Y—

I am putting your theory (or your friend’s theory, or Kundera’s theory) to the test. I don’t do this for just anyone. And I don’t mean to burst any bubbles, but I think I found a loophole in the concept that slowing down allows for remembrance and speeding up allows you to forget…

I have been going approximately eighty-miles-per-hour for a good portion of a couple days now, through farmland and industrial cities, and no matter how hard I push the gas pedal, I cannot outpace the thoughts in my head. As I drive, they accumulate so thickly around my head, cramped within the limited headroom of my little orange Chevrolet Chevette (don’t laugh), that I have to crank down the windows to let them escape, even though it means letting all of icy cold January inside to displace them. You could argue that my clunker of an automobile does not really cruise fast enough to qualify this as a fair test of the physics related to memory, but on the other hand, the nice thing about owning an orange car is that the rust around the edges blends right in, so you don’t have to feel too bad about it.

You’ll have to excuse my absentmindedness, but the road causes me to become this way, and I have to say I enjoy it in its own temporary way. I’m taking a miniature road trip of sorts, and wanted to wait until I had begun the trip to write to you from the desk of one of America’s finest interstate motels. How can I describe my room to you? Let’s just say that if I were suicidal right now, I wouldn’t come here to shoot myself in the head because it would just be too cliché. But let me not dwell on this, because the whole of my journey is not spent in here, but rather out there, with “out there” being the just barely evolving landscape of gray overcast skies and lookalike fields. Okay, so the weather is dreary too, but it’s dreary in a bright, overwhelmingly picaresque way, where your surroundings are so plain, that every little bit of color is a shining beacon through which you can measure your progress. In fact, I’ve avoided motels up to this point, choosing to take my chances on the side of the freeways with the truckers for a few hours until the sun dipped back up just barely enough to pry my eyelids from half-closed slumber.

If Massachusetts is a finger trap as you say, then Illinois is the point where two parts of a wishbone meet. You could break off in either direction, but you don’t know which way you’ll go, or how far. And I will in fact be driving through Ohio to go home, and I’ll see to it that one of your discs accompanies my journey safely and quickly through it. Not that I’m in any hurry. I guess I’ve put it off in this letter far to long to tell you what I’m doing out here in Nowhereland on my own. Truthfully, my reason for driving so far away from the comfort of an apartment in a cold winter is a fairly illogical one. One of my old friends is transporting his things to a new apartment, and I am coming out to help him move and paint. He didn’t ask me to, but I offered, and he gladly accepted. In all honesty, I needed an excuse to run around and spin my wheels a bit. This winter has been a fine but claustrophobic one. I feel like I was gathering as much dust as most of my books, which is fine for awhile, but I felt myself getting a little too comfortable with it, so I decided to shake the old snow globe and take a spirited jog through the white hinterland.

But I don’t want you to worry about me, as I’m sure you know that you shouldn’t. It’s the healthiest thing for a growing boy to do, this driving solo, though perhaps not advisable to the stomach. I do my best to keep away from the friendly adolescents inside the neon huts that offer me french fries and inauthentic bean burritos, iceberg lettuce salads or a donut with stale coffee. For this reason, my little auto is packed with provisions. I love provisions, and if you don’t mind, I’d like to let you know what they are in this particular instance. There is of course the main staple of fresh (well, fresh as of two days ago) bakery bread loaf, accompanied by some jam (raspberry, I know you love the “p” in raspberry), and, my preferred spread and staple, peanut butter (unsalted, extra crunchy). There is a backpack containing a few apples (Braeburn) and bananas (probably slave-picked), as well as some dry-roasted soybeans (bird seed) and some licorice wheels to keep my mouth busy so I don’t start talking to myself like a crazy person (the peanut butter is an excellent mouth sealer as well). I have had strange feelings against baby carrots lately, so instead I have a small bag of carrots that I had peeled and cut myself before leaving. Then there is the thermos, which I am relegated to filling with whatever coffee I can drum up from whatever truck stop I come across. I have found that it is always best to go with the plainest option. The flavored kinds tend to overcomplicated things and end up leaving the kind of aftertaste that alters the taste of every single provision you have in the car. Still, no matter how much you stock up, those neon signs get you somewhere between one farm and the next, and before you know it, you have this little greasy circle of cheese, sauce, and bread sitting right in front of you, and it looks sort of like a pizza, but there’s something about it that’s not quite a pizza. But it’s made just for you, and because it was made just for you, you lap it up graciously and say a little prayer.

I’ve managed to go on about nothing even though I’ve had all this time in the auto to think about everything. I’ve stayed away from cigarettes, alcohol, and double-bacon cheeseburgers, so all in all, I’m doing pretty well. I have a tape recorder in the passenger seat with a blank cassette inside. Whenever I think of something, I hit record and say it, so I don’t have to nearly run into things while scribbling notes on paper. It feels self-indulgent, but it feels necessary. I’ve never felt so productive about wasting so much goddamn time. So far away from the apartment, I find it hard to believe that when I return, life and work will await me just as I left it. If that is in fact true, it will probably feel warm and fresh and comforting, and if it’s not, well that’s okay too. All I have on my mind is painting a whole wall with repeated brush strokes, until it finally fills up with the same color. I have this action and this action only on my mind, and it’s probably the least I’ve had on my mind for a while. There must be some town on the side of this freeway that is not represented by a delegate from a fast food corporation, and when I find it, I will recommend you to it. My trip has just begun. I have already met strange strangers. My next writing to you may be a post card.

Yours,

L

L-

How utterly drab of me to fall off for almost three months just as we approach the subject of quitting.  I would ask you to forgive me for vanishing and all if I hadn’t bigger things to apologize for.  As distance functions all these sorries may have to wait for the unlikely event of face to face contact, heartfelt and sincere as they are. I will surely miss you this year-it is not the first Christmastime without you.

I suppose you’re wondering where I’ve been for the better half of October, November and December..I can only say I met a girl.  She comes from a family of glass blowers. She grew up sitting cross legged under folding tables trying to find shade while talking to old people at the Saturday art fairs.  Consequently, she is used to waiting, still, sometimes all day.

I thought if we ate together, slept near each other, shared enough beers I could tap into her calm if even for a minute and absorb some part of it.  I was trying to lose the expectation, the restlessness I experience in a quiet bar when my tongue traces a bottle top and it doesn’t really matter if I stay or if I go home that tonight.

9 weeks later I am done with her and if I learned anything it’s that the kind of person willing to wait all day has a hell of a time in a world where people need to feel immediacy to feel like they matter.  After a while it just made me sad to be around her.  It’s not her fault really but knowing I felt better walking away from her at the end of the night than arriving at her place for dinner  I am back on the road and I wanna go home.

Besides, Massachusetts is a beautiful part of our country but a fingertrap nonetheless.

In response to questions you asked me months ago  I wouldn’t be so hard on yourself for quitting piano lessons or for that girl quitting you to give your whistler a fair shot.  Neither events have a lot to do with you and though you may have doubted it at the time being able to read music is way more useful than winning the affections of some college bird.

As for your magician dream is concerned whose to say you’re not?  To the child magic has has much to do with the lights going on and off to signify sleep and waking, or turning flour into bread we can sink our teeth into. These are both skills worthy of wonder and having watched your hands both make us a meal to share or turn off the light I can affirm you are capable.  Maybe we turn into what we initially wanted to, by accident…Apart from what a drooling child believes is magic, you do have other charms.

The more I think about it the more I find you posed very provocative statements in our last exchange.  Why would you quit something nice? Reading the first and last pages of a book? That old fucking man slowly heading toward the tree..(when do you suppose he saw it getting closer and closer)  and most of all, would I do my thing for you? You betcha.

Mix Cd’s. I’ve got all of yours. Yes, they’re lame in theory but they are part of getting somewhere better like how you can’t come home quickly without driving through Ohio.  It’s just part of it. They are a very pleasant and sneaky way of experimenting with letting someone know they are on your mind.  These things are important and always have been.  Our generation had the mix cd. The next generation may have something akin to a robot computer chip sync. You know, rubbing wrists together or something. It’s all sort of the same and I’m happy to have been on your way.

Speaking of better things what’s it like where you are? If you have a minute while you’re doing your thing I’ve got a pretty big thought for you.  I was having coffee with an old friend of mine yesterday who was dipping into some Kundera that I hadn’t read. He said that Kundera makes the point that forgetting is associated with speed while remembering is associated with slowing down.  Thus, when idle it is almost impossible to forget and while running down the street it is nearly impossible to recall..Theoretically this means we could slow down a bit and remember or hit the street when we need a break from it all.  I’m gonna try it from my end and you try it from your end and let me know.  Okay. BREAK.

Since early,

Y

Y—

L———>

This afternoon the Autumn trees bent inward as though coy and my walk to work became a narrow inlet of cement within a world of yellow. Is it too late to begin pressing leaves?  Some of the best letters I ever got had leaves tucked within them. They were from places like England, India, Milwaukee.  Some I’ve still got but it’s pretty amazing how anything and everything turns to ash.

Everything is fine here except that every day I want to get up earlier and do more. There is still no money but that’s not a good enough excuse anymore.  (Do you ever think about all the things we never thought to do when we were young and in the same place?  We could have made J take us out on his boat all summer.)  I want to write but am not writing.

Have you had the chance to read anything about this ‘Quit Smoking’ vaccine?  It’s a shot that prevents nicotine from entering the brain where it normally acts as a stimulant. The smoker is able to quit because he/she no longer derives any pleasure from it.

My favorite article pushing it comes from ezinearticles.com and reads:

When the market releases a new treatment, smokers trying to quit are likely to give it a try, especially if they have tried and failed before….Just give it the benefit of the doubt. You never know, it may be just what you need. If you have tried other methods before and are still smoking, why not try quit smoking shots instead?

I love that.  Just give it the benefit of the doubt. C’mon, it’s just your health and body we’re talking about…amazing…Do you think in order to truly rid yourself of a habit, a thought, a memory you must first decide it is no longer something worth longing for?  In order to escape some haunting is it necessary to invalidate the source?  And what if you cannot?

I have a friend whose father gave up smoking when she was born.  Twenty some years later he told her that not a day goes by when he doesn’t want a cigarette. I never knew him but I liked that about him immediately; this quiet resignation. It’s as though his desire keeps him connected to something he is no longer near to.

We’ve got 81 days left of this year.  You will always sound good to me.

Best,

Y