it when we don’t like alike. This is the state of inherent tension that defines social life. There’s no analyzing it away; like a glitch in The Matrix we’re all stuck with it. Sitting here I wonder if this is hell: the realization that I can’t be happy because, as a matter of logic, I don’t like what I don’t like. Something about that bothers me. I’m stuck. I’m really, really stuck. I want to love everything unconditionally, absolutely, eternally. I don’t want to do this to be Pollyannaish. I want to do this to break free. To get to that final stage of enlightenment. See, I happen to love getting pissed off, frustrated, and beaten on some level because I know I’m involved in the human experience. Tragedy is part of the game. To deny it is to deny being a person.
This is irritating because I want to transcend anything that causes me to be irritated. I’m shaking, teeth clenched, sitting alone in this fucking car on a dark Illinois service road as this all floods in feeling like I’ve been suckered by Mother Nature, the great deceiver who constructed the world so that intrinsic permanent happiness is impossible. In this moment I feel quite hopelessly stuck. But only for a moment.
Because there is no final stage, no permanent happiness, no unchanging truth in life. That all comes after life is done. In this world it’s all about the quest. A brilliant teacher was once dispensing advice about interest in social emotions. I was frustrated by the conflicting data, inconsistent observed phenomena, and difficulty of crisply defining boundaries for concepts, interactions, events, you name it. Now this guy had it down. A renowned sociologist, chief editor of the field’s leading journal, chairman of the department, he was known as a pretty intimidating figure. He would bait and prod, as rhetorical questions just to get a rise from the people in the seminar. He’d point out contradictions and inconsistencies, more to call attention to how amusing it was that they were there than to settle any differences or resolve something. While discussing my class thesis in frustration I blurted, half accusing, “I’m about ready to give up the hunt to find a theory that all this bullshit fits into!” He smiled and nodded, squinted his eyes knowingly and said, “When you finally do, I think you’ll have all this figured out.” I thought he was being his typically glib, but now I have a sense of what he meant.
There is no final stage of enlightenment—it just keeps growing and growing, building and expanding, changing along the way. Things don’t stand still just because I stop experiencing them. All that stands still is my memory and my expectation. Chicago was a different place before I moved there and will have changed in little ways while I was away. Happiness is a moving target: sometimes I’m happier in the company of other people; sometimes (like on this trip) alone. Some days I withdraw, passing vicious judgment on people; other days I’m open to the world and easily amused. Some mornings I want to race out of bed and make the world a utopian paradise; other mornings I’d rather lounge under the sheets with a book or a friend till nightfall. Life is always moving, dynamic and changing, never standing still. Life doesn’t lend itself to unconditional generalizations, and there are so many exceptions to the rules of conscious experience that to catalog them all like some kind of recipe for living would require more pages than there are atoms in the known universe.
Stuck, yes. But not hopeless. Hell, as the Christ, the Buddha, Vishnu through Krishna, and many others have realized, is interminable pain and suffering in this world. Hell is confusing the eternal stillness of death with the vibrant and absurd drama of life. Hell is wanting out of the human experience. The enlightened ones keep telling us this and I’ve heard again and again but I haven’t known it. The enlightened ones will repeat themselves patiently throughout their the ages (they have all eternity to say their piece), their words but background noise in the marketplace of ideas until someone finds himself moved to stop, park, and listen—I mean really listen—to their sage advice. I don’t have to get worked up because liking isn’t the only criteria by which the human experience can be evaluated. I don’t much like running but I run to stay fit. I don’t look forward to paying bills but I pay them (late sometimes) to have a place to live. I don’t relish suffering the stupidity of others but I’m grateful that I have this one brief taste of life to know what it’s like to be frustrated and dissatisfied. Crickets and corn and asphalt and even Cherry, no matter how much I anthropomorphize her, will never experience my sheer reflexive joy of being aware that I am happy or I am sad or simply that I am. Cherry is just a machine who doesn’t do much of anything without fuel to burn.
It’s 9:00PM and cool outside. I take a deep breath and drive slowly down the service road. We stop in Williamsville, IL and ask the attendant how far it is to Chicago. “Two and a half hours,” she tells me, “more if there’s traffic.” I expect traffic will be light when I head in, I tell her. I’ve been away for a while and I think it’s about time I got myself home. Just for fun I impose the arbitrary goal of seeing the Sears Tower before midnight and snapping a photo of the city skyline from Michigan Avenue. That gives me something to look forward to since I feel like this minor epiphany was a breakthrough and the trip is basically done. I can feel that void of completion creeping up on me.
The drive through central Illinois feels like days yet passes in a heartbeat. My senses take in everything, every road bump and every cicada cry and every rancid farm odor. Patches of congestion from left-lane road hogs are beautiful reminders of the freedom of the open route. Cherry gets hot on the straight patches and I slow her down. I’ll make Chicago by midnight…or I won’t. Either way it will be just fine. My back is sore and it doesn’t bother me…I’m lucky to have the chance to bitch and moan about my health problems. I’m a complete witness now, participating and observing all at the same time. The drive feels like days yet passes in a heartbeat.
Taking the Stevenson Expressway north into the city provides the night traveler a beautiful view of the skyline. It’s breathtaking in the distance (at this point everything is breathtaking but this particularly so). So many people huddled together longing for peace and drama, each in turn or both at once. Checking out the bustle in the streets, comparing our judgments, weighing this town against wherever we come from or wherever we wish we were. My spine tingles as I get that incredible sense of satisfaction and familiarity that comes from knowing you’re home. I like it here. It suits me.
We move briskly but without any hurry through the south side of town and merge onto Lake Shore Drive just for a moment before exiting immediately at Museum Campus Drive and heading to Adler Planetarium with its gorgeous unobstructed view of the city. I spent many lazy summer days here looking at the beautiful people taking in the sights and making conversation along the lake. There’s not a soul here right now. Just a sense of comfort and satisfaction. Feels like I found something, and that I still have some looking to do.
Sometime after midnight I go back to where I started. I made my deadline, or I didn’t, I kind of lost track…swept up in all the excitement of being home I forgot to even bother with the camera at the planetarium. Instead I drive north along Lakeshore to Jackson, and turn left just after Grant Park toward Jackson and Michigan (the official start of Route 66 before the one-way pattern, and still the official terminus). I’m forced by the traffic pattern to veer onto Michigan and stop under the brown mile marker on Adams that signaled our departure. No maps of the route at the starting point. I love this city. I get out and take in the scenery on this late Sunday night. Somebody passes by coming from the direction of the Art Institute and I ask him to get a picture of me with Cherry, who I just now notice is steaming from under her hood. I thank the stranger and get back in the car. The thermostat is all red. I take it very slow the mile or so home and pull up under the lights outside the garage to inspect the car.I open the hood and it’s like a furnace. The radiator overflow bucket is bubbling and the fan appears to be on full tilt but doesn’t feel like it’s pushing that much air. There’s an intermittent squeak that sounds like a belt slipping. I need to get her tuned up, adjust the carburetor and the intake manifold settings, change the oil, check the tires…I need to maintain the car. And my relationships—now that I’m back I need to fill some friends in on the trip. But the car is my first concern. She took to the road like a forty year old trooper. Not a big deal for a forty year old human but a hell of an accomplishment for a forty year old bucket of bolts. There’s not much I can do for her tonight but let her cool down. I need to get some sleep.
“I want you to wash me,” Cherry coos as I drag my suitcase out of the trunk and lock the door.“Tomorrow. It’s too late tonight.”
“Now!” she demands. “There’s a 24 hour station on Van Buren!”
“I’m not gonna put you through that paint wrecker. Hand wash tomorrow,” I reassure.
“Promise? This trip is not over until you wash me.”
“It’s probably not over even then. You’ve been a good girl. The least I can do is clean you up.”
“Good,” she adds. “I like it here,” she says, snuggling into her stall in the garage.
“I knew you would,” I say. “After all I do know you inside and out.”
The garage is eerily quiet. I unlock the heavy security door for the elevator that will take me home.
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