Blubber

"Vassar, Moby Dick is a book about blubber, with a madman thrown in for excitement. Five hundred pages of blubber, one hundred pages of madman, and about twenty pages about how good n----rs are with the harpoon."

-- Ernest "Hem" Hemingway, in Philip Roth's The Great American Novel

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Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life.

Friday's roadtrip from Nebraska to Michigan, quite possibly the last line I'll draw between those two points, took three hours longer than I'd hoped. Halfway through Illinois, my front driver's side tire blew. The car didn't shake; it buzzed and vibrated violently, and I thought for a second that there was something wrong with the speakers. I'd been making my way through the Led Zeppelin canon, and it was "Gallows Pole" from their third album that played as I swore, signaled and slumped to a stop around mile marker 94, on Interstate 80, a Friday in Illinois on which the heat index may well have been 94. Kneeling in front of an engine sick with heat, I saw what looked like some kind of metal bar hanging down from where it should have connected to the wheel. My first thought was, Oh my God, I've broken the axle.

Nothing so melodramatic. I wrenched the smoking rubber tire from its spot and rolled the donut in place, repacked my suitcases and boxes (I'd had to remove them from the trunk in order to get at the spare) and called my dad, who MapQuested me to the nearest Wal-Mart with an auto center. It was a fifteen-minute drive away if I kept the car under 50 mph, which I did, so I put Zeppelin back on.

At the Wal-Mart, the two old fat women at the auto center took care of the order (one Goodwill tire, along with a handful of Illinois "tire taxes" brought my total to over $80), and I flipped out my cell and talked to friends while I walked around and studied DVDs. Normally, I'd go for the books, but let's face it, searching for worthwhile reading material in Wal-Mart is like looking for art in a furniture store. Within an hour, I was back on the road, cruising through a halfway enthusiastic rainstorm from Chicago with everything I owned in that car. I got to Hillsdale and walked around town with Zach for quite a while, and soon I wanted nothing more than to crash on a couch. Which I did.

Yesterday we slept late and watched 3:10 to Yuma and Death at a Funeral, both of which I thought were great examples of their genres. Alan Tudyk was in both films, which adds a sort of theme to the day's entertainment. Yuma I was skeptical of, because of the two UK actors playing backwoodsy American roughasses, but it has a good plot and fresh things to say about frontier violence and partners. The plight of the rancher is easy enough to understand, but the real question is why the outlaw doesn't just escape. Death is a perfect farce, on uncharted ground. Everyone does farces at weddings, reunions, shows of all kinds, balls, galas, etc. This is the first farce I've seen that dares to attack funerals, with an arsenal of midgets, acid, and literally, an elaborate poop gag. Doors swing open and lock shut, with the intensity of a funeral but with none of the solemnity.

Between the films, we attempted to fly a kite. The wind died, though.

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This morning I finished Winesburg, Ohio, a book that seems to explain American grotesqueness in vignettes of a small Ohio town. It's about ordinary people, so it is also about extraordinary dreams, lusts, and absurdity. Anderson has plugged himself into his own book in the character of George Willard, a young newspaper boy whose life intersects briefly or deeply with every person in town. George takes the time to look at the small alarms in a person's life, those little chinks in the mosaic that make something disturbing and beautiful at the same time. And yet at times, the writer seems to be giving us parables: a semi-absurdist/cynical/sentimental version of an American Old Testament.

Zach and I lunched with Dr. Jackson at the Hunt Club, and we talked of theatre, literature, voyeurism and Alcatraz. I think one thing is true of basically everyone you meet: you always remember the first time someone says "fuck" in your presence. If you're like me, it fills you with something like amusement and fear, as if that one word has suddenly deepened the relationship. You haven't so much ascended to a higher plane as you have found the courage to sink lower with each other. Now, you think to yourself, we are so tight that we can let each other say Fuck. All else follows, then: ass, bitch, damn, God damn, shit--they're all fair game once the magic word rears its perfect, ungodly head. It is similar to the first time someone gossips with you. In the taboo is a kind of kinship.

Now the rain has come (again), the trees are waltzing and the sky has grown dark. We could take the kite back out and rediscover electricity.

Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life.