Yet another reason to hate Starbucks and Houston

Back stateside today, and I really needed to check my email to get a couple phone numbers out of my inbox. So I drove down to the local Starbucks only to realize that T-Mobile makes you pay by the minute to use its wireless connection here, and it requires a minimum session of 60 fucking minutes at $.10 a minute. What a joke. What a scam. I miss Austin.

If I'm gonna get screwed, I'm gonna get the most of out it, no matter how painful it is, so, yeah, I'll blog. That'll show those corporate fucks. YOU HEAR ME, T-MOBILE!?! FEEL MY WRATH — POWERED BY BLOGSPOT!!!

Okay, I've got a lot I want to say about Hawaii, but all I got written on the plane was some narcissistc business. And that's what's going up here.

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Thursday, June 4, 2004
1.40 a.m. CST

“If all the year were playing holidays, to sport would be as tedious as work.”
— William Shakespeare, Henry IV

At this moment my plane is somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Hawaii and California. I’m buckled in, as well fed as one gets off airline food, and cruising at 31,000 feet. Hawaii was … fun. Of course it was fun. It was Hawaii. We camped out on the beach. We partied downtown. We body surfed one day. We went hiking up a tropical trail on another. But my cousin’s car had a gimp right-front paw, so we were dependent on the whims of his more mobile friends. As a result, we missed connections with the Aussie chicks. We skipped the luau. We opted out of the cliff jumping. We never made it out to go snorkeling in the coral reefs or to see the inside of his ship. Plus, while I got along with his friends, it was obvious I didn’t click with them — we were just at too-different stations in life. They all had jobs and girlfriends and other everyday goings-on to worry about. All they talked about was work, or when they got drunk and did something stupid, or cars. By the end of the trip, I kind of felt like a nuisance (and a snob, but that’s another story) because my cousin always had the obligation to try to entertain me, and the excitement just wasn’t in it for him and his friends, who long ago exhausted everything the island had to offer. I enjoyed it there — nights reading on the porch were especially relaxing — but the trip reinforced to me that good company is as important as good scenery no matter how beautiful the foliage. By this morning, when we couldn’t find anyone to take us snorkeling, I was ready to come home, disappointed at all I’d missed out on and overeager to grab cheap breakfast tacos with someone who’s in on all my inside jokes. Parting was bittersweet sorrow.

But tonight, as I sat inside this dim cocoon, filled with silent sleepers, racing to meet the sun, I read the most remarkable essay by E. B. White. (Who else?) Like anything that sticks in one’s heart, whether it be literature or art or romance, it is the timing that gives it such force. In this case, it is my particular position in life right now. Ever since graduation, I’ve felt more and more aimless, and that my writing has followed suit. And after spending a week with a group of people around my age but already thoroughly embarked upon a career, I kept hearing Kriston’s question in my head: “What exactly is your plan?” I’m not even sure where I want to go, so I damn well don’t know how to get there.

While surveying White’s collection One Man’s Meat, I kept thinking, How does one become an essayist anyways? I’d need a starting point. Journalism? Maybe. Magazines? Only if by some feat of resume contortion I tricked one into letting me on staff. Grad school? Please, God, no more criticism. Tech writing? Only insofar as it gets me out of debt. This blog? Ha, I don’t even have punch line to a joke that obvious. But then came White’s essay “on springtime and on anything else of an intoxicating nature that comes to mind.” Imagine a month’s worth of entries from an erudite, small-time farmer’s blog: one of his “little adventures in contentment,” as White’s friend dubbed this penchant of his. As White moved from trifle to seemingly insignificant trifle about his farm, mainly centered around his coal-fired brooder stove, I was hazily aware of the essay’s date of publication: April 1941. And as if in response to this whisper, White concludes:

Countries are ransacked, valleys drenched in blood. Though it seems untimely, I still publish my belief in the egg, the contents of the egg, the warm coal, and the necessity for pursuing whatever fire delights and sustains you.

There it is. The right words at the right time. That’s what I’m going to do. I don’t know where it’s going to take me, but that’s the plan.

For now, it seems like it might take me out of debt. Earlier today the real world slithered its green tentacles into my vacation in the form of an e-mail from National Instruments’ HR dept. A request for a phone interview for a tech writing job: my heart sank. Truth be told, I was secretly hoping that I wouldn’t get any bites on any of the jobs I applied for, which would force me to work odd jobs part-time while spending the rest of my summer at the Texan getting some reporting experience and leaving the door open for me to move away from Texas for a bit. Now that I’ve actually got a bite, I feel like I’ve hooked a dogfish. I need the money, undoubtedly, but I did drop computer science way back when for a reason.

A professor once asked me why E. B. White is my favorite author, and I didn’t have a ready response for him. I think I know now, though. I have found no other author whose worldview so closely matches mine. When I read a statement like “There would never be a moment, in war or in peace, when I wouldn’t trade all the patriots in the country for one tolerant man,” I am feel a little more at ease in my seat. On trips like this last one, where life feels regrettably uncertain and out of place, or on those days at the Texan, when every opinion was going to be somehow wrong, there is nothing so comforting as coming across a man with whom you agree.

To read White is, for me, to read the success story of a man of my mold: someone who wanted the same things I want from life and who, for the most part, earned them. Maybe that’s why every time I feel at odds with the world, I read White or I look at the photography of W. Eugene Smith, and I sleep a little better.

Then again, it’s curious that White wanted nothing more than to be a poet. And for all the poetry he wrote (some of which I own but have yet to read) he is famous only for his other efforts. Funny thing, I was at a poetry reading by Robert Hass (about the only poet that I truly, in my heart of hearts, enjoy), and he said that at a young age he intended to become a political essayist. Instead he ended up poet laureate of the United States. Ideally, I’ve always hoped that I would someday be described in terms similar to these by Pare Larentz: “I would characterize Russell Lee, as a craftsman, as being comparable to the old-time tramp printers (the most distinguished member of that fraternity having been Mark Twain); they could walk into a newspaper shop and do anything from set type to writing poetry to reporting the lead news story.” White said he saw himself as a “recording secretary,” and “As a writing man, or secretary, I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly or unworldly enchantment, as though I might be held personally responsible if even a small one were to be lost.” That sounds pretty good to me, too. Then again, the managing editor at the Texan once told me that someone had asked of me: “Isn’t he that really normal looking guy?” All the better to be that unobtrusive secretary, I suppose.

Forgive me this self-centered indulgence; much more actually about Hawaii to come…