Let's Go Somewhere-1/6/2015 Ideas of Youth, India and a Cemetery Tour

Aleathia says:

I think it is the affliction of most young people to want to travel and see the world.  We think we are invincible.  We want to run to far away places and be a part of a culture so separate from the lives our parents laid out for us.  This is growing up.  This idea is so much a part of creating our own identity in this time and space.

My love of books exposed me to many far away places that all sounded so exciting and exotic.  They were places so out of my reach except on the pages, but deep inside I told myself I would get there someday.  The older I became the more reality set in and I understood that it was going to be hard enough to feed myself and provider shelter on a daily basis and that traipsing across the globe was going to be expensive. I traveled in my own country.  I have gone to Mexico and Canada.  In 2008, I finally made it to England and felt pretty damn fulfilled.

Recently, some acquaintances set off for India and I have watched their progress and adventure through Facebook postings.  Some small part of me is envious.  In my 20's, India was the place I wanted to go most.  I had a guide book that I carried back and forth across the country in hopes I would make it there sometime.  In the end I gave the book to someone who was going to actually go there and use it.  I am not sure why India was the place of my destiny all those years ago.  I didn't know anyone who had ever been, or anything about the country besides what was in that book, but I had an innate need to be there.

Today, traveling to these far off places isn't as enticing as it was.  If given the opportunity, I would love to tour Europe and see the world's most wonderful art galleries, but those days of saving the world, living like a pauper in a foreign land have left me.  These days I am in love with the idea of traveling my own country.  There is so much to explore in my own state that I have not managed to see.  I think in our young days we all have the idea that the grass is greener on the other side and then when we get older, we realize the quality of life is mostly dependent on how you live it, not where you are.


Ally says

To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.
                                                                             – Charles Baudelaire

I’ve always like cemeteries, even as a kid. Maybe it’s cause they’re quiet and sad and beautiful and you rarely see other people. They’re good Thinkin’ Places.

The more I travel, the more I go looking for old graves and old homes and over the years I’ve seen quite a few famous ones. So here’s a few of my favorite graves, in no particular order.

Since he got the opening quote Baudelaire gets to go first.

Charles Baudelaire – Poet (Paris)

Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir – Philosophers (Paris)

Samuel Beckett - novelist/playwright/poet (Paris)

Marie Antoniette – Queen of France (St. Denis)

Jim Morrison – singer/songwriter/poet (Paris)

Oscar Wilde – novelist/playwright/satrist/poet (Paris)

Charles Bukowski – Poet/Novelist (San Pedro, CA)

John Keats – Poet (Rome)

Percy Bysshe Shelly – Poet (Rome)

Galileo Galilei – physicist, mathematician, astronomer, philosopher (Florence)

Julius Caesar – Emperor/Soldier (Rome)

Jean Michel Basquiat – Painter (Brooklyn)

Jack Kerouac – novelist/poet  (Lowell, MA)

Mozart (Vienna, Austria...yes, he was buried in a pauper's grave and no, no one is really positive where it is, but this was close and it's a makeshift marker made from other graves and it's beautiful and quiet and amazing).

Beethoven (Vienna, Austria)

Gustav Klimt (Vienna, Austria)

and of course, Shakespeare (yes that's scaffolding and yes that's as close as I got. Read more about that here.)

Let's Go Somewhere - 10/7/2014 - Cross Country USA

Ally says:

So now that I’m finally free of the shackles of novel revision I can get back to talking about stuff I love here at the Forked Road.

Mainly, travel.

Traveling was something that I always wanted to do. My parents had a subscription to national geographic (didn’t everyone’s?) and as a kid I used to sit down in the playroom and flip through, amazed at pictures of the African deserts, the wildlife in Alaska, the teeming streets of Bejing.

The very first trip I took anywhere as a semi-grownup was to Chicago. I was in college and my then-boyfriend (now husband) and I decided that we would drive from Pittsburgh to Chicago for the weekend. It was huge. We were going on a journey. I sold off my music collection to be able to go. That’s how serious I was about it.

But that was just a weekend. We went to Boston and NYC a few times after that. But the first real trip was after graduate school in 2007. Armed with our higher learning degrees and staring down the double stock barrel of a life of public service work and loan repayments until the age of 64, we did the only thing we could: 

Grabbed whatever leftover student loan money we had and headed west.

Thanks Horace.

We left from Monroe, NY on a cool crisp morning, a cooler full of food and beer in the backseat, a supped up and meticulously checked transmission thanks to my dad, Big Ron, and a map. No GPS. First off this was pre-GPS in every car and secondly, GPS takes all the fun out of traveling. You never get lost you never discover something new. We kept a register in the front seat to manage our finances. Upon leaving we booked half the trip. From NYC to Texas. Everything after that was up to us.

So we climbed aboard our trusty steed, Rocinante, named after Steinbeck's camper from Travels with Charley, which is named after Don Quixote's horse and did as Horace commanded.

Here she is parked at the Steinbeck museum in California

From Baltimore/DC

To Nashville and Memphis

through Louisiana 

To the crossroads where they say Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil to learn how to play guitar

To New Orleans

To Texas

Cadillac Ranch

New Mexico

Arizona

Grand Canyon. I was too scared to go near the edge

through the desert 

finally arriving on the other coast in California

San Francisco

and then all the way back

through Salt Lake

Salt Lake Basin

and Denver

Rockies

St. Louis & Kansas City

Chicago

and finally back home.

Recently, I was called anti-American because of some of the poems I was writing for my How To Be An American series. That is a misunderstanding made towards people who just want this country to be better – for everyone here. Because she’s beautiful. And she’s ours. And she deserves a people who deserve her.

And that was where it started. A lifelong love of traveling. It’s a big world and we’ve only got so much time, friends. Pack only what you can carry. Let's go. 

Lit Bits-9/10/2014 Jack Kerouac, Margaret Atwood

John Says:

According to Alexis Kleinman (Huffington Post Tech Editor) there’s a “new” fad going around on Facebook in which people are listing books that “changed their thinking” and are challenging their friends to do the same.  You can read the article HERE.  I had no clue that this was a new fad as I’ve seen this about three times in the six years (six years, damn) that I’ve been on Facebook.  Maybe Ms. Kleinman heard about the fad from under the same rock where The Huffington Post gets the bulk of its articles.

I liken this fad of listing books (anything really) to be more like the wave that pops in and out of popularity at sporting events.  Or maybe they are like a comet.  Point is they never really go away, but just disappear from your sphere of influence for a while, until they’ve reached the farthest of your contacts and make their way back.  Christ, I hate the twenty-first century.

I rarely participate in these things.  But I’ve participated in the book one twice.  The first time I listed books that I thought fit the bill of those that challenged me or changed my thinking in some way.  When the list came back to me again, I couldn’t really remember what I’d put the first time, so I listed some books that have mattered to me over the last five years or so.

What constitutes a book that changed you?  If Ms. Kleinman is correct, you folks who listed books like Infinite Jest or The Sound and the Fury are lying, and what you’re really doing is hiding in your darkened rooms taking all of your cues from J.K. Rowling and George R.R. Martin.  Is she right about this?  Are you really a liar because you listed Moby Dick as a book that changed and/or challenged you?  Look, if you made your way through Moby Dick once and found it a satisfying read I’m all for you putting it on whatever list you like.  Of course I’m still not sold on Infinite Jest.

Maybe it should’ve just been one book with a decent explanation as to why this book matters to you in the way that it does.  I mean I could list twenty, fifty, one-hundred books that I’ve walked away from with some new foresight or thought that I didn’t have, but if push comes to shove only one book really matters to me.  On The Road by Jack Kerouac.

I don’t know where I heard the name Jack Kerouac.  Maybe from my good buddy, Kristofer Collins.  Anyway I found him or he found me.  And instead of going to class I spent my hours sitting in the campus library reading and re-reading On the Road.  I’d never experience a novel like that.  Had never been introduced to such a loose cannon of thought and prose, dressed in the guise of a shy boy from Lowell, Massachusetts.  But there it was in my hands.  A new way thinking.  A new way of seeing the world.  All coming from a guy who could’ve been me.

I was hooked.  On the Road and Jack Kerouac became synonymous with my very being.  Old ruddy Pittsburgh streets became jazz glamourous tongues of pavement full of noise and sights and smells.  Every car ride, every bus ride became imbued with the quick desire for motion and movement, and every meal a beatific feast.  Yeah I was just going around Pittsburgh, the city I was born in, but I was eighteen and I was suddenly enlightened.

From the moment I read On the Road I was done.  I was changed.  I was challenged.  Nothing would ever be the same.  I stopped dabbling in writing and really got down to what I wanted to say.  I stopped fucking around with the idea of home, kids, suburbs, American Dream, and started trying to fit a course I could live with and live with happily.  Sure that kind of thinking may have led to living in a few cities, a decade plus of working more shitty jobs than I care to count, and being basically broke well into my mid-thirties until I dragged my ass, kicking and screaming, into graduate school.  But it was worth it.

I re-read all of Kerouac the year I turned thirty and not a word, not an emotion changed for me.  I meant to do it this year for my fortieth but life has sort of gotten in the way of those kinds of goals.  Still I imagine I’ll get around to it.  At the very least I’ll go and read On the Road.  And I imagine I’ll get that feeling, the same feeling I always get, the same one the eighteen year-old kid got that first time in Hillman Library in Pittsburgh when he opened On The Road, and his eyes met that first immortal line: I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up…..and then just let the novel take it from there.

Aleathia says:

When you hear the name Margaret Atwood I am sure the first thing that comes to mind is not her collections of poetry despite the fact that she has published 20 collections from 1969-2007.  She is best known for her novels and non-fiction works over the years.  She is a highly decorated Canadian writer.  I own several of her novels...none of which I have cracked open yet (the waiting list for my fleeting mind is so long), but I do keep her collection of poetry Two-Headed Poems at my bedside.  If a book is at the bedside that means a lot in this house.  It is reserved for my favorite poets: Mary Oliver, Jack Gilbert, Sharon Olds, Adrienne Rich, Ferlinghetti, and Margaret Atwood.  It is also home to a portion of my collection of Buddhist texts.  It is where I reach when something is not right and I need some words of clarity.

About 5 years ago while I was scouring the stacks of books at the Friends of the Library book sale I came upon this collection of poetry by Margaret Atwood.  I was surprised because I had not known that she was also a poet.  I liked that it was also an original publication from 1978 in great condition. I loved the look of it with its stark black and white background and blood red lettering.  I have looked every sale since then and have never found another collection of her work.  Sure...I could order it off of Amazon or some other retailer but the part of being a book collector is in the finding of books.  It is the work of sifting through boxes and boxes of musty smelling pages to find that gem that makes your stomach flip and your heart race.

The Woman Makes Peace With Her Faulty Heart

It wasn't your crippled rhythm

I could not forgive, or your dark red

skinless head of a vulture

but the things you hid:

five words and my lost

gold ring, the fine blue cup

you said was broken, 

that stack of faces, gray

and folded, you claimed

we'd both forgotten,

the other hearts you ate,

and all that discarded time you hid

from me, saying it never happened.

There was that, and the way

you would not be captured,

sly featherless bird, fat raptor

singing your raucous punctured song

with your talons and your greedy eye

lurking high in the molten sunset

sky behind my left cloth breast

to pounce on strangers.

How many times have I told you:

The civilized world is a zoo, 

not a jungle, stay in your cage.

And then the shouts

of blood, the rage as you threw yourself

against my ribs.

As for me, I would have strangled you

gladly with both hands,

squeezed you closed, also

your yelps of joy.

Life goes more smoothly without a heart, 

without that shiftless emblem,

that flyblown lion, magpie, cannibal

eagle, scorpion with its metallic tricks

of hate, that vulgar magic,

that organ the size and color

of a scalded rat, 

that singed phoenix.

But you've shoved me this far,

old pump, and we're hooked

together like conspirators, which

we are, and just as distrustful.

We know that, barring accidents, 

one of us will finally

betray the other; when that happens,

it's me for the urn, you for the jar.

Until then, it's an uneasy truce,

and honor between criminals.

Let's Go Somewhere-8/19/2014 Pacific Coast Highway

Ally says:

“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” – G.K. Chesterton

I don't like flying. For two reasons:
1) something that heavy should not be able to stay in the air for that long traveling at that speed (engineering is scary) and
2) I feel like you miss all the really good stuff.

Obviously this is not an option when I go overseas because I have neither the time nor the money to take a steamer across the Atlantic (...that reminds me - there is this really great book by Seth Stevenson called Grounded: A Down To Earth Journey Around The World that you should really read if you have any interest in this sot of travel.) but it is a possibility when we travel in the US.

I did a cross-country trip in 2007 the details of which would be far too long to include in a post here. And then last year I drove from LA to San Francisco. My husband was invited to do a poetry reading in Long Beach and it just so happened that we had vacation scheduled. We usually went to New Orleans at that time but figured, why not, and hopped a plane to LA.

We took the Pacific Highway 1 all the way from LA to San Francisco - a whopping 8 hours and 400 miles or something like that. We managed to get lost only one and a half times (the half only because the sign was covered and the ocean wound up on the wrong side).

The Pacific Coast Highway is listed as one of the top 500 Drives of Lifetime by National Geographic and it does not disappoint.

We started out in the early morning from Long Beach (which by the way doesn't believe in tea. You really need to get on this Long Beach. Not everyone in the US drinks coffee.)

As you head into Big Sur you'll come across the Bixby Canon Bridge

Which his unbelievable high, like hand shaking as you're driving sort of high. Just high. So high.

If you're a Kerouac fan than you already know the meaning of  Big Sur in Kerouac lore. It recounts the time Kerouac stayed at Lawrence Ferlinghetti's cabin in Big Sur. It's a heavy book, as Jack was battling both public demands and his increasing spiral into acute alcoholism. 

“The empty blue sky of space says 'All this comes back to me, then goes again, and comes back again, then goes again, and I don't care, it still belongs to me”  - Jack Kerouac

Along the way you'll also run into these guys:

This is from the Sea Elephant Viewing Area - located about 7 miles north of San Simeon.

San Simeon takes you right into Monterey, the beautiful city of John Steinbeck:

There I was witness to a controlled burn:

and from there it's just a quick drive to San Francisco where your journey ends here:

California is an amazingly beautiful state. If you have the chance, take the drive. You won't be sorry.