Radio Days

I got my job at WCIR through my dad. He had met the program director, who let slip that he was in desperate need of a gopher/office slave. Dad told him I’d be interested and soon enough I began sorting cds, copying reel-to-reel tapes, handing out contest prizes, setting up the transmitter for remote broadcasts and doing all sorts of other odd jobs for the radio station to the tune of $3.35 an hour, which was the minimum wage in 1989. I was 16, though, and it seemed like a pretty good deal.

I didn't really have a desire to get on the air, but eventually did as the result of some dumb luck. There was a week-long teacher's strike in March 1990. With no school, I’d drive up to the station every day to see if there was anything they needed me to do. One morning I arrived to find the P.D. in a heated argument with the overnight guy, whose shift had ended an hour or two before. The overnight guy had somehow locked himself out of the station at 4AM, leaving nearly two hours of dead air until the morning guy arrived, making no effort to bust back in or call anyone about his dilemma. He just sat on the hood of his car and smoked. The P.D. hadn't planned on firing Mr. Overnight, but when people argue for a long enough time someone is going to eventually say something stupid. Mr. Overnight did, and he was gone.

A few minutes later the P.D. came by where I was copying some tapes and asked me if I wanted to go on the air. After an hour or two of the most basic training, he told me to go home and come back that night, as I would be working the 11pm-6am shift until the teacher's strike was over. If things worked out, the weekend overnight guy would move to full time, and I would take over the weekend shifts. Things worked out, and I had the job for the next couple of years.

Like almost everyone else at the station, I was given an awful air name. Following 1950s-era conventional wisdom which held that people won't want to listen to a DJ with an "ethnic" name, the P.D. changed me from Craig Calcaterra to Craig Miller. Within the first couple of weeks the jock who worked before me took to calling me "Madman Miller" as I was coming on the air. While it was stupid I didn't really object, and Craig “The Madman” Miller stuck.

Though it was by far the biggest, most popular station in town, WCIR had antiquated equipment, making the technical part of the job pretty easy. The 1960s-era control board consisted of several round mixing "pots" as opposed to the more modern sliders and equalizers, and the two cd players were haphazardly patched into the board. A rarely-used turntable sat off to the left. Commercials were all played on cartridges that resembled old eight track tapes which would give off a deep and satisfying clunk when you pressed the play button. Rather than sit as if at a desk, the DJ would stand in front of the board while on the air with the microphone hanging at mouth level, much like it would in a recording studio. There was a comfy leather chair in which to sit for the three to five minutes one had to wait before the next station identification, weather report, or segue between songs.

And, oh, were those songs terrible. The pop charts of the late 80s and early 90s were dominated by hair metal bands singing power ballads and some of the most soulless R&B ever recorded. There were some bright spots – REM had a couple of mainstream hits by that point, and you could always count on war horses like Tom Petty and Madonna to have a hit or two – but my play lists were dominated by the likes of Milli Vanilli, M.C. Hammer, Wilson Phillips, Poison, and Michael Bolton. Since the P.D. slept during my graveyard shift I could get away with a bit more freelancing than the other jocks, but I usually found it easier to simply play what was programmed, mostly because people would call in to complain if I didn't play the hits on a constant rotation. Today there is no small amount of grumbling about the bland repetition of top 40 radio, but Clear Channel and the other corporate radio behemoths are giving the people what they want. Or at the very least, are giving the people what they've trained them to want and with what they now feel they cannot do without.

Music aside, I loved the job. No dress code. No paperwork. No manual labor. Working from 11pm until 6am gave me almost total solitude, and as long as I was able to do the station ID at the top of every hour, play the commercials when programmed, and segue from song to song without dead air, I could do almost anything I wanted. Some nights I spent reading a book. Others I spent on the phone, talking to girlfriends, buddies, or whoever was bored enough to call the DJ to chat. When I got really bored I would make up contests. Within a month or two of beginning the job, I met the guy who worked the same shift at the big country station in town, WJLS. He and I would talk on the phone all night, comparing the weirdos who would call in and daring each other to do silly things on the air.

Perhaps the oddest thing about the job was that there were groupies. I thought the P.D. was joking when he told me to expect it, but I’ll be damned if I didn't have women calling me at all hours of the night. I was flattered at first, but it quickly became obvious that only the truly deranged among us obsess about someone just because they’re on the air at a piddling little radio station in a podunk little mountain town. Maybe “deranged” is too strong a word. For the most part they were simply lonely people who felt comforted by a familiar voice coming out of their radio each night. In this way the DJ isn’t all that different than a bartender. You listen to people talk. You act interested but you never pry. When the person asks for a drink – or in my case a song – you give it to them.

I never had a stalker, and despite some random threats over the phone, I never came face to face with an angry fan. The weirdest thing that would ever happen would be when women would call in and ask me how old I was. Seeing no reason to lie about it, I would tell them that I was sixteen or seventeen or whatever. Most giggled about it. A visible minority seemed aroused by the idea, which creeped me out quite a bit. One took to calling me "baby," and referred to herself as "mama." I quickly memorized her phone number and avoided her whenever it popped up on the ID. For the most part, however, it was harmless, and given the format of the station, the vast majority of callers were teenagers wanting to here the latest tripe from the New Kids on the Block or Bell Biv Devoe. I got a lot of nice cards and letters from twelve year-old girls.

Within a month or two of starting, the guy working the weekday overnight shift quit, and it would be over a year until the P.D. could find a stable replacement. Despite school still being in session, I pulled several seven-night weeks during the frequent intervals between replacements. I would work until 6am, leave the station, grab breakfast, and then go on to school. I'd go home after school, crash for a couple of hours, eat dinner with my parents, and then crash for a few more until it was time to work again. I'm sure all of this was in violation of all kinds of labor laws, but as long as my grades stayed solid Mom and Dad didn't much care.

After some initial bumps I quickly developed a fairly smooth and confident on-air persona. Maybe too confident, as I found myself in trouble on a few occasions for being a smartass. The first time was when I introduced a Wilson Phillips song by saying something like "here’s that new girl group; you may have seen them on MTV; the one with the two hot women and the fat chick . . ." My phone line lit up. It was a woman angry that I'd make fun of someone's weight problem. I asked her if she was mad because she herself was a fat chick. She hung up. The next morning the P.D. came in to tell me that the woman I was insulting was the wife of a friend of his. Turns out I hit the nail on the head about her being fat. The P.D. thought it was kind of funny but he made me write a letter of apology anyway.

On another occasion I got in trouble for allegedly interfering with police business. On most Saturday nights, the first hour of my shift was a remote broadcast from the lobby of the movie theater, promoting the theater's Midnight Movie series. Following my last break at 11:45, I would get in the car and race to the station, hopefully in time to make my first commercial break after midnight. If I didn't, the guy who played the prerecorded show from 8pm until midnight and manned the boards for my remote would have to do the break. I hated that, so I usually drove like a maniac to make it.

One night, doing about 60 m.p.h. in a 35 zone, I was pulled over by a policeman running a speed trap. Obviously dead to rights, I figured that I would quickly cop to being a lead foot, accept my ticket, and do my best to get to the station as soon as I could. The cop, thinking he had pulled over a partying teenager on a Saturday night, took forever to walk up to my window. When he got there I apologized for my speed, explained that I was late for work, and basically did everything I could think of to make the whole transaction go smoothly. Rather than ticket me, he asked a hundred questions about where I was going and why. He thought I was lying about working at the radio station and gave me a hard time about that. Then he made me get out of the car while he gave the backseat a once-over, looking for drugs or beer or whatever he assumed I was on. Eventually he went back to his car. After an extended lecture about my speed (which I deserved) and a bunch of criticisms about the radio station (which I didn't) he gave me my ticket and let me go. The stop probably took three times as long as a usual traffic stop and by the time I finally got to the station I was pissed and the guy working the board was having a meltdown.

During my first commercial break I took the opportunity to alert anyone who may be out driving where the speed trap was and to watch out because it was manned by a cop who liked to hassle people. About twenty minutes later someone at the police station called me. It wasn't the cop who had pulled me over, but he was angry all the same. Immediately sensing that I may be in trouble, but not knowing for what, I hit "record" on the reel to reel machine attached to the phone. After a minute it seemed clear to me that the call was less than official. Yes, it was a cop (caller ID confirmed that), but it wasn't anyone in a position of authority. Maybe Officer Speed Trap's buddy. He complained that by saying what I said I not only was disrespecting a police officer, but I was "interfering in official law enforcement business." Though I knew enough about the First Amendment to be pretty confident that I hadn't done anything wrong, I kept my responses to simple "yes sirs" and "no sirs" out of an abundance of caution. After a couple of minutes the cop hung up.

I got my wits about me and listened to the tape. I hadn't realized it during the call, but it turns out that the conversation was pretty damn funny. As my "yes sirs" and "no sirs" got quieter and less respectful, the cop got angrier and angrier. Eventually he was ranting incoherently, calling me "son" and starting every sentence with "listen here!" and stuff like that. I decided it was too good not to use, so at the next break I took to the mic in a solemn tone, referenced my earlier comments about the speed trap and apologized for being disrespectful to the professionals of the Beckley Police Department. Then I played the tape over the theme to the Dukes of Hazard. A couple of days later someone at the police department called my boss to voice his "profound disappointment" that a station as active in the community as WCIR would exhibit such an immature disrespect for law enforcement. I had to write another letter of apology. If I wasn't working an impossible-to-fill shift for minimum wage, I suppose I could have been fired.

I manned the DJ booth from March 1990 until I left for college in September 1991. Just before leaving, the P.D. sat me down and told me that, my mouth aside, he thought I had what it took to make a career out of it, and that he'd be willing to offer me a full time job on the spot with actual adult pay and benefits and everything. Though I agreed to think about it for a couple of days I knew I would never seriously consider the offer. I didn’t yet know what I wanted to do for a living, but I knew I wanted something more stable than radio. For all of the fun and flair of the job, the DJ was becoming increasingly superfluous to the modern radio business. My sense was that any stations that weren't already automated or run by giant corporations soon would be, and even if you could make a life out of radio, it would be a pretty itinerant one. I thanked the P.D. for the offer, politely declined, and went off to college. With the exception of a couple of months back at the station the summer after my freshman year, my radio days were over.

Though I still have a lot of life left at this point, I’m pretty sure that I'll never have a better job. And that’s true even if it would take me a decade or so of full time overnights at the wages I made back them to make what I now make in a single year.

Great Moments in Mix CDs

As I'm winding up work this morning, a law student who has worked in my office as a clerk since the beginning of summer left me a mix CD entitled "Music that Craig Likes?" She and I have been friendly enough, but we've never talked about music or pop culture or anything like that. Certainly not about anything of enough substance that would give anyone a sufficient lead to go and pick out 15 songs that are likely to be up my alley. Skeptical, I put the CD in.

The results: fabulous. Mostly old school punk -- Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Stiff Little Fingers, The Damned, and more mainstream stuff like the Ramones and the Clash -- but also some nice 80s and 90s flavor like Billy Bragg, Nick Cave and the Pixies. To top it off, she ended it all with "The Breaks" by Kurtis Blow because, hell, just because.

All stuff I love, but mostly stuff I last had on Memorex tapes circa 1990 and lost somewhere between then and real adulthood. If she had merely parroted my current record collection she would have gotten points for coming up with a good profile. Putting together stuff I (a) love; and (b) have lost turned what merely could have been a fabulous mix CD into a transcendent one.

Is this law clerk some sort of mind reader or, as another coworker said a few minutes ago, do I merely give off a super obvious aging hipster vibe? I don't think it's the latter. In fact, I've always assumed most people who meet me figure that I'm an old fart who generally wants people off his lawn. Which is true, of course, but either way doesn't lead anyone to think that I'd actually enjoy a CD full of punk.

But I do enjoy it, and I suppose the lesson here, such as there is one, is that you just never know, ya know?

Jobs I've left: an inventory

As I wind up my last week of legal work before starting in with NBC, I'm nostalgic for the many, many jobs I have left in my 20 years in the workforce. An inventory:

Little Caesar's Pizza: My first job. I worked there for two weeks in August 1989. I was scheduled a grand total of three shifts. First shift: I scrubbed out used pizza pans. Second shift: I put the little prefabricated dough balls into some dough stretching machine despite the fact that you were supposed to be 18 years-old to operate it. Third shift: cheese and sauce station. The franchise owner moved me off sauce because he said I was making "race tracks" with the ladle. Then he moved me off cheese because he said I was "gonna put [him] in the poorhouse" because I was too heavy with the cheese. Best part: I'm not entirely sure that in 1989 Little Caesar's was using real cheese. After the cheese he sent me back to the pans. I quit the next day.

WCIR FM: What started out as a gopher job around the radio station turned into a full-blown gig as a weekend overnight DJ (though I often worked during the week too, in violation of child labor laws). Great job, even with the bad 1989-92 top 40 music I had to play. Best job I've ever had. I kept it until I left for college and even came back for the summer after freshman year. My last shift was seven straight hours of non-format music from my personal collection. My boss figured it was easier to let me do that than to argue about it.

A Columbus, Ohio public opinion polling company whose name I honestly can't remember right now: I worked there a month during my sophomore year in college. Seemed like easy money until you realized that people hated me calling them to interrupt their dinner and/or "Wheel of Fortune" watching even though I wasn't selling anything. I quit without really telling anyone. They called me three weeks later to ask me if I would ever be picking up my last paycheck.

Ohio State University Bookstore: Office supplies counter. I had this job for the balance of college. It was about half student employees, half-lifers. The lifers were a bit scary. One of them said that the worst thing that could ever happen to him would be for him to win a lottery when the jackpot was below $20 million. Why? "Because there are certain things I'll need to do if I win, and I'll need all of that money." His expression when he said that was serious, approaching dire.

Limited Credit Services: A second job in the summer between sophomore and junior year. Fielding customer service calls from people with Limited, Victoria's Secret and Express credit cards. Most of it was fielding calls from mall stores where the account holder wanted to buy $250 worth of ugly clothes but only had the credit limit to buy $150. I was a bit of a pushover and usually let them have it, so I'm probably partially responsible for the state of our debt-heavy, consumerist economy.

Department of Justice, Antitrust division: unpaid clerkship the summer after my first year of law school. Since they weren't paying me I could pretty much leave whenever I wanted to. They called it the "13th Amendment Schedule." That summer they were going after Ticketmaster for gumming up the concert industry, Microsoft for monopolizing the operating system market and was looking at GM for trying to put entrepreneurial electric car companies out of business. My contribution: I searched LEXIS for criminal cases with interesting fact patterns that I could maybe one day adapt into a mystery novel.

Law Firm Number 1: A litigation boutique here in Columbus. Crazy screaming partners who always made you feel like crap. Insane hours. I quit to make more money at Law Firm Number 2. When I quit, the screamers said that I was making a huge mistake and would regret it for the rest of my life.

Law Firm Number 2: A big, international law firm here in Columbus. Crazy, passive aggressive partners who never let you know where you stood. I preferred the screamers. It was a pretty big mistake leaving the screamers, and I did regret it for a time. Insane hours. I quit to go someplace less passive aggressive. When I did, they sort of casually let me know that they were probably going to let me go soon anyway. Did I mention that they were passive aggressive?

Law Firm Number 3: A big national law firm here in Columbus. Crazy partners who had all kinds of humanizing personal problems but who were, on the whole, nice to me. The place actually worked out OK for a good long while, but I soon started to realize that my life might be better if I didn't go out drinking after work every night and living and breathing the facts of my ethically-shady clients to the exclusion of quality time with my growing family. Naturally, such a decision was terrible for my career, and after a year or two of coasting, I was laid off. But hey, at least I started up the baseball blog during the coast.

State Government Job: Started back in February, leaving on Friday. Bad money, but good work. Nice people. The first time in 11 years that I realized that one can practice law for a living and actually be happy. If it weren't for the NBC gig, I probably would have stayed there until I retired or until the state pension system went broke, whichever came first.

So, doing the math, that means I average a new job every two years. I'm 36 now, so I only have, what, fourteen or fifteen jobs until I retire?  Watch this space for coming career announcements!

Programming Note

When I started writing ShysterBall in the spring of 2007, the idea was to give myself a place to be where I could escape the stress and unpleasantness of my legal career, if only for the briefest of moments. As time went on, it began to consume more and more of my waking hours and, in all honesty, interfering pretty significantly with that legal career. No, I never dropped the ball on a case, but it has been a struggle. I mean really, how is someone supposed to prepare for an oral argument when Roger Clemens is testifying before Congress? I'd like to say that I eventually managed to find balance with all of this, but that would be a lie. My life hasn't been in balance since at least 2006. Maybe earlier. Something has to be done. So I'm doing it:

I'm quitting the law. Starting November 30th I will be writing about baseball full time for NBC Sports.com at the Circling the Bases blog.

Obviously this wasn't a unilateral decision on my part. NBC has decided that they want me all-in on Circling the Bases, and that's not the kind of thing you have to ask me twice. The people over there have been fantastic to me since I started moonlighting back in April. They've never censored a word I've written. They've never declared a topic off-limits. Their instructions to me when I started were to make some fucking noise, and they've allowed me to do that non-stop since. When they asked me to do it full time, it was a complete no-brainer.

I don't yet know how it's going to all work out -- the enormity of this is just starting to sink in -- but to say I'm excited would be something of an understatement.

How I Got to Ohio

A ShysterBall reader asked me the other day why I lived in Ohio (he actually asked me why anyone would live in Ohio, but I can't really answer that question). The short answer is that I'm here because I went to Ohio State for college and decided that, after three years of law school in D.C., Columbus was a nice compromise between my country upbringing in West Virginia and the increasingly annoying big city. How I got to Ohio State, however, is a longer story.

Aside from a couple of semesters of messing around at commuter schools, neither of my parents went to college. Neither did my grandparents. Neither did most of my friends' parents or any of my neighbors. While my folks weren't themselves blue collar, we just happened to live in places where blue collar people could make a decent living, so college just wasn't a major factor in anyone's life. Still, once I started getting good grades and scoring really high on achievement tests as a kid, it was always sort of assumed that I'd go someday, even if no one really planned for it. Really, we were all kind of casually ignorant about the whole process.

Despite some struggles with math and science, my overall grades were above average. I scored respectably if unremarkably on the SAT and ACT exams. On the power of those things, nearby Concord College and Marshall University sent me letters offering tuition waivers during the summer before my senior year, so it seemed that at the very least, I would be going somewhere. Not that I was all that enthusiastic about staying in West Virginia for college. Neither a Marshall nor Concord degree really travels, and the career pickings for those staying near home were pretty damn slim. Unless I wanted to teach school in Beckley – which had actually crossed my mind for a while – I knew I needed to go out of state.

So I sent away for applications from a half dozen places like UVA, Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State, and UNC, with the idea being that (1) if I went to school out of state, I would want to be within a day's drive of home; and (2) if I didn't know what the hell I wanted to do with my life (I didn't), I had better go someplace big where I would have a lot of options. I received unsolicited packages from dozens of other places, mostly smaller liberal arts colleges in Virginia and Ohio. Over the course of a few weeks I tried to imagine what each of these places would be like. Given that the only concrete information I had to go on in those pre-Internet days was their brochures, they all seemed like they'd be nice, leafy places with stately buildings and a charmingly multicultural student body.

I was far more concerned with how I was going to pay for it all. Having moved several times, Mom and Dad were never more than a couple of years into a thirty year mortgage and, let's face it, we had always lived a little bit above our means via credit card debt. We took a lot of nice vacations, but as a result, there wasn't a college fund waiting for me upon graduation. As such, I was looking at either a scholarship or hefty loans. While I ultimately went with the latter option, I ran out all of the ground balls on the former one, which included a several-month flirtation with the ROTC.

Not that I was enamored with the military. To the contrary, by virtue of typical teenage rebellion and the fact that most of the considerable amounts of pop culture I had consumed growing up was informed by Boomer-era anti-establishment sensibility, I had quite the aversion to the military. This despite the fact that my grandfather, father, and brother had all served in the Navy. I may have been painfully naive, but as far as I was concerned, the liberals, punks, and hippies were right about everything that mattered, and the military was full of wannabe Nazi squares, with the possible exception of my brother. The Kurt Vonnegut books I had recently gotten into didn't help matters.

Still, I was either cynical or deluded enough to think that I could endure four or five years in the military if it meant a free college education. After all, if I were to take an ROTC scholarship I would likely be an office bound officer as opposed to some piece of cannon fodder. If things got bad enough once I started active duty I could just pretend to be gay or crazy and get myself booted. Finally, thinking that in the event a war broke out I'd rather have the bad guys shooting at whatever it was I was driving as opposed to shooting at me personally, I sent off applications to the Navy and Air Force ROTC programs.

The Air Force must have just been giving them away, because they responded almost immediately, offering me a scholarship and telling me that I could go to any college I wanted as long as I majored in computer science or engineering. This struck me as crazy. I mean, they already had my transcripts, so they must have seen my dreadful math and science grades when they made their offer, right? Grades aren't everything -- mine may have been more a function of my lack-of-interest as opposed to a lack-of-aptitude -- but on what possible basis could anyone conclude that I'd make a good engineer? The Navy seemed to have their shit together a bit better. They took longer to respond, but when they did they conditioned my scholarship on my passing a series of aptitude tests.

That October, my Dad and I drove down to Virginia Tech's campus in Blacksburg, Virginia where they would be administered. Though I wouldn't be obligated to go to VT even if I got the scholarship, my observations of the place gave me serious pause about the whole endeavor. Virginia Tech's ROTC program was different than most. They call it the "Corp of Cadets," and it's run like a mini-West Point rather than some unpopular extracurricular program. As I walked around Blacksburg that day I saw nothing but overclocked adrenaline junkies in their pressed gray uniforms yelling "boo-yah!" and the like to each other at every opportunity. It wasn't the sort of thing that made me want to join their ranks, but I took my tests – passing them all – and a few weeks later got essentially the same offer from the Navy that I did from the Air Force.

While I tried to figure out if I could actually stomach the life of a military engineer, Saddam Hussein decided to invade Kuwait. President Bush sent my brother (and a few others) to the Persian Gulf to straighten it all out, and suddenly being a cheerleader for the military was no longer unfashionable. I worked at a radio station at the time (more on that in another post), and that fall I was tasked with playing hastily-recorded, jingoistic anthems by guys like Hank Williams, Jr. Mom and Dad took to watching CNN 24 hours a day. After more than 15 years of the post-Viet Nam blahs, everyone was war crazy again. While I'm certain that there were a dozen other things that would have eventually caused me to reject the ROTC scholarships anyway, the outbreak of the war is what ultimately turned me off to the whole idea, and it all came to a head one morning in Columbus, Ohio.

I had recently been accepted to Ohio State, and Dad and I drove up to visit the campus and the ROTC program to see if it was the right place for me. It was January 17, 1991. The fighting in Kuwait had started the evening before, and Dad and I had watched it unfolding in real time from our hotel room. While we would have preferred to stay glued to the TV, we had an appointment with the Ohio State's Commandant at 9AM, so we reluctantly came to campus that morning.

Upon arriving at the ROTC building, we passed a student lounge with a television tuned into the war coverage, surrounded by a couple dozen of uniformed cadets. Cheers and high fives erupted with each bomb blast and Tomahawk missile strike. The cadets' glee at the outbreak of war was obscene to me, and not just because I was a anti-establishment kid conditioned to think such a thing by Boomer culture. I had a brother there. Though it would soon become the popular – albeit erroneous – consensus that the first Gulf War was an unequivocally righteous and bloodless triumph, I knew that each of those blasts meant the deaths of several people. No matter if they were Iraqis, Americans, angels, or Nazis, this was nothing to be cheered.

Leaving the lounge, Dad and I went to meet with the Commandant. He was a nice enough fellow who was far more scholarly than I would have expected. Still, he couldn't go three sentences without making excited reference to the day's carnage, no doubt thinking it would help him sell me on the scholarship and his program. I was getting sick to my stomach as the conversation continued, tuning him out until it was eventually just him and Dad talking.

We wrapped up our meeting and walked outside to take a stroll around the campus. The farther we got from the ROTC building the better I felt. By the time we made it across the Oval and down to Mirror Lake, I knew that I wasn't going to be taking any ROTC scholarship. Having made this decision, I was overtaken with relief. A positive mojo beam from deep within me, bouncing off the buildings and back at me, intensifying the euphoria. I hated those bastards at the ROTC building, but I was liking Ohio State, because it was the first place I had felt content about college and my future since the whole process had begun.

I didn't tell Dad that I wouldn't be taking the ROTC scholarship for a few days. He wasn't particularly happy about it – it meant some huge college debt was in the offing – but he didn't give me much grief either.

Within a few weeks I would receive rejection letters from Michigan and Virginia (justified, in my view, based on my lackluster SAT scores) and acceptances from Penn State, North Carolina, and a couple of small liberal arts colleges that I was never really considering. Having been in the south for a few years and wanting out, going to North Carolina seemed like a step in the wrong direction. Another gigantic state school, Penn State seemed interchangeable with Ohio State in my mind, but got demerits for being in the middle of nowhere. Of course, given the good vibes I had felt at Ohio State that January morning, I had pretty much made my decision already.

I moved into the dorms at Ohio State on September 21, 1991, started classes four days later, and graduated on June 9, 1995. For all of the stuff you hear about big football schools, I think I got a pretty fabulous education. Following three years of law school in Washington, I moved back and have been here ever since.

There's a lot I like about it. There's a lot I don't like so much. Either way, I've now lived in Columbus longer than anywhere else, so there's no denying that it's home.

2003 Road Trip Diary: Epilogue and Forward Ho

I went back to work a week after getting back off the road. While I'd like to say that I grew as a person as a result of my experiences, the truth is that I still look out the window and daydream too much. I've been at this job for five years now -- nearing ten years as a lawyer overall -- and while I am far less prone to existential angst these days, most of the time I feel like I would be happier doing other things. I think most lawyers feel that way, honestly, and the ones that don't aren't the sort of people you really want to talk to.

But things are better. Until my road trip, I struggled to simply get through the day most of the time. Now I have something to get me through when the going gets tough. Two somethings, actually:

Anna was born on December 15, 2003. Carlo followed on July 19, 2005. They and their mother are the best things that have or ever will happen to me. When they're old enough I'm going to take them out west and show them how a big sky and all the time in the world to ponder it makes life's problems feel pretty small. Until then, we're just going to have fun.

The other thing that keeps me sane is writing. I sort of lost momentum at my new firm last year. ShysterBall saved me. Now, no matter how bleak things get at the office, I have something to look forward to every day. It's hacky to quote Whitman about this, but I'll do it anyway because it's true: "It's our game - the American game. It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us." Maybe it's not as much the American game now as it was in Whitman's time, but it's still true for me.

But it's not just baseball, it's writing about it. Actually, as I've found over the past month or two in this space, it's writing about anything. Everything. Writing is the one thing I do better than almost anyone in the law and is probably my only distinct talent in life at large. I wanted to be a writer when I was a kid, but I suppressed that, because I didn't know any writers and didn't really think it was a job that real people actually did. Writers, I assumed, lived on other planets with rock stars, athletes and cowboys. You couldn't just become one. You had to be one already.

I know that's not true now. Sure, it's still a pretty tough trick to make a living at it. I'm not even close to that yet, but it probably doesn't matter. I've been paid for a handful of writings in the past year, but the fact of payment added exactly nothing to the experience for me. For me it's all about getting an idea, transferring it from my head to the screen, and working to polish and complete it. Making a living at this would be wonderful, but I get the same sense of accomplishment writing one of these installments for an audience of 50 as I do writing a book review for the New York Post that will be seen by half a million.

And really, that's what this space is for: writing for the hell of it. I have some odd autobiographical things I've always wanted to write down, so you'll see some of those going forward. I'm going to do my best to keep this from becoming an excessively bloggy space, but I might put down the random news-inspired thought here from time to time as well. I'm going to do my best to put something new up once a week or so, but don't hold me to it. If there hasn't been anything new in a while, click over to ShysterBall to make sure I'm still alive. If I am, come back later. There will be something new eventually.

I hope you enjoyed reading the story of my little trip as much as I enjoyed writing it. For those of you whose minds are still on the road, the pics from the trip can be found here.

2003 Road Trip Diary: Chapter 14

We woke up late, got showers, and headed out in search of a bookstore and then breakfast. The bookstore was to figure out where to eat breakfast, because neither of us had an Austin city guide of any kind. We found a great bookstore near the UT campus and an even better breakfast at a place called Trudy's. The people watching was pretty interesting too. There's a definite Texas type, even in an otherwise oddball town like Austin. Every man's hair is neat -- I suspect hairspray is involved -- and every woman is blond and essentially beautiful in a very different way than blonds are usually beautiful. Striking, yes, but almost alien in some important but indescribable way. There were many couples with matching polo shirts. It was just an odd scene.

We found a more suitable hotel after breakfast -- the Radisson at the corner of Congress and Caesar Chavez -- dropped our stuff off, and went walking around. Sixth Street is the main drag of bars and music clubs and we figured we'd spend the day and evening hanging around there. As luck would have it, the biannual Old Pecan Street Festival was happening that weekend, so there was a lot to see. The live music that usually comes out of every storefront on Sixth had moved out onto the sidewalks, and the street was filled with arts and crafts booths.

After checking out the artists' wares, we stopped into Joe's Generic Bar for a few beers and some music. As it was still only early afternoon the acts weren't exactly headliners, but the guy playing when we came in -- a Stevie Ray Vaughan wannabe -- was a lot better than the best you ever see in places like Columbus. I'm a big Lucinda Williams and Hayes Carll fan, and I've read just how tough a go they had in Austin. I can't imagine how tough it is for the guys we were watching to make a go of it.

We drank a few Shiner Bocks and enjoyed the music. It was a dive, but I liked it. I was surprised, then, to read a couple of years later that the guy who owned the place -- Joe Bates -- had closed up shop in September 2004, citing his disgust with Sixth Street (he called it "sick street"). According to the article I read, when he first started Joe's "things were great for an entrepreneur. But when the street got really popular, the city stepped in and ruined the party." The rent had quadrupled and the city was cracking down on open container laws, which really killed the bar-to-bar business. Joe had had it, and was going to move to a better, less commercialized location in Austin. He never got the chance, though, because less than a month after he closed the bar, he was found murdered in his home. Joe's Generic is now a tattoo parlor. From what I can find online, many in Austin believe that live blues hasn't been the same since.

I left the bar before Ethan was ready to go. It was hot that day -- high 90s, and the beer and lack of air conditioning was kind of getting to me -- so I went back to the room to shower (again) and cool down. Ethan came back about an hour later and told me that he had chatted with the fake Stevie Ray after his set. I probably should have just sucked it up and stayed because I imagine that would have been an interesting conversation. Still, Ethan and I ended up having an interesting conversation of our own about human nature, the war, and a hundred other things while we killed time before dinner.

Ethan and I had pretty different upbringings. He didn't watch TV growing up and isn't the more or less cliche pop-culture-fueled product of the 70s and 80s that I am. He read far more books and had parents that were simply more serious about things like religion and work ethic and all of that than I did. This made for some pretty radical differences between the two of us back when we first met in college -- I was something of a naive, knee jerk liberal because that's pretty much all I knew; Ethan, while not fitting the conservative stereotype as such, was definitely way to the right of where I was. Over the years there has been something of a role reversal. Nothing radical to be sure, but I am fairly certain that he is now to the left of where I am politically (not that I'm too far right). Maybe it's because he's been in the Bay Area for most of the past 15 years and I've been to law school and the Midwest. Those kinds of things matter.

More pronounced than the political shift is the cultural one. There was a time when I would sit and educate Ethan about popular music, movies, and whatever cultural ephemera seemed to matter to me at the time. These days, mostly because I've had kids, I have no clue what's going on in music anymore, I don't see many movies, and basically lead a pretty insulated life, culturally speaking. As I'm writing this I'm listening to the Rolling Stones' Let it Bleed. That's partially because it's a kickass album, but partially because I haven't bought a new CD in about four years. In contrast, Ethan will email me several times a year now to tell me about a concert or a play or a movie he just saw that I have simply never heard of.

There's no real point to this digression except that, as I sit here now and think about it, I'm pretty sure that conversation we had in the hotel room in Austin was the last one before our cultural and political vectors crossed and headed off in different directions. Not that it matters all that much. I'm pretty sure that Ethan and I would remain friends and confidantes regardless of where things stood culturally and politically, and I really can't say that about anyone else in my life.

Dinner that night was at the Bitter End Bistro and Brewery. It was quite the place at the time, but I read now that it has closed its doors to make way for a hotel. And so it goes. Dinner was great, though. The wine was better. Ethan -- who knows wine better than you know your first born -- ordered three bottles, and each time our waitress -- Martha -- came back to tell him, sorry, they were all out of it. As a peace offering, Martha gave us a bottle of 1996 Opus One at the price of whatever the last wine it was we tried to order but couldn't have. I think it ended up being a $100 discount on the Opus One, which these days sells for something like $350-$450.

The wine was wonderful and so was the dinner. Martha was great too, and all of the good juju of the evening inspired Ethan and I to flirt with her a bit. I quickly came clean as a married father-to-be, however, and asked Martha if she had any suggestions for baby names. She suggested Tyler. Alas, even if I was interested, there was no future for a person like Martha and me. She came through much stronger, however, when we asked where we should go after dinner. She suggested the Elephant Room across Congress Avenue, and it was a dynamite suggestion. Dark, unpretentious, and cozy (it's in a basement), we sat in the Elephant Room and listened to some fabulous jazz for a couple of hours and, of course, engaged in some deep conversation. The topic: my concern that Ethan will never find contentment and Ethan's concern that I will never find excitement or true satisfaction in life. It was a conversation fueled by just as much mutual envy as it was genuine concern. It's also a conversation we've had pretty frequently since 1991 and will probably have it until we die.

And with that, the real business of the road trip ended.

The next morning meant an early wake up call and a 200 mile drive to Dallas where I dropped Ethan off at the airport for his flight back home to San Francisco. I had a thousand more miles ahead of me, but I knew they'd be quick ones. I had seen enough for one trip and wanted to be home. I also knew that I'd be back on the road one day, and still know five years later that I certainly will be. I let East Texas, Arkansas, and Western Tennessee buzz by with nothing much more than a glance as I kept the music cranked and the pedal to the metal.

I made it all the way to Nashville that night. I might have gone even further if it weren't for terrible storms in Tennessee. They were part of an unusual outbreak of tornadoes that hit the south that week, killing at least 39 people in Tennessee, Missouri, and Kansas. I had trailed the storms for a hundred miles or so, but had no idea how severe they were until I stopped in Jackson, Tennessee for gas and found a devastated town with no power. The tornado had hit less than two hours before I got there. I'd read later that eleven people died and hundreds of homes were damaged. As I looped back to the freeway I drove past dazed people, not yet aware that, in all likelihood, someone they knew had just died.

I made it home just after noon the following day. Carleen was still at work. I didn't unpack the car for a while. Instead I came inside and sat down in the silence of my living room. I thought a bit about the job I would be starting in a week. I thought a bit about the baby that would be coming in December. But mostly, I thought about the road and how good it had been to me for the past month.


Come back soon. I've got an epilogue in mind.

2003 Road Trip Diary: Chapter 13

We awoke at 5:30 the next morning, packed up, and made our way back down the mountain and into Saguaro National Park for some hiking on the Tanque Verde Ridge Trail. It's about 14 miles and serves as the main access to back country camping, but we had places to go, so we only went a couple of miles in and a couple of miles back. There was a pretty tough climb about a mile into the hike. Given the quickly rising temperature that day, it was quite a workout. Ethan got stuck with several cactus needles. I somehow made it though unscathed.

Once we got back to the car we headed out of Tucson, passing a large bone yard where the U.S. Air Force mothballs planes in the event the Russians or the Martians or someone invade. I don't know much about military aircraft, but Ethan said most of the ones he could see from the road were Vietnam-era fighters. Later -- after a long drive during which I saw at least a half dozen military planes flying and the u-turn shaped contrails of fighter jets -- we arrived at the White Sands Missile Range Museum, outside of which sits a bone yard of old missiles, rockets, and bombs.

As Ethan and I climbed on disarmed weaponry, the United States Army was busy subduing a foreign country because it dared acquire some of their own. Or so we were told anyway. The case for WMDs in Iraq has been thoroughly discredited by now, but it was pretty questionable even then. At least I thought so, as did just about every smart person I knew at the time. Nevertheless, our soldiers had invaded in March and President Bush declared that the mission had been accomplished just the day before. We know now that the mission, such as it was, may never be accomplished and its undertaking was always a mistake. While there was a time a few years ago when I would engage anyone in an argument on the pros and cons of the war, I can barely discuss it anymore, even with those who share my opinions about it all. Especially with those people, actually. When it comes to Iraq and what our country has become because of it, right and wrong are virtually meaningless to me anymore. All I can feel is sorrow.

After leaving the range, we stopped at White Sands National monument. It may as well have been the surface of the moon, with gypsum dunes covering hundreds of square miles. We took the road into the monument until we lost sight of gypsum-free land, parked, and hiked into the dunes. After walking around half-century-old monuments to the destructive force of man a mere half hour before, there was something refreshing about making tracks and footprints which would be covered up by nightfall.

Twenty five miles later we were in Alamogordo, where we stopped to pick up food for another night of camping. I sat in the car as Ethan went into the grocery store. Looking out the window, I watched a poor-looking Mexican woman struggle with a baby and two bags of groceries. Looking in another direction I saw an old, beat up Chevy Impala filled with four or five kids waiting for their parents. Since I became a father, there's a feeling that I get when I see children in what I perceive to be less than prosperous circumstances. It's not pity, but it's not not pity if that makes any sense. Whatever it is it makes me sad, even if I realize that it's mostly a function of my shallowness, naivete, and insecurity. That afternoon in Alamogordo was the first time I ever really felt it, and I've not been able to shake it since.

Ethan got back with the grub -- chicken this time -- and we made our way to a campground just outside of town. Unlike the night before, this was a flat utilitarian place in the shadow of a mountain rather than atop one. I was quiet that evening, wrestling the anxiety of impeding fatherhood that had been creeping over me since we left the grocery store. Ethan could obviously sense that something was up with me -- I'm pretty sure I came off more standoffish than introspective -- and he soon found a comfortable place to sit down and fired up his laptop. As it grew dark, bugs descended on our campsite. I got into the car to escape them and to write in my journal.

I crawled into my sleeping bag a few minutes later, but sleep wouldn't come quickly. My head was filled with the notion that I didn't know the first thing about being a father, and the thought had me on the verge of panic. I know now that that feeling of fearful ignorance is about the best thing that can happen to a prospective dad because, no matter how uncomfortable it makes you feel in the short term, it certainly makes you pay attention once the baby comes.

As usual, I felt better by the morning light. After cleaning up camp, we headed east on US-82, which took us up into the Sacramento Mountains. It was beautiful country that reminded me an awful lot of West Virginia (which is what I consider home, for those who don't know). The only thing that ruined it was an over eager sheriff's deputy who decided to tag me for going 60 in a 45. Amazingly -- after days on-end of setting the cruise control at around 100 -- I get a speeding ticket for going 60. To this day I consider it a horseshit ticket, though Ethan maintains that I deserved it. Given that I've gotten something like seven or eight tickets in the nearly 19 years I've been driving, he's probably right.

We came down out of the mountains near the town of Artesia, and then headed south towards Carlsbad Caverns. We were eager for some subterranean hiking, but once we got there and saw the tour buses and old people with fanny packs, we realized that there wasn't anything all that rugged about it (this is what happens when you don't read guidebooks). Carlsbad Caverns is basically a leisurely stroll down a paved trail. There's even a snack bar at the bottom.

Despite all of that, Ethan and I made the best of it, taking our time to walk and talk as we descended into the cavern. About Ethan's marriage mostly, and how he wanted to arrange his life going forward. Would he date? Would he dive headlong into work? Would he travel? Knowing Ethan like I do, I assumed the answer would be "yes," and I was more or less right. As a guy who can't juggle two balls at once, I have always been amazed at Ethan's ability to juggle five.

The biggest mistake of the day -- and maybe the trip -- came next, and that was taking the guided tour of King's Palace, which is a set of large rooms at the bottom of the cavern. The tour group was large and disorganized. The guide -- a ranger named Clint -- was an information-free bore. We entered a large room and were put to sleep with irrelevant geological details, tangents about the difference between cavers and spelunkers, and more bad jokes than you could shake a stick at. At the one-hour mark, the group began to turn on poor Ranger Clint. People were openly groaning and grousing, and some asked his young assistant if the tour could simply be stopped. Ethan corrected Clint when he claimed that his aluminum flashlight was steel. A middle-aged woman loudly described the tour as "an interpretive nightmare." By the end of the tour I almost felt bad for Clint, but those feelings were far outweighed by my joy that it was all over.

The original plan was to find someplace else to camp that night, but it was barely mid-afternoon when we got back to the car so we decided to press forward and see how far we'd get. Crossing into west Texas was a load of fun, as we took an empty bit of highway (Texas route 652) across some open range over to US 285. Strangely, after nearly a month of crossing deserts and mountains and canyons -- after standing on the edge of the Pacific Ocean and lying awestruck under the Milky Way -- nothing made the world seem larger, and myself smaller, than the open ranges of West Texas.

We cut down US-285 with the intention of hooking up with Interstate 10 in Fort Stockton. We encountered a slight detour in the town of Pecos, however, when a truck pulling a trailer with an extraordinarily large boat had managed to get stuck in the middle of the junction through which we had to go. The police officer at the scene said it would be at least an hour before they could get a crane in to clear it out. This didn't bother me especially, because it gave us the opportunity to travel down another empty highway (county road 17) which, while taking us about 40 miles out of our way, afforded another opportunity for blazing speed and open spaces. Unfortunately it was a bit too much speed, as I saw the flashing lights of the Texas Rangers in my rear view mirror right after we hopped on I-10. I pulled over to the side of the road cursing my bad luck (certainly I bore no responsibility for this terrible misfortune).

Based on some accounts I've read, Ethan and I fit a pretty questionable profile that afternoon. We hadn't showered or shaved in a couple of days and we each looked like hell (my respectable bald pate was covered by shifty looking corduroy Kangol). The car was an absolute mess inside and out. We were a mere handful of miles from the Mexican border, hauling ass, with out-of-state plates. When I saw the big white cowboy hats and mirrored sunglasses walking up towards us, I fully expected the car to get tossed for drugs or, at the very least, to be given an extremely hard time.

We need not have worried. The two rangers who pulled me over were the most polite law enforcement officers I have ever encountered. They called me sir and asked us how we were enjoying our trip. Yes, they gave me a ticket -- I was really going like a bat out of hell -- but they marked it down as 89 mph in a 80 zone, which is at least ten miles per hour slower than I was really going. The day's tally: $270 worth of speeding tickets. I rationalized this by amortizing the amount in my mind over the course of the whole trip, convincing myself that it was no different than paying $10 a day for a license to speed, which I would have gladly paid beforehand. Unfortunately, neither Carleen nor my insurance agent saw it the same way.

We had planned to just drive until we got tired and found a hotel, but there isn't a hell of a lot in west Texas. It was a nice evening though, so we drove. And drove. And kept on driving. We came close to running out of gas just before Sonora, but just made it into town on fumes. As I filled up the tank, Ethan decided that we should pool our money and open up a gas station ten miles to the west to take advantage of all of the desperate folks like us who thought they wouldn't quite make it. We'd call it the Pump 'n Dump (we really needed a bathroom by the time we hit Sonora as well). It would make us rich, he said. Sadly, we neglected to follow up on the idea when we got back to civilization.

It was getting good and late by the time we made it to Fredericksburg and we were ready to stop for the night. We couldn't, unfortunately, because a biker rally had taken all of the hotel rooms, so we pressed on to Austin. It was nearly 1AM when we stopped at the airport Ramada, which was the first hotel our weary eyes could see from the freeway. We checked in and passed out.

The day's tally: nearly 800 miles, 2 speeding tickets, a wasted trip down an overdeveloped hole in the ground, and about 17 hours of good conversation. I'd take that just about any day.

2003 Road Trip Diary: Chapter 12

We hit I-80 heading east just after breakfast. In Sacramento we switched over to US-50 and made a beeline for the Sierras, reaching South Lake Tahoe in time for a Rooty-Tooty-Fresh-and-Fruity lunch at IHOP. I’d been to Tahoe once before, joining Ethan and some friends of his for a ski trip. It usually takes me two visits to a place to get and hold a clear picture of it in my mind, but Tahoe was pretty much how I remembered it.

After lunch we cut over to US-395 and turned south down the back of the Sierra Nevada mountains for several hundred miles. I had long been looking forward to this portion of the trip and was disappointed that the weather had kept me from taking this route a couple of weeks before. I was anything but disappointed that day. The Sierras give you a thousand different looks. They're the most beautiful mountains I've ever seen.

We turned east again just past Lone Pine, with Mt. Whitney in the rear view mirror, and Death Valley straight ahead. The most significant direction, however, was down in that we went from 5000 feet elevation to –190 in the space of about 100 switchbacking miles of highway. I had expected stifling heat, but it was probably only about 85-90 degrees on the valley floor that day which, as so many have said, is quite comfortable in the desert. I had likewise expected Death Valley to be bleak and barren, but the desert bloomed with wildflowers. Even the sagebrush took on a green tint, making this legendarily desolate landscape one of the more welcoming places I had been on my trip.

We stopped the car when we reached sea level to take pictures of some sand dunes on the north side of the highway. It was unnaturally quiet. No cars passed us the entire time we were stopped. For some reason, I felt compelled to lie down in the middle of the road. I’d been in a fabulous mood since my epiphany that morning, but lying there, staring at the desert sky, transported me to a higher plane of relaxation and contentment. Soon the sun began to set and we continued on our way.

I have mixed feelings about Las Vegas. 30 million people go there every year, primarily to gamble, and if you read the Ely and St. Louis installments of this diary, you know my feelings about gambling. Las Vegas' isolation and uniqueness temper those feelings somewhat. Though I know it's more complicated than this, I allow myself to believe that, unlike the riverboat casinos in Missouri or the Hotel Nevada up in Ely, Vegas isn’t being kept alive by people making quick stops to blow the grocery money on their way home from work. It’s a destination, I tell myself, and budgeting to blow a few thousand vacation dollars at Caesar’s Palace is no more offensive than budgeting to do the same thing at Disneyworld. Maybe less offensive. Gambling aside, the place, its history, and what it represents in American culture and psychology just fascinates me in ways that sad-sack southern towns with faux riverboat casinos simply never will. I'd like to write a book about it one day.

We checked into the Mirage just before 8 P.M., stowed our bags, and went down to get some dinner. Ethan had called ahead earlier in the day and got tickets to see a show. It was a lot of fun, but road fatigue got the best of me about halfway through. We had a couple of drinks back at the Mirage after the show, but by then I was dead on my feet. I managed to engage in some conversation with Ethan regarding the end of his marriage and the beginning of his single life, but my head wasn’t really in the game. As I went to bed I hoped that I didn’t give him any bad advice. Of course, after all of these years, he’s no doubt an expert at sorting through my bullshit.

I awoke the next morning to the buzzing of an alarm clock – the first time I needed one since my last day at work. I guess the previous day's drive had taken more out of me than I thought. I let Ethan drive out of Las Vegas. After stopping for a quick breakfast in Henderson, we snaked over the Hoover Dam. Neither of us felt all that compelled to stop for what is, essentially, a lot of concrete and a lot of tourists. As we crossed over I prayed for a pre-cision earthquake (yes, I know that was a different dam).

Highway 93 south through Arizona is dullsville. Nothing but miles and miles of, well, nothing interrupted by the occasional mobile home squatting on land selling for $500 an acre and a waste of money at half the price. It was the perfect landscape for our purposes, though. Whereas the day before was full of long stretches of silence as we took in the beauty of the mountains, lakes, and deserts, this day was full of conversation. About change, mostly. Ethan's soon-to-be-filed divorce. My soon-to-be-born baby. Career uncertainty for both of us. The feeling that we were getting older and exactly how we felt about that. This last bit was underscored by a call from my Dad when we were just south of Kingman, telling me that he had decided to retire. The only constant in life is change.

Soon after my Dad called, Ethan’s prospective landlady back in Berkeley called me to check his references. I suppose it might have been awkward if she had asked me any tough questions, him sitting a foot away from me and all. Amiable hippie landladies from Berkeley aren't ones for tough questions, though, so she asked me a series of odd ones like “what is his favorite kind of pizza?” and "is he a complete person?" We drove out of signal range before she had a chance to ask me what kind of tree he would be.

We pulled into Tuscon at around 5:30, made a quick stop at a grocery store for camp grub, turned onto the Catalina Highway and started up Mt. Lemmon and into the Coronado National Forest. U2’s Joshua Tree blasted from the cd player as we raced up the switchbacks, stopping every so often to take in the view as a golden sunset cast the day's last light on the valley floor below. We were on a combined music-driving-scenery-altitude high as we stopped at Spencer Canyon Campground, about 8000 feet up the mountain.

It had been over 90 degrees down in Tucson, but it was already well below 60 and dropping fast as we made camp. Ethan built a fire, over which we cooked our manly feast: cocktail shrimp, peppers, onions, and tomatoes, marinated in sesame oil on bamboo skewers (I kept my wedding ring and a picture of my wife close by just in case we encountered harassment). We continued to camp like morons as I stirred the fire with my car's jack handle rather than seek out a thick branch. I would end up forgetting the jack handle when we left the next morning. A massive fire burned much of Mt. Lemmon just over a month later. As I watched the news coverage back home, I wondered if anyone would find the jack handle next to the fire pit and assume that some greenhorn had accidentally burnt the goddamn place down.

For the past several months, each night's sleep had been preceded by several minutes of building anxiety. If dreams came, I didn't remember them. When morning came, I couldn't wake up.

That night I zipped into my sleeping bag and stared up at a billion stars, framed by a proscenium of Ponderosa Pines. Sleep came quickly. My dreams, vivid.

2003 Road Trip Diary: Chapter 11

Things were much better by the light of day. I dropped Carleen off at the airport at 11:00 A.M. and, amazingly, the world didn’t end. Within a few hours she’d be back in Ohio, falling back into her routine and I’d have no basis for projecting my anxieties about us being apart onto her. It was a beautiful sunny Bay Area day -- a bit cool, just how I like it -- and with spirits bright, I drove over to Arthur's house in Berkeley to pick up Ethan for a day of amiable pointlessness.

He wasn’t there when I arrived. Instead, I was greeted by a rather tense and grumpy Arthur. He loosened up as he and I talked about nothing important for a few minutes, but the tension returned when Ethan came back. After a bit of three-way conversation, an uneasy truce regarding their unexplained dispute seemed to be forming, but it was hard to say how long it would last. Regardless of what they were fighting about that morning, the larger issue was probably the fact that Ethan was going on a second week on Arthur's couch, and as most people know, it's not easy for grownups used to their own space to live together for any extended period of time. Ethan had an apartment in the works, but it wouldn't be ready for a couple of weeks, so he decided to get out of town for a while and join me on the road for the drive back east.

We left Arthur’s and went to a cool little Italian place in Berkeley to plan the route. The planning took about twenty minutes. The usual bullshitting about life, the universe, and everything took about three hours. That usually happens when Ethan and I get together with time to kill. Despite the fact that I've known the guy since freshman year at Ohio State, and despite the fact that we've exchanged several thousand emails of often preposterous length since we graduated, we never run out of stuff to talk about. As far as road trip companions go, you can't do any better.

The general plan we had come up with was to head east the next morning, hang a right at Tahoe, head down US-395 along the backside of the Sierras, hang a left into Death Valley, and hopefully make Las Vegas by dinner. After that it was a bit more vague, but the general idea was to go south towards Tucson, then east into New Mexico, cut across the width of Texas to Austin, and then up to Dallas where Ethan would catch a flight back home and I would head back to Ohio.

The only specific thing we had settled upon was that we'd camp for a couple of nights. Seeing as though I didn't have any gear with me, I went to the REI store after lunch to buy a sleeping bag, a decent fleece, and a couple of other random things. After that it was a haircut and a trip to the laundromat, during which time the Albany, California police gave me a parking ticket that, as I sit here five years later, I realize I never paid. Two hours later I was in San Francisco with Ethan, Arthur (détente achieved), and Ethan's friend Liz, drinking beer at the 21st Amendment outside of Pac Ball Park in advance of seeing the Cubs-Giants. Despite a pretty stiff wind out to center, neither Bonds nor Sosa homered. Ray Durham and Moises Alou did, however, and Kerry Wood pitched a pretty good game on a really cold night. Cubs 4, Giants 2.

We lost Arthur and Liz after the game, but met up with another friend of Ethan's and headed to the Mission to get a late dinner and some mojitos. Between the rum and the wonderful day I was buzzing quite nicely as we crossed back over the bridge and into Berkeley. I dropped Ethan off at Arthur's and -- assuming that Arthur wouldn't want yet another squatter in his house -- I checked into the Hotel Durant for the night, eager to get on the road the next morning.

Except when the next morning came I wasn't so eager. I don’t know if it was one too many mojitos the night before, or my room’s broken radiator and banging pipes, but I slept terribly and I was in a gloomy mood when I woke up. Sitting on the bed as the room went from black to gray, I started thinking that whatever illness had prompted me to get on the road in the first place had long since passed. I no longer wanted to find myself, or see the world, or do whatever the fuck it was I was supposed to be doing. I had to scuttle the rest of the trip, burn ass eastward, and get back into my normal routine as soon as possible. I had to be home with my wife. I had to start painting the nursery or buying life insurance or fixing the wreck that was my career. I had to do something -- anything -- that smelled of responsibility and structure.

I called Carleen, hoping against hope that some minor disaster that urgently needed my attention had befallen her. Nothing serious, mind you, just something big enough to justify me ditching Ethan and the rest of the trip. Unfortunately, everything was fine. I then lobbed her a wonderfully spineless, passive aggressive batting practice pitch, hinting that I was thinking of breaking off the trip and asking her if she’d like (rather than needed) me home. I waited for her answer, thinking that all I needed was a “well, of course I’d like it if you were home,” which would give me an excuse to get on I-80. It didn’t come. Instead, she told me that I should do whatever I thought was best in the short time I had left before I started my new job, and if that meant traveling, I should travel. It figures: the one time in my life I wanted Carleen to be all hysterical and irrational about something, and she pulls this level-headed, understanding shit on me. Jeez.

Disgusted with my wife's thoughtfulness, I called Ethan and asked him if it would mess his week up if I bailed on the trip. In my anxiety-clouded state, I had decided that the only possible way for him to react would be to unleash a classic male pep talk in which he'd tell me to grow some balls, man-up, or whatever it is guys are supposed to say to each other at times like these. Indeed, I was hoping for this, because if it came, I could counter with haughty indignation at the assualt on my manliness. I’d declare that there were far more important things for me to be doing than dicking around in the desert with my friends, and that I was shocked -- shocked! -- that he couldn’t understand that. It would be the perfect cover for a strategic retreat east.

Ethan failed me too. Instead of acting like a typical guy, he acted, as always, like a true friend. He told me that I had to do what I had to do, and that he’d be fine no matter what I decided. He continued, however, by explaining that there were many objective reasons not to rush home, all of which he then listed in a calm, sober manner. Sure, I’d be home in a couple of days, but all I’d do once I got there was watch baseball, mow my lawn, and read books, and though this seemed comforting to me at that moment, it would be a source of regret in the future. I’d never have a chance to do this again. Carleen was pregnant, and once my child came there would be little time for hikes in the desert and 500 mile drives with my best friend. Sure, I may travel out west again – maybe dozens of time – but every time I did it, I’d be reminded that I passed up the opportunity to do it when I was a young man and still relatively free of responsibilities.

Of course he was right, and I knew it as soon as he said it. I thanked him and told him I'd call him back to let him know what I was going to do. I pulled the chair over to the open window, took in a deep breath of fresh air, and gathered my thoughts.

What had come over me? Why was it that when faced with a completely blank slate -- in this case, a month's worth of zero responsibility and carte blanche to do whatever I wanted short of adultery -- I am invariably drawn to the safest, least creative alternative? Wasn’t it exactly this sort of behavior that led me to two legal jobs I hated and a desperate need to find myself? I gazed down Durant Avenue and watched UC Berkeley start its day. How many of those students down there wake up afraid of being away from home? How many of them are overcome with anxiety when forced to do something other than their normal routine? Not many of them, I'd wager.

I sat there, thinking that there would be no hope for me if I didn’t somehow manage to break old patterns. No, I wasn't going to do anything radical, but I had to start testing my boundaries from time to time. To push back against that which predisposes me to be safe, fat, seemingly-happy, but boring. I wasn’t about to abandon my career, sell my house, and become a drifter, but I was going to stop allowing myself to compulsively take the path of least resistance.

I didn't call Ethan back. Instead, I got dressed, packed up, and headed over to Arthur's house. He was a bit surprised when he saw me at the door.

"You here to tell me goodbye?" he said.

"No. I'm here to tell you 'let's go.'"