At some point in my teens, I became certain that ground travel across the United States, as well as staying in motels, were the moments to be most striven for, and once obtained, savored for every footloose second. I am aware that as a Californian, the concept of "car culture" - of road trips with stops at motels just off the highway, not so possible in parts of the country that don't live in a land of perpetual summer - is part of my home state's collective unconscious. But I haven't just driven. I have also racked up thousands of Amtrak and Greyhound miles, all across the country, countless times over. And as far as staying in motels, even when my heart was racing so much I was trembling, from sneaking out of my last house while my ex went upstairs for a second and was clearly going insane and absolutely nobody in our town would let me stay with them, even then I still thought, "Well, at least I get to stay in a motel for the night."
When I was younger, college age, a part of the Olympia Washington artistic scene in the late nineties, I used to really like folk singers who glorify American travel, especially Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. I particularly liked to sing along with this verse of Bob Dylan's version of the song, "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright": Where I'm bound, I can't tell. Goodbye is too good a word, babe, so I'll just say 'Fare thee well.' I ain't saying you treated me unkind. You coulda done better but I don't mind. You just kinda wasted my precious time!"
I held jealousy in my heart towards my male friends, because our creative circle was sexist. Their creative output was taken more seriously than was mine, and there was a double standard around sexuality. I was mad at them too because they seemed to lay claim to these folk singers, when they hadn't lived the stories in their songs as much as I had, not realizing that to them it was only music.
When I get upset at home sometimes now that I live in a studio apartment, I sometimes pretend I'm at a motel, I guess because of the blessed sense of impermanence of just spending a night or two somewhere , though I don't know what is so great about impermanence, really. When I used to own a home and have a full-time job and all the trappings of a happy family, I'd sometimes wonder what it'd be like to effectively disappear off the face of the earth, just from the people who were used to seeing me every day not knowing what strange town I'd moved to, and I've done that like loads of times now so that it's not a novelty.
I do like to experience things that I'd wondered about as a teenager, though.
Comments
Post a Comment