News from 2014

October 13, 2016 by tom mcallister in news, other writing

This barely qualifies as an update, but in October 2014, I wrote an essay called "Halloween Glossary, D-H" for Waccamaw, and I've always been pretty happy with how it turned out. In my ongoing quest to make this essay an October staple on par with the Great Pumpkin and Bobby "Boris" Pickett's entire oeuvre, I thought I'd share it again today.

It includes one of my favorite dumb jokes I've ever made, and it starts like this:

DEATH
Halloween is a celebration of death, of dead things and things that kill—vampires and werewolves and zombies—but also a time of literal death, first the leaves and the grass and the millions of mosquitoes and the creatures that feed on the mosquitoes, then the end of the hopes one always pins to summer, the plans to get organized, to spend a romantic weekend in Cape Cod, to finally finish that novel manuscript, to get that scuba diving certification, to go on a safari and watch a lioness as she stalks an antelope. Also the time of year when my dog died, when I took two elderly Welsh Corgis to the local groomer in preparation for a pumpkin carving party and then returned from the groomer with two elderly Welsh Corgis, but Otis, the tri-color, the one with the little patches of brown fur like eyebrows, which invited us to attribute all sorts of human characteristics—empathy and understanding and high-level cognitive skills—was quietly suffering from a ruptured spleen. I didn’t know the spleen was ruptured then, and I ignored his abnormal behavior when he wobbled across the room wheezing and flumped in front of me with the force of a sandbag dropped from the ceiling; I patted him on the head and then left to drink beer with my friends in the city. While I was out, my wife returned home from work and called to tell me Otis wasn’t standing and could barely breathe. My wife—a nurse, normally calm and rational and never panicked (see also: PANIC ROOM PROCEDURES)—was sobbing and I knew that the dog was dying, had been dying in front of me, that his flumping was a cry for help, that the other dog was at home watching him die and was incapable of understanding why she would never see Otis again, and so, four beers deep, I drove to meet them at the animal hospital, speeding at ninety, ninety-five, checking my phone at the same time for directions, and knowing I was endangering others’ lives, hoping only to arrive in time to see the dog one last time and to be with my wife who had grown up with this dog and who had made many unbreakable associations between the dog and her own long-deceased mother, and I remember thinking: I hope if I get pulled over, the cop is a dog-lover. I remember thinking: I hope he understands.

What are you even doing? On literary journals and respect

September 12, 2016 by tom mcallister in other writing

Update 9/12, 9:44: I've made a variety of minor edits since originally posting, mostly to fix some typos, add a few links, and clarify some word choices.

Earlier today, I tweeted this short string about literary journal submissions:

seeing a lot of journals now that
a) charge sub fees
b) don't pay
c) are online only
d) "can't promise to respond"
Then wtf are you doing?
— Tom McAllister (@t_mcallister) September 12, 2016

That's a sincere question. Literally, what are you doing? What distinguishes you from a personal blog? Why does your journal exist?
— Tom McAllister (@t_mcallister) September 12, 2016

To not even have the time to send a form rejection that takes SECONDS is openly hostile to a writer, esp. if you've charged money for subs.
— Tom McAllister (@t_mcallister) September 12, 2016

I want to take a few minutes to expand on these, because I think there are some important considerations for literary journals here, and also because I think writers, especially novice writers, need to make some important choices in deciding who to work with.

The submission fee debate has more or less been resolved; despite the resistance of some writers and journals, submission fees are becoming the norm. The justifications for submission fees typically fall into five categories:

It costs money to send submissions through snail mail anyway, so $3 is no different
The journal needs some way to cover its costs, and nobody donates or buys literary journals anymore
The nominal fee deters "carpet-bomb" submissions
The journal pays writers, so fees subsidize the published writers
It's a volunteer staff and editing can be grueling and thankless

Setting aside my objections to most of these points (well, except point #2, which I would suggest is indicative of a much larger problem, i.e., if you're completely unable to keep the press afloat without submission fees, then perhaps that means your press has no particular reason to exist), let's just acknowledge here that lots of smart people have debated the topic endlessly, usually respectfully, and writers have to individually determine where they draw their own line in paying fees.

Some, like friend and fellow Barrelhouse editor Dave Housley, refuse to pay fees under any circumstances.

Submissions are open everywhere and as always I'm really surprised at the near total caving in to submissions fees. Try harder, lit mags.
— dave housley (@housleydave) September 2, 2016

Anecdotally, it seems Dave is in the minority. As more journals move toward paid submissions, writers are left with an increasingly limited pool of venues to submit their work, so more people are begrudgingly agreeing to pay fees.

I'm mostly in this camp. I decided a few years ago that I would never submit to a journal that charged fees but didn't pay writers. I still don't love it, and I especially don't love the idea that the relatively small roster of widely-published writers has their work subsidized by the paid fees of rejected writers, but at least the money is flowing outward toward writers. Any arrangement in which the money goes to a vague "administrative fee" or is used as the primary revenue stream for a magazine seems, at best, like a poorly considered system, and, at worst, like a scam.

But, okay, I wasn't going to get into that debate again. The point is: every writer makes his or her own choices. Some people aren't bothered at all, everyone has had their say, and here we are. I'm not a fan of submission fees, but I understand they're here to stay. I like when journals open brief fee-free periods for people who just cannot afford to spend six hundred dollars a year on submissions. I like anything a journal does that prioritizes showing basic decency and respect to writers.

What made me particularly angry this morning, as I searched through about a hundred calls for submissions, was seeing how many journals fit all four criteria I mentioned in my first tweet:

Submission fee (usually $3, but sometimes $5, and in a few instances, $10 or more)
No pay for writers
Online only
No promise of even a response

On their own, each of the first three traits is justifiable, depending on context. It's hard for literary journals to pay. After eight years of being almost entirely self-funded (aside from a few generous donations), Barrelhouse was finally able to pay $50 per author, but that's still criminally low, and we keep trying new approaches to generate more revenue that we can pay out to authors. Every poet, essayist, and fiction writer hates that part of the system, but also understands that if the money isn't there, the money just isn't there. "Exposure" can only keep you satisfied for so long, but again, every writer is free to make that choice.

Online only is, in fact, not a problem at all. A lot of writers I know, including me, have begun prioritizing online publication because more people read it, the turnaround is faster, and many online venues are really well-designed and run by great editors. It's only a problem in this context, because if a journal is charging fees and not paying writers, then they are either explicitly or implicitly saying they need that money to cover costs. But if the only thing you do is pay for web hosting, a Submittable account, and maybe a Squarespace account, then your annual fees are no higher than $550-600. That cost is covered by the first 200 submissions (which will come in about 3 weeks), and then what? What, exactly, am I paying for? The time of the editor, who, of his own volition, decided to start a website and call it Sick Hermit Crab Quarterly or whatever?

If you run an online journal and you don't pay writers, and you still cannot figure out a way to pay the very low cost of entry, then you need to reconsider whether your journal should exist.

Despite the self-evident badness of point #4 above, it's become increasingly common. Often, it's phrased like this: "We cannot guarantee you a response. If you haven't heard back in four months, assume we've moved on." Every editor I've ever met has been a writer first. How could you be an editor and have so little respect for the time, and work, of a writer that you can't deign to make the time to send out a form email? I could reject 100 Barrelhouse submissions right now in less than the time it took me to write this paragraph. Form emails aren't great, but they're the least you could do if you're trying to operate a journal in some way that approximates respect for writers. I assume one reason journals adopt this policy is because they're overwhelmed and often forget to reply-- it happens to Barrelhouse with embarrassing frequency-- but that doesn't mean you should never respond to anyone. When you mess up, you send an apologetic email, explaining yourself. Maybe another justification is conflict-avoidance. When you reject people, they get sad, and sometimes they get mad, and sometimes they threaten you.

asking bc some dude sent a gun threat to one of our female editors so we decided we had to actually make a formal blacklist for the 1st time
— Barrelhouse (@barrelhouse) August 22, 2016

@barrelhouse we got this last week pic.twitter.com/OW4RyK6dCD
— The Stockholm Review (@StockholmReview) August 22, 2016

And it sucks. It sucks to let writers down, to think about the daunting numbers game of submissions in the first place. It sucks to have to tell somebody No. But if you're not even willing to do that, what are you doing?

Accepting submissions is a pretty passive system already. You open a link and say, "Give me some stories" and hundreds of people flood your submission queue without you having to do anything. Then you can pick a handful of things and post them on your website and call it a journal. These things can turn out to be quite good. But often, the editor has had very little to do with the process beyond unlocking the door and telling people to show up. So when a journal shirks the basic responsibility of even responding to people, then what are they doing besides running a blog with exclusive access and a cover charge?

The other Barrelhouse editors and I have been pretty adamant on all of these points (and have even been accused of "hostile hubris" for being so vocal about them), but I can't think of a more fundamentally important thing in the literary world than respecting the writers who are producing the work. The combination of practices that set me off amounts to overt disrespect of the writers, and even open hostility toward them.

I'm fortunate that I have the privilege of not needing to submit constantly. I have a good job. I have some good publications. I'm working on a few projects. I'm someone who can be selective and who can also afford the occasional submission fee with no problem at all. But if I were twenty-three and trying to figure out publishing, and I was met with nothing but journals that wanted to charge me money so they could pay their web fees, and also they couldn't even be bothered to respond to me, I don't know what I would do. I would submit anyway, I guess, and feel like shit about it.

New Story Published

August 29, 2016 by tom mcallister in other writing, news

My story, "Eight Scenes from the Life of a Professional Raven" is up at Hobart today. It's the third in a series of stories I've been writing about sports mascots who are actually oversized sentient animals, rather than guys in suits. The first two are about a pig and a gorilla, respectively. Today's story starts like this:

The sky every morning tells its own story, and today when I wake before sunrise, I look up and see it is going to be a bad day. It’s hard to explain, but there’s a sense you get. You live long enough and you can read the clouds, and you can hear distant flocks migrating, and you can see the weather before anyone else.

There’s going to be a storm, and it is going to rip through this city like god’s own scythe during harvest.

Read the rest.

UPDATE:

The story was named Longform's fiction pick of the week. This is the second time a story of mine was has been singled out by Longform.

A Brief History of World Travel (part 14) - Notes on Seattle, WA

August 02, 2016 by tom mcallister in Travel, other writing

(ed. note: this is the final installment in this summer series of travel essays. If you've missed any, you can find them all here.)

1. I’m aware that it’s a cliché for people to return from vacation and announce that they’d love to move to the city they’ve just visited, but when LauraBeth and I came home from Seattle, we both said we would be happy to move there. It’s the only place we’d ever visited that we agreed we could live in full-time. In a four-year period, we traveled to Seattle three times, for a number of different reasons. If it weren’t so expensive and so far away, we’d probably go back again this year. Even though I’ve lived in New jersey for the last ten years, nearly my entire adult life, I have always defined myself specifically as a Philly guy. A friend recently introduced me at a reading as “the most Philadelphia person I’ve ever met.” I wrote a memoir partly about shaping my whole life around this particular identity. Philadelphia is not like Seattle. The people are different, the weather is different, the air is different. The buildings are all newer, and the culture seems less pointlessly antagonistic than in Philly. But within two days of being there, I felt at home. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what I liked about that city, besides that when I was there, I felt better. In every city there is good food, and in every city there are nice people and scenic views. But there’s some intangible thing about a city where you feel comfortable right away, like you’ve finally arrived at your destination. Though there are serious logistical hurdles to moving, I’ve applied for teaching jobs in Seattle each of the past three years. Does this all mean I’ve evolved and become a Pacific Northwest person rather than an east coast Philly guy? Or does it mean that my whole life, I was never truly a Philly guy at all and I’ve been living in the wrong place? And why did I feel a sense of shame and embarrassment to even consider these questions? It would explain a lot of things if I’d just been born in the wrong city. Maybe everyone is born in the wrong place and they have to spend their life trying to locate their rightful home. Maybe most people never find it.

2. I assume actual Seattle residents hate the Pike Place Market in the same way Philly locals sneer at tourists who go to Pat’s and Geno’s for cheesesteaks. But we went there because that’s where you’re supposed to go. It’s overcrowded, but so is every tourist destination. The fish-throwing spectacle is a novelty, but only entertaining for about fifteen seconds. As I gathered notes for this essay, I asked LauraBeth what I should say about the market, and she said: “You should write that they sell amazing cookies that are bigger than your head.” Which is true. They do.

3. We spent most days exploring the city on foot, trying to avoid the steepest hills. One afternoon, we headed toward Pioneer Square in search of an independent bookstore. About half the people we saw there were homeless. Passing a parking garage, we saw one homeless man drop his pants so another could inject him with heroin. LauraBeth will walk through places with me that she never would alone, because I walk with confidence in most places. It’s a fragile confidence, based on having grown up in a city and feeling like I know how to project a specific unapproachable energy, but whatever version of me could credibly pass as a city boy is long gone; I’m in my mid-thirties and softened from a decade as a college professor who lives in the suburbs. If someone demanded my wallet, what would I do, fight them? I haven’t been in a fight in twelve years, and that ended with me being body slammed through a bar room table like an extra in a Clint Eastwood movie. A middle-aged black man, clearly homeless, started shouting and jogging toward us. “Yo,” he yelled. “Yo, Temple!” I was wearing a Temple University t-shirt. He unzipped his jacket to show me his own Temple shirt. “I graduated from Temple!” He’d grown up in North Philly, graduated from college, and made it all the way across the country. I gave him five dollars and shook his hand. There were two decades worth of blanks that he didn’t fill in.

4. Easily the most decadent experience of my life occurred in Woodinville, a suburb of Seattle, where we enjoyed a dinner that cost more than my flight. This was the second time in a week we’d gone out to celebrate our anniversary, but it’s easy to rationalize extravagance on vacation. We ate a nine-course meal that took three hours and came with wine pairings for each course. I understand how obscene it is to spend that much money on a single meal. I have relatives and friends who sometimes need to borrow cash to pay the bridge toll to drive into Philly; the only reasons I can afford indulgences like this are because I lucked into a decent job at the right time, LauraBeth makes more money than me, and we have no kids. It’s not like I deserve any of it; I just stumbled into fortunate circumstances. But my guilt in moments like this is useless, because I don't do anything about it. I just get sad during the meal for a while and later write some notes and then even later write some self-conscious sentences about my guilt so I can feel better. Around the fifth course and wine pairing, I started to get drunk and forget my guilt.

5. Did you know there is such a thing as a super pod of orcas? A super pod is when several pods of orcas all gather in close proximity. There are three pods of orcas considered full-time residents of the waters in the Pacific Northwest, and we saw all of them at the same time. A super pod is when you are surrounded by dozens of orcas. It is when you are standing on a boat in the waters off of Washington’s San Juan Islands with your wife, the boat’s engine turned off so that the whales won’t be scared away, and you’re trying to decide whether to take hundreds of pictures or just look with your human eyes. It’s when no matter what direction you’re facing, you can see dorsal fins rising up like teeth from the ocean, and you can see a mother swimming alongside her calf, and whales are leaping and splashing everywhere. It’s when, after a decade of false starts and missed opportunities, you get to finally see whales in the wild and it exceeds all your expectations.

6. On the Seattle Underground tour, we walked through a network of passageways beneath the city streets, and learned about the massive fire of 1899 that burned down thirty-one city blocks. Every city seems to have a Great Fire in their history, but the fire itself is less interesting than the aftermath. In Seattle, rather than just rebuilding, they took the opportunity to dramatically alter the face of the city, essentially building a new city on top of the old one. Now you can tour the remnants of the old marketplaces that operated while the rebuild was ongoing. For a while, there were two Seattles, and now there’s one, and the original is just a memory. Two versions of the self can exist simultaneously, though one eventually has to go dormant. It’s natural to go through periods of razing and rebuild, and over time, it’s perfectly natural to look at yourself in the mirror and realize the face you’re seeing is totally different from the one you remember, different from the one you thought you were projecting. One version of you burns to the ground, and after a rocky transition period, the new version stands on the old one’s shoulders and sees everything from new heights.

7. On our anniversary in 2011, LauraBeth and I sat on the patio of a French restaurant in the Pike Place market and accidentally plotted out my next book. I’d published my memoir the year before and had spent three years struggling with an unpublishable 600-page novel about a pro wrestler who fakes his own death, and I felt stuck. And then in the middle of dinner, we came up with the story of a young man trying to overcome the grief about his wife’s sudden death. We talked about him carrying her ashes on a road trip across the country. I spent the next couple years working on that book and thinking about what I would do if she’d died, and I realized that the thing I feared more than anything in the world was losing her. All of my writing is about my fear, about articulating it and lashing out at it and trying to tame it, and as I worked on that book, I realized that everything I was writing, maybe everything I ever would write, would in some way be about LauraBeth and how lucky I feel to have found something so good, and how afraid I am of losing it all.

A Brief History of World Travel (part 13) - Notes on the Jersey Shore

July 26, 2016 by tom mcallister in Travel, other writing

1. When I was young, most of my friends took two-week family vacations to Ocean City, New Jersey every summer. We went to Ocean City, Maryland for one week. These two places shared a name and an ocean but very little else. As I got older, I came to resent these separations from my friends; when you’re twelve, everything becomes a personal affront, and I was sure my parents were trying to spite me in some way. Mainly what I did on these vacations was watch TV with my dad; we didn’t have cable at home and I spent months looking forward to the indulgence in what seemed like a rich person’s hobby. On the drive down, I read back issues of TV Guide cover to cover and did the crossword. During the day, my dad stayed inside and watched mystery shows—Quincy, Poirot, MacMillan and Wife, Alfred Hitchcock Presents— while we sat on the beach. When I had the remote, I watched standup comedy on Comedy Central. The comedy you encounter when you’re young has the potential to shape you for your entire life. As I watched Steven Wright spin non sequiturs into brilliant jokes, I fantasized about being a standup myself. I even wrote jokes, which I later threw in the dumpster behind the building. I never had the courage to try, or even seriously think about trying comedy. When I got home, I would repeat my favorite jokes to my friends often enough that it was like they’d been watching with me.

2. When I was thirteen, I joined my best friend on his family vacation to Ocean City, NJ. We spent mornings on the beach with his family, and in the afternoon, we watched music videos—that summer belong to Macarena, Marilyn Manson, Garbage, and No Doubt. We watched each video at least twenty times. At night, we walked on the boardwalk and played in the arcade. I’d spent months collecting quarters, stacking them in old film canisters, and planning on dozens of hours of Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, and whatever else was open. I had a searing crush on my friend’s older sister, and I kept hoping for some magical transition to occur if I were left alone with her even for a minute. One night, she and her friend came to my room to let me know they were sneaking out. They laid on my bed on either side of me, and said, “You should come!” One of them had her hand on my arm. I was acutely aware at the moment of each of my skin cells, all straining to be closer to her. I had never had a private conversation with a girl, let alone kissed one, and already this scene had accelerated far beyond any reasonable fantasies, so I panicked and said I was sick, a decision I spent the next five hours regretting while sitting on the floor and listening to Weird Al Yankovic’s Bad Hair Day, the only CD I’d remembered to pack for the trip. The next day I called my parents and told them I wanted to go home, I couldn’t spend another ten days here, and my dad drove to Ocean City to pick me up, claiming some family emergency had come up.

3. I inherited my dad’s pale skin, propensity for weight gain, and aversion to the beach. He never joined us on the beach. At some point during the day, he would step onto the balcony and wave to us before going back inside to watch more TV. I don’t think I ever saw him touch sand. The beach is bad and boring and full of people. It’s a long expanse of dirt that you pay money to lay on so that wind-whipped cigarette butts and errant Frisbees can terrorize you as you get burned nearly to death by the sun. You can try reading, but the wind keeps blowing your pages and throwing sand into your eyes. When you want to cool off, you take a leisurely swim through the ocean, which is the most destructive single force on the planet, and is filled with so many deadly creatures we haven’t even identified them all yet. When you’re a fat, pale, self-conscious kid, every anxiety is compounded, and when you’re a fat, lonely kid surrounded by unattainable girls in bikinis, the beach may be the worst place on earth. I went to the beach begrudgingly and stayed until I was allowed to go. The beach is fine if you’re just passing through and you get to make stops on the boardwalk for free samples at The Fudge Kitchen, where every day women with indeterminate Eastern European accents tell you that you’re in luck because today only they have a special where if you buy two pounds of their creamy fudge you get one pound of saltwater taffy free. The fudge is worth the trip. So is the pizza and the polish water ice and basically all of the food. The beach is a fine place to look at in pictures.

4. LauraBeth’s mom died in September 2004, three weeks after I’d started grad school in Iowa City. I canceled a week of classes to fly home and be with her. We spent one afternoon in Ocean City, partly because her mom loved going to the shore, and partly because LauraBeth wanted to be away from her house, the planning, the misery. We sat on the beach for a while before retreating to the shade, then walking the boardwalk, then eating fudge. We played two rounds of miniature golf. When I was young, I ruined many vacation evenings for my parents by throwing tantrums during rounds of mini golf, hurling my club across the course, beating on the windmill obstacles, throwing the ball off the course and onto the beach. By the time I was there with LauraBeth, I’d gotten much better, had come to understand that missing a putt in mini golf is a completely meaningless act. Sometimes I think I should be more competitive than I am, but then I remember what a nightmare I was when I felt that way. I don’t remember much else about that day, besides that it was a good day in the middle of a very bad time in our lives.

5. After high school graduation, my friends and I rented a shore house in Ocean City for Senior Week, a tradition of pre-college partying with hundreds of other graduates who descend on the town at the same time. In theory, we would experience the most memorable parties of our lives and permanently strengthen the bonds that had brought us there in the first place. I was too young then to realize how ephemeral most friendships are. My best friend disappeared after the first day, in pursuit of a girl he loved. The girl I’d been sort of dating called on the first morning to say she’d been grounded for life because an ex had mailed nude Polaroids of her to her parents, and also whatever thing we had between us was over. Another guy in the house got dumped by his girlfriend on the second night, and he mourned by taking a five-gallon tub of cheese balls and a bottle of vodka to the living room, where he sat until he’d finished both. At the time, everything we were doing seemed very memorable, but now the whole week blurs into a series of indistinguishable games of beer pong, stacks of red cups, and rooms full of drunken strangers.

6. A couple weeks after I moved home from grad school, I went with LauraBeth and her family—dad, both brothers, one future sister-in-law—to a rented shore house in Ocean City. It rained most of the week, but we sat on the porch and played board games and drank, and at night we took turns cooking. It was the first extended time I’d ever spent with her brothers; now I consider both of them good friends, but then I wasn’t sure what to expect. LauraBeth and I had gotten engaged recently, and we had to drive home one afternoon to sign some paperwork for the house we were buying. It was a time of great upheaval, and a time, finally for some optimism after several years of feeling lost.

7. LauraBeth and I now most often go to Cape May, which skews older and also offers a wider range of activities than most shore towns. We live close enough to Cape May that if we have a free afternoon we can easily drive down and spend the day there without it feeling like a long haul. LauraBeth can get her fix of the ocean and the beach, but at night we can go out to restaurants where you have to wear shoes, and we can feel more like we’re in an actual town. We spent our first anniversary in a bed & breakfast from which we could admire the ocean without all the misery of sitting on the beach itself. Most summers, we go for at least a day, and we always do the same things, many of which she did with her mom when she was young.

8. Nine years after the first vacation I took with LauraBeth’s family, we all shared a shore house again, this time in Cape May, and this time with more people: my father-in-law’s girlfriend, another sister-in-law, a toddler, an infant, and another baby due any day. Does it matter what we did there? We did the same things we always did. Cape May does offer more variety than the other shore towns, but it’s still a shore town, so you do the same things you always do. What matters is that you’re there, doing them again, and every time you do them, you’re a different person walking alongside those old versions of yourself. What matters is who you’re with. You start life with one family, and if you’re lucky someday you find another one, and they tolerate you enough to let you go places with them, even if you spend the whole time complaining about the beach.

A Brief History of World Travel (part 12) - Notes on San Francisco, CA

July 19, 2016 by tom mcallister in Travel, other writing

1. On our first day in San Francisco, LauraBeth and I wore t-shirts that said GROOM 07 and BRIDE 07, respectively, and we kept waiting for someone to approach us and say something like, “Oh, you’re newlyweds? Please, have some free stuff!” I was certain we would at least get a free drink on the flight, if not an upgrade to first class. This expectation was a combination of wishful thinking and self-absorption, I realize now. Why should any stranger care that we’d just been married? It was a Sunday morning in August; probably ten thousand other couples in the country had been married the night before. Probably half of those people had staged the same basic wedding as us and served guests the same basic chicken-with-unidentifiable-sauce as us, and played the same basic music as us, but they weren’t us, a fact we hoped would somehow transcend the utter ordinariness of being a married straight couple in our twenties.

2. There’s an implicit pressure on a honeymoon to be more important and momentous than any other vacations you take together, because you’re setting the tone for an entire marriage and therefore things need to be extra meaningful. There’s a cultural expectation that this particular trip, above all other trips, be the one that defines who you are as a couple. At the beginning of a marriage, everything is supposed to be a sign of something. At my brother's wedding, my tux had come without a tie, and my mom declared immediately, "It's a sign!" though she never clarified what is was a sign of, nor who was signaling us. LauraBeth and I had been dating six and a half years, had lived together for a full year, before we got married, and we had been on a half-dozen vacations together already. I wasn’t nervous about being married and I wasn’t anxious about things going well on the trip; I was just excited to finally have the stress of wedding planning behind us. We had never traveled so far together, and the only thing we both wanted was to be in the same spot as each other. We ate lots of food I vaguely remember. We saw the things you’re supposed to see—cable cars, Alcatraz, the bridge, Ghirardelli Square, and so on—and dutifully took pictures of those things. We were far away from everyone we knew without easy access to email, and so we were gloriously alone and free to do whatever we wanted.

3. On the flight to San Francisco, I was fiddling with my wedding ring—besides the half hour during which I'd worn my high school class ring, I’d never worn a ring before—and dropped it under my seat during drink service. It rolled down the aisle past a flight attendant and I first looked to see if LauraBeth had noticed—she had—and next hoped it would land at the foot of a friendly stranger who would return it without making a big scene—it did. Sometimes things aren’t symbolic or foreshadowing; they’re just things that happen.

4. On the second day, we both woke up before sunrise due to the jet lag, and we decided to take a walk. We were staying in a hotel in Fisherman’s Wharf. I’d been there once before, when I was twelve and on vacation with my parents, but the only things I remembered were the homeless street performers and the sea lions at Pier 39. We wandered aimlessly, and, even though it was a weekday in a major city, we found nothing open for hours. We watched the sea lions for a while. Later, when I told my brother about them, he asked, “What do they do?” I told him they just sort of flop around and bark, and sometimes swim. “So what’s the point?” he asked. And I didn’t know how to answer, besides: they’re sea lions and they flop around and bark and swim. He and I are sometimes looking for very different things in vacations. LauraBeth and I stayed at the pier for almost an hour before moving in another direction. We improvised a four mile circuit that cut through Chinatown and several other areas of the city I barely remember. It's liberating to be young and relatively fearless and walk blindly through a city, feeling safe enough, and having no obligations to anyone. That has become a staple of our vacations: we find ourselves in a central location and start walking, hoping to find something. We walked several miles every day in San Francisco. I don’t know if I learned anything about the city. It felt good to be walking somewhere with my wife and not having to answer to anybody.

5. After four days in San Francisco, we drove north to Napa Valley. My brother-in-law had a friend who was an executive at a major winery, and he’d arranged for us to get private VIP tours at two vineyards. Neither of us knew anything about wine, but we knew we were supposed to go to wine country. The first time we went to a nice restaurant and ordered wine, the second-cheapest bottle, I stared dumbly at the waiter for a full minute after he presented me with the sample pour, because I had no idea how much ritual was involved in the wine-ordering process. At the vineyards, we listened to all the instructions and swirled the wine the way we were told to swirl the wine, and sniffed it, and after each sample we said something like yeah, that’s pretty good. We both liked very sweet wines then, and did not know what to ask for or how to conduct ourselves. We tried to absorb as much information as possible, but we were too young and too inexperienced to fake it. The guides were gracious and patient, and the vineyards themselves were as scenic as we’d been led to believe. If anything, these places were too nice for us. One tour ended with a picnic lunch that included two free bottles of wine. We’d already spent the morning tasting generous pours of expensive wines, and by mid-afternoon we were both very drunk. The guide gave us a wink and said we’d be fine to drive home. The roads are straight and wide, with broad shoulders, and there are frequent signs warning you that traffic signs are coming soon. They’ve built the area to accommodate drunk driving. We should not have driven, but we did. I have no meaningful reflection to offer on this fact.

6. Our ninth wedding anniversary is approaching, and lately, LauraBeth has been talking about going back to San Francisco. There are so many places to see, and we don’t have the resources to see them all. But there’s something appealing about returning to that same place we visited almost a decade ago, when we were different people and we were still learning how to be adults in the world. Since then, we’ve both become much more aware of ourselves and what we actually enjoy, and so we know if we go to San Francisco, we’ll experience it completely differently. If we don’t yet qualify as old, then we’re closer to being old than we are to being young, and I’m okay with that. I like the person I am now much more than the person I was then. You can’t erase past versions of yourself, but you can try to overwrite them; you can revise and create something closer to the person you want to be. Nothing momentous happened on our honeymoon; all the consequential things happened between then and now. It’s noteworthy because it came first, but being first wouldn't matter if not for all that came after.

A Brief History of World Travel (part 11) - Notes on Ireland (part 2)

July 12, 2016 by tom mcallister in Travel, other writing

1. LauraBeth and I drove 1800 kilometers, about 1100 miles, when we were in Ireland, starting in Dublin and ending in Belfast. Technically, I only drove about 3 miles, a harrowing stretch during which I nearly ran us off the road several times before being demoted to navigator. My previous trips to the country had been conducted via bus and were restricted to major roads and large tourist destinations; now, in a rented Peugot-- riddled with dents and scratches and seemingly reserved for American tourists not used to driving on the other side of the road-- we had access to so much more. We drove through the Sally Gap, a tiny road—barely wide enough to fit our car, but still two-way—winding through the Wicklow mountains. A thick fog hovered just above us, creating a weird, mystical atmosphere. We cruised through the kind of unspoiled, ancient scenery that makes you think of pretty good adventure movies. Occasionally, an impatient Irish driver sped past us, but for several hours, it felt like we had this entire majestic scene to ourselves.

2. In the months preceding our trip, LauraBeth had studied two travel guides, scoured dozens of travel sites, and compiled a book full of notes. She spent a few hours most days planning. She likes to have things under control. She is appalled by the thought of just dropping into a country with a backpack and no plan. I offered some suggestions during the planning, but I’d let her do hundreds of hours of work with very little help. She often bears the burden of this kind of invisible labor in our relationship: remembering people’s birthdays, planning events, reminding me to call friends and family. I realize this arrangement is unfair, a byproduct of gendered expectations, and just because I mow the lawn I’m not precluded from having to think about other people. I’m trying to get better about it, to be more aware of the ways in which I benefit from being allowed to be inconsiderate. But my contributions to this trip were, in order of importance: hauling my body from one place to another, carrying the money, deciphering the thickest of Irish accents, reading the GPS in the car, and making some jokes at dinner.

3. This was a vacation of scenic drives. We took country roads and avoided highways whenever possible. We drove around the Dingle peninsula. We toured the Ring of Kerry. We drove and we drove and we drove, and it never got boring, because every moment there is something amazing to see. Ireland is green, which you know, but do you realize how fucking green it is? The reason Irish people curse so much is that they're constantly in awe of every fucking thing around them. On one of the drives, we lost the connection to our GPS and we drove along unmarked roads until we pulled over to eat our lunch. We strolled down the road and climbed a small hill, at the top of which we found a glacier-made lake. A sheep drank calmly from it and watched us from the other side. From our perch, we looked down through a foggy valley and seemingly across the whole country. We were greedy for as much of the landscape as we could consume. It’s so impressive you begin to feel guilty for spoiling it with your presence. To see the existence of such perfect sights is reaffirming; for someone like me who struggles to see past the hostility of the world, let alone to maintain faith that it can be a good or even decent place, there’s an immeasurable value to just seeing it at its best. I know terrible things have happened in Ireland, some of them in my lifetime. Atrocities have happened everywhere, and yet we persist, and if there’s not a lesson in there, exactly, there’s something to hold on to.

4. Driving toward Antrim, Northern Ireland, we stopped at Ailwee Caves. We saw almost nothing inside the cave. Outside, we visited a bird sanctuary, where we saw a handler tenderly kissing an eagle on the beak. We bought a half-pound of fudge and a half-pound of cheddar cheese in the gift shop and ate lunch behind the bird cages. If it were possible, that would be my lunch every day.

5. In most cities, most pubs promise authentic Irish music most nights. Most nights, it’s only authentically Irish in that at least one of the musicians is from Ireland. Our first night in Dublin, we sat in a pub while a band of Englishmen took requests from the largely American clientele. They played American classic rock hits, and, whenever possible, inserted the name “Barack Obama” into the lyrics. They ended the show with a rousing rendition of “Sweet Home, Barack Obama.” It was 2009 and the Irish loved our new President. They stopped us to shake our hands and congratulate us. When I’d been there in 2004, they yelled at me about the Iraq War while I apologized and said I’d had nothing to do with it. They would shake their heads in disgust and then buy me another pint so they could berate me some more.

6. We visited a bog village, where we learned how Irish villagers lived centuries ago. As with many of these types of sites, we saw lots of crude pottery and I tried very hard to make myself care about the crude pottery but I could not make myself care. I understand the archaeological value of pottery shards, and yet I have no need to ever see them again. We learned that bogs are a strange ecosystem that can mummify people and animals, and so we saw the mummified remains of some unlucky cats and one villager. There are things we try to preserve and things that are preserved whether we like it or not, and they’re all there in the end. We wanted pottery and we got bodies. You keep digging in the bogs, and you don’t know what you’ll turn up.

7. Most of the drinkers in Dick Mack’s, a small pub on the Dingle peninsula, were commercial fishermen. They knew we were Americans as soon as they saw us, and they welcomed us, wanted to talk about Obama, and to tell us about the American cities they’d visited. Only one of them had ever been to Philadelphia; he’d flown there with a woman he loved and driven west with her to Arizona, but they broke up before even reaching their destination. He hadn't been back to the US since. Another American entered—a preppy young man who ordered a Guinness and demanded it be served ice cold. When the bartender scowled at him, he tried to explain: “I’m in the beer industry in America, and that’s actually the proper way to pour it.” Someone booed him. Someone else tossed a piece of candy at him and said “maybe you’d like some sweets instead.” Everyone in the room laughed. I’m not proud of it, but I very much enjoyed the feeling of being the Good American in the room, the one who had adapted to the culture and made himself relatively inconspicuous, who didn’t show up and tell everyone they would be better if they just acted a little more American. The bartender served him a warm Guinness and he was laughed out of the room. A few minutes later, a man with a fiddle stepped inside and started playing a song. Suddenly three other instruments appeared in the room and everyone was singing along to a song I’d never heard before. Our beers refilled magically. At the end of the song the fiddler checked his watch and said, "Oh shit, I'm an hour late!" Then he ordered another beer and said he'd leave soon. It was the most Irish thing I’ve ever seen. It was one of the happiest travel moments of my life. I wanted to move to the Dingle Peninsula and spend every day for the rest of my life in Dick Mack’s.

8. Dick Mack’s is a small room that used to belong to a cobbler, and so it is sparsely decorated with old shoes that had never been picked up. Everything in Ireland used to be another thing. Even coming from one of the oldest cities in the US, I was reminded repeatedly of how much older these nations are than ours. There are remnants of centuries-old battles scattered across the landscape, constellations of bullet holes in the walls in Dublin, fortified town walls armed with cannons around Derry, half-burned lookout towers along country roads testifying to Oliver Cromwell's reign of terror a hundred years before the US became an independent nation. Throughout Belfast, we saw murals dating back to and referencing The Troubles, and were reminded that even now in a time of peace those tensions are still real. It’s easy to see how a place with such a long, convoluted history could test your belief in the goodness of humanity, but it also seems easier from that perspective to take the long view. So much has happened there, and the place has persisted, evolved, turned into something new and functional. It’s not quite what it used to be, and it’s not quite turning into what it was expected to be, but it’s a place where people can live and succeed and feel safe and fulfilled. I’m writing this during a week when it seems like my country is burning down, when people are being killed by institutional racism and other people are being killed by military-grade rifles just for having committed the sin of going outside, and it seems like the most useless thing I could possibly do is write a fractured essay about the time I went to Ireland with my wife. But now, as I scroll through the pictures from my time there, and I remember the things Ireland has endured, I think: maybe this is just what times of transition are like. They are terrible and frightening and yet you survive them and you continue doing what you do because there’s no other option. You stake yourself out on the good and moral side of the debates and you make yourself heard and you hope that when the dust settles, things will be a little better. And if they're not, then you have another beer and try to be good to the people around you as long as you can.

A Brief History of World Travel (part 10) - Notes on Ireland (part 1)

July 05, 2016 by tom mcallister in Travel, other writing

1. This is a story I used to tell a lot. I was in Dublin, mid-March 2001, around midnight. It was my second day in the country, on the travel component of a travel-study course, and I’d followed a group of classmates to the Temple Bar area, which is famous for its nightlife. We lined up at a bar and took several shots of whiskey, then we ordered a round of Irish Car Bombs. This is how young we were – even while ostensibly in a class studying Irish religion and culture, it had never occurred to us that the name for that drink might be offensive to actual Irish people. The bartender refused to serve us, not because of the name but because, “nobody should ever do that to a Guinness.” We moved to another bar. It was too loud to talk, and I had no interest in dancing. I drank and watched the room. At some point, I followed a pair of funny Englishmen out of the bar because they said they would take me to a better bar. I didn’t tell my classmates I was leaving. My new friends led me to a nightclub with a line stretching around the corner. Suddenly, three police officers rushed us, and before I understood what was happening, my two Irish companions and I were pinned face-first against a brick wall while the police frisked us. They found knives on the other men, then cuffed them and dragged them away. I was lucky they realized I was just a drunken tourist, not really affiliated with those guys, so they shoved me away. I begged the police to let my new friends go. “Shut the fuck up, Tom,” the officer said. I didn’t remember giving him my name. I was still registering the knives I'd seen on the ground. I wasn’t sure if I was even standing. Another cop shoved me. “Shut the fuck up, Tom," he yelled. I don’t know how or why, but I ended up in the nightclub by myself, lost in the confusion of flashing lights and Britney Spears songs. In desperate need of a bathroom, I followed the wrong signs and found myself in an alleyway holding a pint of Guinness. In a panic, I hurled the glass at a wall and ran. I was so full of booze there was no explaining anything. I was all blunted animal instinct, and my instincts were terrible. I sprinted through the streets of Dublin, stopping occasionally to ask strangers if they knew how I could get back to my hotel, but when they asked me where I was staying, I couldn't tell them. I was wearing cargo pants, and had forgotten the pint glass I’d stolen and stashed in one of the cargo pockets, until I bumped into a wall and heard it shatter. The next morning, I would notice the blood stains on my pants, and would spend a few minutes trying to shake all the loose glass out into a hotel trash can. A stranger grabbed me roughly by the shoulders and shook me. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he said. “You run around like this, you’re gonna get your ears boxed.” I tried to tell him my story, but I realized I was crying and incoherent. He led me to a cab, but I had no cash and didn’t know where to tell the cab to go. I’ve been lost many times, am famous among my friends for getting lost even in my own neighborhood, but I’d never been so completely lost that I thought I might never be found. I found a pay phone and tried to call my parents collect. I didn’t know what they would do, but I was pretty sure they would be able to save me. I was nineteen, and incapable of saving myself. The vagaries of international calling were lost on me, though, and I never got through. I sank to the curb and cried and listened to a busker singing a bad version of a bad U2 song. I thought if I could find a safe place to sleep overnight, maybe my teachers would find me in the morning, and I would have time to figure out some explanation for my behavior. I thought it was possible I would die here. Then I heard someone calling my name; this time it was my roommate. He’d been in the bar directly behind me wondering where I’d gone. I’d thought I’d covered so much ground, but it’s possible in all my running that I never moved outside a two-block radius. He hugged me and I pretended I hadn’t been crying, and he helped me get home. In the room, I vomited for hours. The next morning, we got up just after sunrise and boarded a bus that bounced us along winding mountain roads while I chewed feebly on a single piece of toast.

2. When I got home from the trip, I told that story for laughs. I downplayed the parts where I was a blubbering mess in favor of the slapstick elements. The way to cope with a terrible drinking experience is either to learn from it or pretend it had been fun, and never stop talking about it.

3. Later on that same trip, I got so drunk at a medieval castle banquet that I was convinced everyone could see through my shirt, and I kept telling people to stop taking pictures of me. I tried to confiscate the souvenir photo that the castle wenches had taken, because I didn't want anyone seeing my chest. I cornered a professor and repeated over and over that there was something wrong and the cameras could see right through me. He just looked disappointed in me and led me back to the bus.

4. I went to Ireland twice as a student, both times on spring break. The first time I was nineteen and finishing freshman year of college, and the second I was on the verge of graduating. Both times, I went primarily to drink. While I was there, I learned some things about Irish culture, particularly the religious history. I saw so many abbeys, it’s hard to distinguish them in my memory. A lot of our tourism involved looking at rocks: ruined castles, mysterious pagan altars, incredible cliffs. We looked at rocks and said these are interesting rocks, and we took pictures of the rocks. When we got back to our rooms, we drank Jack & Coke out of plastic cups and then went out to the bars to get drunker and drunker and maybe meet real Irish people.

5. Midway through the second trip, one of our professors, a native Irishman, lectured us over breakfast. Drinking is part of the Irish culture, he said, but not like this. “We don’t just sit around and drink pint after pint after pint,” he said, disgusted. “It’s not a race.” That night, we did our bad impressions of him while we drank even faster. One of the girls on our trip disappeared from the bar with a married couple and didn’t turn up again until the next morning, just before breakfast. She would later miss the connecting flight in Paris on the way home, because she’d run outside to have a cigarette. Years later, now a college professor, I think about how much I would hate to run a travel study course like this, having to police the drinking of a bunch of students who have no interest in learning and only signed up because college means drinking and Ireland means drinking and so college plus Ireland equals double drinking.

6. Between binges, we saw some things that were impossible to forget. The Cliffs of Moher, towering Cathedrals, Croagh Patrick, rolling green hills everywhere like a living postcard. Even viewed through the filter of a jaded, hungover college student watching through the window of a bus, it was impossible to deny: this was a truly beautiful country. This wasn’t a surprise, exactly, but it’s still shock to see it in person. It’s a world made of colors I didn’t even know existed. I wouldn't truly appreciate any of it until I returned to the country five years later, with LauraBeth, and with a much clearer understanding of what I wanted to find.

7. So much of what I remember from my student trips is my time on the bus. We seemed to always be bussing from one place to the next. Our driver plowed down two-way roads that seemed too narrow to even accommodate a motorcycle, and I sometimes felt sure we were about to die. A senior named Hugo sat in the front of the bus by himself, refusing to speak to anyone. He had bought a set of new clothes for this trip and each day, when he undressed, he just threw them out. Another senior and his girlfriend sat together, making out with each other in the sloppiest, lip smackingest possible way for the length of every drive. There was an adult student on one my freshman trip who one afternoon sat with me in the back of the bus and told me that when she got home she would smear peanut butter over her crotch and let the dog lick it off for hours. “You think I haven’t done it?” she said. “I’ve done everything, man.”

8. The experiences of the two college trips run together in my memory. In the moment, there is a rushed intimacy on this sort of trip—you are crammed into close quarters with thirty other people and expected to work it out. On my first trip, I spent a full day with a girl whose longterm boyfriend had died in a car accident just months prior. She cried, and I hugged her, and we trusted each other. Later, when I was too drunk to even get to my room, she escorted me there and made sure my roommate was taking care of me. Now, I can’t even tell you her name. You spend all day with these people and tell stories and laugh and reveal parts of yourself you try to hide at home. Then you get home and you disperse to your real lives and leave the rest behind. You can reinvent yourself for ten days, but then when you get back, the new version of you and the old version can’t coexist. After the first trip, I ran into one of the professors on campus, and he said, “I can’t believe you’re not drunk!” It was ten AM. I was going to class. I wasn’t even sure if I liked drinking, and I was pretty sure I didn’t like being drunk. What I liked was having been drunk. I wanted to accumulate exciting stories, but the further I distance myself from that time, the more I realize there’s nothing exciting about those stories: first I wasn’t drunk, then I was, then I was not again. That’s it.

9. When I teach courses in creative nonfiction, I can count on getting a few essays from students about their own travel study experiences. Most of them follow a similar pattern: leaving the country, getting really drunk, a disastrous sexual fling, and then everyone learning an important lesson about themselves. When I get these essays, I spend a lot of time in class trying to convince people that there's nothing at all interesting about a travel essay in which the person just drinks and drinks until they're very drunk. "Try to think more interesting things about the world," I once wrote on a student's essay. "Nobody cares how drunk you are at a given moment." Like most of my teaching advice, I realize these notes are written to a younger version of myself. Everything I tell students may as well be written on a slip of paper, stuffed in a bottle, and tossed back into the past in case the nineteen year old version of me is there, looking for help.

A Brief History of World Travel (part 9) - Notes on Madison, WI

June 28, 2016 by tom mcallister in other writing, Travel

1. LauraBeth switched career paths in her late twenties, and her new job required occasional flights to Madison for classes and certification tests at the main campus of a large company based just outside the city. In consecutive summers, I flew out to join her for a few days. I was on summer break and flights were cheap, and the first year she was scheduled for classes on our anniversary. I used to think there was no more passive way to live your life than to let arbitrary dates on calendars dictate your behaviors. But they’re not arbitrary, and they’re good reminders. On birthdays, the main thing you’re celebrating is having not yet died, and on anniversaries you’re toasting your ability to have not yet driven your spouse away. These are both achievements worth every bit of celebration.

2. While LauraBeth spent the day in classes, I took a bus into town. The front desk attendant walked me to the bus stop and waited with me for its arrival. He introduced me by name to the driver, who was wearing a Milwaukee Brewers hat and seemed inordinately happy that I had come to Madison just to visit. I spent most of the ride speaking to an elderly black man who’d sat next to me. He was excited beyond reason to hear that I had chosen to vacation in the Midwest. He suggested a dozen places I should visit, pointed out interesting landmarks, and told a very likely untrue story about the time he’d met Jimi Hendrix on the university campus, smoked pot with him, and refused when Jimi offered to give him a girl for the night. He claimed to have met both Keith Richards and Brett Favre, but everyone in Wisconsin seems to have at least two Brett Favre stories. He shook my hand repeatedly. A man nearby joined our conversation and promised me I would love Madison. I like riding buses in strange cities, trying to experience, briefly, what life is actually like for the people there, to learn a little about the character of the place. Here’s what I learned from my bus ride in Madison: everybody is nice, even the weirdos.

3. The Madison Convention Center was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and is the only convention center I’ve ever visited that didn’t feel like a giant tomb with fluorescent lighting. On the rooftop, there is a bench where you can sit and look out over Lake Monona. A plaque notes that Otis Redding’s plane crashed in this lake, and so I sat on the bench and looked out over the rail trying to think important thoughts about mortality and legend. It was a pristine summer day, and I was already a couple years older than Otis when he’d died, and his most famous song was about exactly this kind of thing, so I felt an obligation to sit quietly and be contemplative. But I was hungry, and also a bee was buzzing around my head. I swatted at it, and I yelled that I was busy thinking important human thoughts it wouldn’t understand. I was being complex and thoughtful, I explained, but the bee did not care. The bee swirled around me and buzzed in my ears and I swatted at it again, and spun around, feeling ridiculous. I left the bench and the bee landed on it, taunting me. I was incapable of thinking big, important thoughts. Otis Redding was dead and there was a bee on my bench and I was still hungry, and so I walked away.

4. At night, we asked the man at the front desk where we should go for dinner. There was the bar across the street that seemed to cook all their food in the microwave, and there was a place down the road called Culver’s. “They have everything you could ever want,” he said. “Everything.” Everything means different things depending where you are. In this case, everything meant: hot dogs, burgers, chicken fingers, and ice cream. We ordered burgers and milkshakes, which is not quite everything, but is far from nothing. It was my fifth burger on a three-day trip; at that point, I felt I should personally write a letter of apology to cows worldwide. I felt vaguely ill. I wondered if I could ever live in a place where “everything” means “some, but not most, things.”

5. On my second trip to Madison, we rented a car and explored the outlying areas. We stopped to play miniature golf at the most remarkable course I'd ever seen. One hole required climbing a rope ladder, then going down a slide. We found a tiny restaurant that made homemade gluten-free lasagna, which we’ve still never found in any other city. We drove past Taliesin, the famous estate of Frank Lloyd Wright, but did not enter, because admission was too expensive, at least for two people who have only a passing interest in architecture. We visited the House on the Rock instead, a bizarre, sprawling estate built on a hill by an eccentric millionaire. The building is a mixture of museum, home, and creepy diorama. There are priceless artifacts mixed indiscriminately with piles of the kind of junk you’d find at a yard sale, themed rooms, rooms jutting out over a cliff, and rooms so small you have to crawl just to access them. Going here instead of Taliesin is probably the architectural equivalent of visiting the circus rather than seeing the Royal Shakespeare Company perform Macbeth. But sometimes I get tired of trying to be cultured. Sometimes I don’t want to see perfect lines and interesting use of negative space. Sometimes I want to see a room full of carousels and dolls that look like they’ve just emerged from a watery grave. The House on the Rock is a place that has everything, and if it doesn’t have something, then that thing might as well not exist.

6. During my free days in downtown Madison, my pace was glacial. I walked many miles, taking occasional breaks to sit on benches. I watched protestors circling the capitol, demanding the recall of their governor. I spent hours in the free museums, learning (and later forgetting) so many details about the role of Wisconsinites in the Civil War. I nodded contemplatively at exhibits and tried to be a serious thinking person. It was a summer weekday in a college town, so it felt sometimes like I had the whole city to myself, and yet there was a sort of performance to the way I walked through the museum. I took long lunches at local restaurants. When I’m on vacation all I want to do is eat everything, to be so full of food and drink I can barely stand up. I want to grow and grow and inhabit as much of this new space as possible. On the third day in town, I tried to counteract the effects of days of unhealthy eating by ordering a salad, but when they delivered it, it was covered in roughly seven pounds of bacon. I hadn’t been to the Midwest since grad school, and I’d forgotten that the extra pork is often implied. My willpower caved, and I ordered fried cheese curds and a beer. Sitting in a patio chair outside a clean, friendly bar on a sunny afternoon and having nowhere to be, with no one expecting anything from me—it felt criminal. It felt like I was getting away with something. I considered the luxury of being able to completely disappear. I could have stayed forever if they’d let me.

A Brief History of World Travel (part 8) - Notes on Baltimore, MD

June 21, 2016 by tom mcallister in other writing, Travel

1. If I were to design a postcard for Baltimore, it would be a picture of my Uncle Ed—a retired Marine in his mid-70s with the energy of a man a third of his age—a cigarette in his mouth, a Michelob in his hand, chasing a runaway crab through his yard, yelling, “Get back here, you son of a bitch!” It’s one of the best places in the world, is what I’m saying.

2. Most summers, we drove down from Philly to my uncle’s house in a Baltimore suburb, and when we arrived, there would be a bushel (or two) of crabs and a cooler (or two) full of Michelob. In retirement, Uncle Ed had taken up wholesaling plants and shrubs, and so his small patch of land was covered by a wide array of plants. Every visit began with a tour of the grounds. If you asked about a plant that looked like it was dead, he would shout, “It’s not dead ‘till I say it’s dead.” Then, later, he would lean in as if telling you a secret and say, “That damn thing’s been dead for two weeks.” But even when he whispers, he’s one of the loudest people in the room. At night, after the crabs had been picked and after lighting fireworks in the street, we sat by his fireplace while the adults drank and talked. His voice was, and still is, the dominant one in the room; every visit, he tells many of the same stories about drinking, fighting, and gambling, but every time he tells them they’re a little different. It doesn’t matter if they’re true or just mostly true, because nobody tells stories better. I rarely spoke when I was young; I was so shy, two different teachers suggested to my parents that I was autistic, and another sent me to a speech therapist to convince me to talk. So every summer, I sat quietly with the adults and absorbed everything they said. For me, Baltimore has always meant crabs, beer, and stories. It was where I began to learn what adults are supposed to talk like. It was where I saw how you could own a room just with your words.

3. In eighth grade, my classmates and I took a field trip to Baltimore’s inner harbor. I wanted to spend most of the afternoon in the aquarium, but my friends rushed through and I followed meekly along. The leaders of the group headed straight to Hooters, where we snickered and tried to act mature around the waitress, and when she was gone we almost certainly talked about masturbation. This was a big topic for all of us then. At Hooters, I stared at the waitresses’ legs and tried to memorize every detail because I’d never had such close exposure to so much skin on any woman. My shyness was still crippling then; if I spoke at all in big groups like this, I just repeated jokes I’d stolen from standup comedians. And speaking to girls was completely out of the question. Just weeks before, I’d gotten a phone call from a popular girl in class. She said she liked me and so, like most boys would, I hung up on her, unplugged the phone, and ran upstairs to my bedroom to hide in case she showed up at my house. I told everyone I was grounded, and skipped several graduation parties so I wouldn’t have to face anyone. I tinkered with the idea of digging a tunnel beneath the house and living underground by myself for the rest of my life. The next time I saw that girl, she was making out with a high school boy behind the movie theater.

4. As we were leaving Hooters, we saw our teacher, sitting by herself in a booth on the other side of the restaurant and gnawing on wings. It was unsettling to see her in such a human moment. She was one of the most hated and feared teachers in the school; two year prior, a student had poured dog shampoo into her Diet Pepsi, and we sat in an assembly trying to suppress laughter while the principal yelled at us that this was actually a very serious issue. I wanted to run away before she saw us in the same restaurant as her, but my friends all bought t-shirts so they could prolong their interaction with this woman who was contractually obligated to flirt with us.

5. I never felt more like a character in a John Updike story than when I had my first beer with my cancer-stricken dad. I was twenty and we were picking crabs at Uncle Ed's house, and dad would be dead in less than a year. Nothing momentous happened; we acted like normal men who happened to be friends and drinking beer. I had a few more beers. Later, my brother said my mom had told him to watch me and make sure I didn’t get too drunk. I joined the nightly conversation more than I ever had. I even told my own stories. Uncle Ed’s wife, Joan, leaned over to my mom and said, “Tommy has gotten really funny.” Is it shallow if I say that may be all I want? For people to listen to me tell a story and say I’m funny? Because most days, it is the only thing I want in the world.

6. In March 2014, I drove down to Baltimore to meet with the other Barrelhouse editors. We’d been invited to do a reading in a gentrifying part of the city. I beat the others to the hotel and asked the woman at the front desk where I could get coffee. “Baltimore isn’t really a coffee town,” she said. But what kind of town is not a coffee town? Do people in Baltimore not wake up in the morning? Do they not need help surviving work? Every town is a coffee town, I thought. I walked west from the hotel assuming I’d find a coffee shop quickly. I’ve spent plenty of time in North Philly and in parts of Camden, have ridden buses through the degraded, neglected neighborhoods of many cities. I know how to carry myself. But on this walk, I was obviously lost and was dressed a little too nicely, and I was a potential target. I passed one corner where a young man said hi to me, and when I looked at him, he flicked a lit cigarette at me. The same thing happened on the next corner. In my whole life, nobody had ever flicked a lit cigarette at me, and it happened twice in five minutes in Baltimore. Later, we would dub this move a Baltimore Handshake. Maybe you just have to take a couple cigarettes to the chest to prove you can hang in that town. I never found coffee. I saw three men get arrested, and I hustled back to the hotel as quickly as I could.

7. The first time I did a public reading of my work, I was so anxious, I nearly vomited, and afterward I left the venue immediately to sit by myself in a different bar where nobody would know me. The only thing I remember is my hands shaking, and thinking: they can see my hands shaking. I remember thinking: how do I make my hands stop shaking. A decade of immersion therapy in the form of teaching has helped me progress to a comfort level with public speaking that would have been unfathomable to me when I was twenty-four. In those ten years, I’ve also learned to like myself, have been taught by my wife how to like myself. Instead of looking out at a room full of strangers and imagining all the reasons they’ll probably hate me, I assume they’re completely indifferent. It’s not exactly a switch to optimism, but it’s like I went from believing the glass was half-full of poison to trusting that it’s just water in there after all. That night in Baltimore, I read from the first chapter of my novel, which was still not under contract. I had a phone call with an interested editor scheduled for the next morning. This was the first time I’d ever read from that book in public, and so the crowd in the weird abandoned theater in Baltimore was my test audience. They laughed at the things they were supposed to laugh at, made sounds of approval when I wanted them to make sounds of approval, and they applauded long enough that it didn't feel perfunctory. Afterward, strangers told me it was good. They told me it was funny. I don’t want to oversell it and make it sound like a coronation; it was an audience of forty people, and the other readers were better than me. And yet: I was in Baltimore and I was telling stories and people enjoyed them, and everything felt right.

107 Ironclad Rules for Writers Who Want to Be Better at Writing

June 20, 2016 by tom mcallister in writing advice

ed. note: I posted this on my old blog a few years ago, and it was, by far, the most popular thing I've ever written online. It was lost when I overhauled the site, so I'm re-posting it below. All advice is 100% serious and legally binding.

1. Write every day. Except on days when you don’t feel like writing that much and you don’t have anything interesting to say.

2. Never write when you’re too hot. Beads of sweat are ideas leaking from your brain.

3. Nobody really eats turnips. They are a ridiculous food. Characters cannot eat turnips.

4. Hypnosis is the writer’s greatest tool.

5. Skinny people are often the cause of conflict. Fat people are often the solution. NO MEDIUM SIZED PEOPLE.

6. If you must write about the travails of being a writer, at least give yourself a glass eye or a cyborg hand or something.

7. After your second draft, read backwards, from last page to first. If it doesn’t make sense both forward and backward, you’ve done something wrong.

8. Always describe the smell of your protagonist’s hands.

9. Fathers and sons do not speak to each other unless one of them has lost a limb and needs help finding that limb.

10. There is no evidence that people have gills, but there is no evidence that people cannot have gills.

11. For photosynthetic purposes, it is essential that you spend time writing in the outdoors.

12. 3rd person narration, like gladiator duels, is a barbaric invention of the ancient Greeks and should never be used under any circumstances.

13. Using multiple questions marks or a question/exclamation combo makes you look an actual crazy person.

14. Wear non-restrictive clothing that will allow the ideas to flow freely around you. Tunics are good, and cheap.

15. Chronological order is the only structure the human mind has evolved to understand.

16. If at all possible, get your characters to a place without gravity.

17. Cicadas are the most symbolic and underutilized creatures in literature.

18. A sex scene only works if it’s written in precise, clinical detail.

19. More fucking profanity.

20. Always know what size shoes your characters wear. The soul is in the shoes.

21. Most people don’t understand math anyway.

22. At least one character must have a funny accent.

23. Everyone moves clockwise. Counterclockwise is for anarchists

24. No lefthanded characters. Too weird.

25. For every adverb you use, do five pushups.

26. Y is an indecisive letter; using it implies indecision.

27. Children are interesting from ages 0-2 and the not again until they’re 14.

28. Just assume everyone has a weird fetish they’d like to keep secret.

29. A nursery rhyme: short chapters make everyone happier.

30. Start with the acknowledgments page, so that you always know who you’re disappointing on your bad writing days.

31. Include at least one scene in which someone meets an estranged sibling.

32. Characters use microwaves, not ovens. Ovens take too long

33. Highlight all the verbs and replace them with other better verbs

34. Writer’s block is best cured by swallowing a penny.

35. The hard C sound conveys authority. Do not soften yourself.

36. In dialogue, include all the ‘um’s but cut the ‘uh’s

37. Conjunctions, conjunction, conjunctions!

38. Remember, every surface your characters touch is just covered with deadly microbes.

39. Mercury poisoning is great for providing plot twists.

40. Do not have more than two redheaded characters, or people will think you’re up to something.

41. Make sure the plot isn’t lifted from a Nancy Drew book.

42. If an editor gives you advice, do the opposite.

43. Buy a lot of index cards.

44. Every day, pick an unusual adjective from the dictionary and be sure to use it.

45. Your literary heroes were probably terrible people. Be more like them.

46. No boats. Boats are over.

47. No airplanes either. Nothing interesting happens on airplanes anymore.

48. The only reliable way to begin a scene is with an alarm clock going off.

49. If you’re stuck, introduce a blimp. Blimps expedite plot.

50. No lightning. It’s cliche.

51. There is always a ghost in the attic.

52. Twins are interesting.

53. At the zoo, it’s easy for people to fall over fences.

54. Present tense is for junkies and teenagers.

55. It’s easy to distinguish characters if each has a unique hat.

56. Italics makes words sound fancy.

57. Shoot for a minimum of two metaphors per page.

58. If you haven’t introduced the gun by page 50, introduce it on page 51.

59. Diners and bars are the setting for about 80% of all human conversations

60. What does a gerund do? It does nothing.

61. In dialogue, everyone should always be lying.

62. Elevators are the crucible of our social lives.

63. Readers want to know where your character bought his car, what his monthly payment is, what kind of rate he got.

64. Your character may not be a caterer. There are more caterers in movies and novels than there have been throughout the history of the world.

65. See what you can do with SONAR.

66. Time your writing schedule to coincide with the different phases of the moon.

67. Spend two decades traveling before you write a single word.

68. If, in the history of language, anyone has written a sentence like the one you’ve just written, delete that sentence and start over.

69. Most metaphors don’t have to make sense; they just need to be memorable.

70. Rain is always meaningful.

71. Linoleum floors are much less interesting than quicksand.

72. The stars can be beautiful without forcing themselves upon you. The same should apply to your writing.

73. Shakespeare did it first. You can do it second.

74. You haven’t truly made it until you’ve received a threatening email from a stranger.

75. Write as if you’ve been possessed by a demon, but, like, a nice demon.

76. Record a video of yourself sleeping at night, so you know what it looks like when you’re at your most vulnerable.

77. Most people want you to fail. Never forget this.

78. At least 25% of any book should be flashbacks.

79. Never kill a dog in your book. The dogs will know.

80. The best food to eat to stimulate your writing process is a charcuterie tray. D.H. Lawrence ate nothing but cured meats.

81. Writing is 30% perspiration, 40% inspiration, 40% good luck, 50% magic, and 1% mathematics.

82.Every sex act must result in a pregnancy.

83. Repetition is the sign of an unfit mind. If possible, never employ repetition of words or phrases, lest you seem to have an unfit mind.

84. The internet is not going away; your characters should frequently interact via email and hacking. Lots of hacking.

85. Only employ vampires if they are a metaphor for municipal government.

86. Dialect should be heavy and consistent. It is important to know whether someone is from the South, or Eurasia.

87. Leave a few blank pages at the end of your final chapter and encourage the reader to conclude it the way he or she would like.

88. One of the most important choices you will face is deciding which font to use.

89. Spill every secret you know; you can’t save them for the afterlife.

90. Write a minimum of twelve drafts. Then put the manuscript in a safe deposit box for one full year before reading it again.

91. Think about all the cool things you can do with UFOs.

92. Set the scene. A minimum of seven sentences of setting description before even mentioning a character.

93. Readers like mystery. Try to reveal as little as possible during the first two chapters.

94. Characters in neckties are boring. Characters who poach rhinos for a living are not.

95. Every line of dialogue should be performing a minimum of five functions.

96. In your final draft, cut the last line of every paragraph, no matter what.

97. When something is REALLY IMPORTANT, put it in CAPS. It’s the only way for some readers to know.

98. A well-placed illustration can save you the trouble of writing a thousand words.

99. Writing a book is fundamentally a political act. This means at least one character must be given the opportunity to make a political speech of no fewer than 6 pages.

100. Magical realism is a term invented by occultists.

101. Write to displease whatever god you believe in.

102.Believe in monsters.

103. Contractions are a crutch for writers too lazy to type the whole word, but also crutches can be really useful, like if you have a broken leg, for example.

104. Write about the thing you love the most, and destroy it.

105. DO NOT READ other novels while writing. You don’t want to taint your vision.

106. Cut all human ties until you have finished your book. Friends are leeches, family are anchors.

107. The human body has 206 bones and 642 muscles. These are naturally perfect numbers: 206 words per page, 642 syllables per page. Every page.

A Brief History of World Travel (part 7) - Notes on Interstate 80

June 14, 2016 by tom mcallister in Travel, other writing

1. There’s something simultaneously miraculous and dispiriting about the uniformity of highway travel across the country. The only things that change are the names of the fast food chains, the color schemes of the gas stations. If you go south, you get Waffle House. If you go west you get Sheetz. Every forty miles or so, there will be a Subway, a McDonald’s, and a place to get Mexican food. There will be trucks and bustling rest stops and long stretches of nothing. It's amazing how little of consequence can happen in a thousand miles. When I first made the drive from Philadelphia to Iowa City, I was anticipating an adventure. All I got was tired.

2. I moved to Iowa City in early August 2004. I’d graduated from college in May and I was going to graduate school for creative writing because I didn’t know what else to do . The one thing I’d always been good at was being a student, so I decided to keep doing that. I knew very little about the program itself, and even less about Iowa. I spent the summer clarifying for people that, it’s Idaho with the potatoes, not Iowa. Iowa is the one with the tornadoes. I left a week after LauraBeth’s twenty-second birthday. I’d asked her to move with me, but we both knew she couldn’t; her mom was dying, and her sickly grandfather lived with her. Her younger brother was still in college and her older brother was away in medical school. She had just started a new job as a nurse. I was abandoning her during what would prove to be the hardest stretch of her life. I did it all thoughtlessly, the way I did everything then.

3. Along with two friends, I drove a U-haul with my ‘91 Honda Civic towed behind, headed toward an apartment I’d never seen before. We only stopped for gas, food, and to take some pictures of Notre Dame’s campus. In all, it took us about nineteen hours to get there, almost all of it spent on the same uninteresting road. The next day, after helping me unpack, my friends took a Greyhound back home. I’d like to think I thanked them profusely, but I don’t remember. I must have thanked them. My whole life I’ve been surrounded by people and systems propping me up and nudging me forward, sometimes against my own will, and I’ve so rarely taken the time to thank any of them. I was selfish then. I’m selfish now, I just smile more so people think I’m nice.

4. The night my two friends spent in my apartment, one of them got drunk on Canadian Club and kept hugging me. He kept saying, “this is it, man. It’s all over.” I thought he was being overly dramatic, but in the ten years since that ride, I’ve seen him fewer than a dozen times. Last time we saw each other, we had an awkward, stilted lunch and left with a handshake. Sometimes there are clear moments marking the point when you’re stepping out of one life and into another; the first morning when I woke up alone in the Iowa City apartment was one of those moments when I understood everything actually was going to be different, and I was not ready for any of it.

5. I didn’t realize it until years later, but I was very depressed then, and I was drinking to excess almost every night. I thought I was having fun, but I was coming home and vomiting and screaming at my computer and wishing for a tornado to touch down on my apartment building before I woke up and had to face myself again. Most mornings, I awoke in a panic, certain I'd done something wrong the previous night, but not sure what, or to whom. People assumed because I was in the Midwest, I was trapped with nothing to do, but it was LauraBeth who was stranded. Her friends were being care-free twenty-three year olds and she didn't have that luxury. She was at home, sleeping in the room where her mom had died, taking care of two high-maintenance dogs and a demanding grandfather. I wanted the long-distance relationship to work, but, as with many things in my life at that time, I did very little to make it happen. I thought my good intentions were enough. In my memoir I detail all the ways I was falling as a person during this period; when I was submitting it, one publisher wrote back to say they liked it, but, “Nobody in the room believed this woman would want to marry you.”

6. In early May, the day after I submitted my final grades, I drove from Iowa City to Chicago, where the plan was to pick LauraBeth up at the airport, so she could join me for the final 770 miles. On the outskirts of Chicago, traffic was stopped. People turned off their engines and stepped out of their cars. A tractor trailer had overturned on an exit ramp. Past the guard rail, the road sloped down into a steep hill, at the bottom of which were two totaled cars. We waited two hours, and with each minute, I got sweatier and angrier and more anxious. I realize the people in the accident were much worse off than I was, and yet all I could think then was that I wanted so badly to see my girlfriend and to get on the road and go away. It had been a bad year. I was, for the first time in my life, a poor student, and an even worse teacher. I only went to one class regularly because the teacher stocked Snapple, peanuts, and Pringles, which became my dinner every Wednesday. At an end-of-year party, an older classmate told me I’d be more interesting if I were more mature. Later that night, I’d nearly vomited on the shoes of a famous author who was a recovering addict. Stranded on I-80, I felt incapable of doing anything.

7. I hate driving – I hate the responsibility of holding people’s lives in my hands, of knowing that on the highway, you are always one unlucky moment away from total calamity. The thing I’m most afraid of is not dying in a car accident, but having a terrible accident and surviving, losing my mobility and my ability to think, becoming a lifelong burden and having just enough mental capacity to be aware of it. Alone on the road, I sometimes look in the rearview and envision and truck just rolling over me and flattening me like Mario stomping on a goomba. LauraBeth likes driving. This makes us a good couple.

8. In August, LauraBeth and I were back on the road. We drove together to Chicago, and she flew home from there. At the airport, she tried not to cry and I didn’t know how to help her. My absence had become the biggest problem in her life. I wouldn’t see her again until maybe Thanksgiving. She would visit me in February. when it would be so cold that ice would be frosted over the ignition in my car, and we would never leave the apartment. The only thing to do then was hope the next year passed by quickly.

9. What can I tell you about Ohio? Nothing. What can you see in Illinois? Farms and more farms. What can I say about Indiana? It goes by faster than the other states. Western PA? Everything is named after rocks and coal. I spent so much time on that road and I learned almost nothing about anything.

10. In my final month in Iowa City, I experienced a sudden moment of clarity and realized I wanted to marry LauraBeth. Friends were shocked because I’d never even mentioned marriage, and the truth is I’d never even really thought about it. One day the thought was there and it made more sense than anything had ever made to me. I bought the ring at a mall in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and I proposed to her the day after my graduation. I had a Master’s degree, a storage unit full of junk, and no job prospects. I’d gained thirty pounds in two years from drinking and fried food. But there was one part of my life that seemed right and good and true, and I wanted to hold onto it as long as possible. We drove the thousand miles from Iowa City to her home in New Jersey feeling like we finally had a chance to live the lives we wanted. It was the first time I’d ever been on that road and felt good about myself.

11. There is an assumption when you start driving that the road will continue, that the highway will stretch as long as it needs to until you reach your destination. The maps and the GPS tell you it’s true, but every now and then, in the middle of a long droning stretch of driving, you consider the possibility that the road only exists as far as you can see it. And once you hit that point, you’ll just fall off a cliff and be swallowed up by the earth. Every time I drove I-80 I doubted I would ever reach the end. The road was just a road but it was so long, and the things I wanted were on the other end of it, so far away I couldn’t see them and could barely believe they existed.

A Brief History of World Travel (part 6) - Notes on an Alaskan Cruise

June 07, 2016 by tom mcallister in Travel, other writing

1. In the Schooner Lounge of the Rhapsody of the Seas cruise ship, you can pay six dollars for a bottle of beer or four dollars for a heavy pour of Maker’s Mark. You order it from the square-jawed Filipino waiter who speaks limited English, but who says “For the honeymooners!” every time he delivers drinks to you and your wife. You try telling him, again, that you’ve been married for four years, but he does not listen. He simply laughs and says, “honeymooners!” again and then looks at you with an expression that translates across any language: he is happy for you because he believes you have either recently had sex or are going to have sex imminently. Then you sip your drink and look out the window for an hour, hoping to catch a glimpse of a whale, relaxing your eyes like you’re looking at a Magic Eye poster, and every now and then asking your wife: do you think that was one? That spray of water, maybe it was from a blowhole? That splash? Your wife looks too, and she sips her drink, but she’s tired. She had her gall bladder removed in an emergency surgery a month ago and is still in recovery, her discomfort exacerbated by the boat’s unsteadiness. The motion sickness meds make her fuzzy and drowsy and she feels distanced from everything. You see a disturbance in the water and lean closer. Was that a dorsal fin? Your glass is empty again, and you’re not sure when it’s appropriate to get another.

2. Relative to other cruise ships, the Rhapsody of the Seas is pretty small. It needs to be able to navigate narrow passageways and fjords that other cruise ships would be too big to handle. By the middle of the week, you recognize almost everybody on the boat. There is the middle-aged African American couple that dresses like sea captains and never, ever smiles. There is Sidney, the trivia expert who gets free passage on the ship for delivering a one-hour lecture on the geography of Alaska. There is the young honeymooner who wears sweatpants every day with the name Mrs. Padilla bedazzled in cursive across her butt. There are hundreds of people with little quirks that annoy you when you’re stuck in a crowd and that charm you when you’re able to sit at a distance with your wife and mock them. You and your wife are not popular among the other cruisers.

3. The only way you could be talked into getting on a cruise ship in the first place was to be assured you wouldn’t have to sit at a dinner table with strangers every night. You have no interest in spending a week bonding with new people. You do not want to hear stories about their children, or about their hometown, or about the other cruises they've been on. Cruisers love talking about going on cruises beyond all other subjects. You want to be left alone with your bourbon and your decadent food and your search for whales. Your brother-in-law and his wife are the outgoing, personable ones. They are energized, rather than completely drained, by socialized with strangers. They enjoy the scheduled activities. By the third day, everyone seems to know them, greeting them as they walk the halls, smiling at them, high-fiving them. They’ve won a team obstacle race, a hula hoop contest, a handful of trivia contests, and who knows what else. They become the stars of one evening’s entertainment, a Newlywed Game-style show. In the morning, people stop by your breakfast table just to tell them how fun they are. “You must have a great time hanging out with these two!” they say. And you do; otherwise you wouldn’t have gone on the cruise in the first place. Though at night you wonder what it is they have that makes it so much easier to just talk to people, to be friendly, to be able to turn off that nagging critical voice in your head and just enjoy yourself. All of these tasks get a little easier after you and your wife split a bottle of wine at dinner.

4. Because you are an MFA-holding white male of a certain age, you have of course read David Foster Wallace’s famous essay about taking a cruise, and you have of course written your own poor imitations of it, and you of course spend an incredible amount of time on the boat telling everyone about this particular essay and its relation to your own experiences. It’s hard to imagine a more annoying behavior, and even as you’re doing it, you think: stop talking, stop talking. But you do not stop. Later you feel like you need to assure everyone that, yes, you are having fun. You really are. For real. You’re just not good at showing it.

5. Cruises are famous for their deferential and obsessive service—it’s one of the things you pay for, to have every whim satisfied—but there is a desperation to the service that is upsetting if you consider the plight of the workers themselves too deeply. Your waiter is charming and sweet and so concerned with your comfort that you begin pretending to like some meals to avoid upsetting him. He is excited because he is going home to Manila at the end of the trip. Most of the workers spend six months on board the ship and then go home for a few weeks to see their families before returning to the boat again. It paints a grim picture of life at home, of the options available to men like him, of the toll trying to make a living takes on everyone. When he shows you a picture of his son and seems to be holding back tears, it crosses your mind that this whole story is a con to elicit a bigger tip at the end of the week, but you don’t want to be that cynical. You can’t be.

6. You discover the one exception to the obsessive service ethos when your wife requests, and is denied, gluten-free food options, even though she provided medical documentation and arranged for them in advance. On the second night, when none of the entrée options is gluten-free, the dining room supervisor, a grim Estonian man with the build of a comic book henchman stops by the table, puts his arm on her shoulder and leans in. “You must understand,” he says. “What you want is not possible.”

7. During one of the Captain’s addresses, he reels off a variety of context-free numbers meant to impress you: the size of the boat, the speed it travels in knots, how many hours it took to construct the boat. Then he adds one you do understand: the average passenger on this cruise will gain four pounds during the week. The audience laughs guiltily, everyone remembering the midnight snacks they had sent to their room, or the second entrée they got last night just because, or the ice cream they had to pass the time between breakfast and lunch. You want to rush to the edge of the boat and purge everything. Consumption on that level feels monstrous, feels, even to someone with no religious inclination, sinful. You’re not going to stop, but when you order a second helping of braised venison, you will at least feel badly about yourself.

8. Most nights, you return to the Schooner Lounge after dinner and sit with your wife and your bourbon, listening to a pianist named Rosemarie, who is the least popular act on the boat and therefore seems very appreciative that you’re there. When you applaud, she looks to you and smiles, covering her mouth with her hand. When you see her elsewhere on the boat, she has her mouth covered with a veil. You never figure out whether this is some sort of religious modesty thing or if it's self-consciousness thing or maybe a thing where she just has bad teeth and has been told that the customers should never be allowed to see them. When her show ends, you migrate to the room next door, where a Filipino band called C-Wind plays covers of American rock hits. You consider asking your wife to dance but she’s falling asleep and also you’re not a dancer, and also how do you dance to Credence anyway?

9. You don’t leave the boat often. There are stops in Juneau, Skagway, and Victoria, BC. Victoria is bustling and beautiful and you wish you could spend a week there instead of just seven hours. In Juneau, you and your wife wander away from the main street into the woods, past the many signs warning about grizzlies, and you pretend these signs don’t concern you deeply. You walk on and around a glacier. You see eagles soaring overhead. You enjoy the brief freedom of not being managed from one event to the next. In Skagway, you board a helicopter, which flies you over a landscape that is beautiful and alien and so bright you can barely look at it. It lands on Denver Glacier, where you follow a safely marked trail to a dog sledding camp. This excursion costs almost as much money as the cruise itself. You meet the dogs and hold puppies, and then you get hitched to a sled and feel the power of eight howling, excited huskies pulling you at full force across a glacier, and you wind whips cold against your face, and you know you will never experience anything like this again. After a short run, a dog named Roo jumps up and licks your face, and you picture some other version of your life in which you were more adventurous and you actually liked nature as much as you wish you liked nature and you lived on a glacier with sledding dogs and didn’t have time or energy to worry about all the petty things that keep you up at night. You try to think of anything that brings you as much joy as pulling this sled brings to the dogs.

10. One morning, you wake up at three o’clock because the captain says you won’t want to miss the sights. The sun is already rising, and a small boat pulls alongside yours. A skilled pilot boards so that he can navigate you through the Tracey Arm Fjord. You’re exhausted, but it doesn’t matter. The world is bright and incredible. In the middle distance, you see the humps of whales surfacing, great clouds of water spurting from their blowholes. Mountains of ice rise out of the sea and as the boat glides close to them you consider reaching out to touch the walls. The boat stops in front of an enormous glacier wall, and the color is like nothing you’ve ever seen. It’s blue, but not really. It’s like the blue of the ocean from another planet. Below you, on a patch of ice, there is a seal lying in a pool of blood. At first you think it’s been killed by a predator, but then you see a pup lying near the mother’s belly. While you’re watching the seal, there is a tremendous rumbling. A house-sized chunk of the glacier breaks loose and crashes to the sea; in its volume and power and prodigiousness, it is the most impressive thing you will ever see in your life. Earth is enormous and the universe is bigger and you are so small it hurts. In the future, every time you begin to complain about the inconveniences of your cruise, you remember what an amazing opportunity you had. You’re four thousand miles from home and doing something relatively few people will ever get to do; how petty is it to complain about inadequate meals in the face of everything else? Before you pull away, a Belarusian staff member approaches you with his camera. “Picture?” he says. He stands in front of the glacier, pointing at it, smiling so widely it looks like it hurts. When he gets home, he will show these pictures to a family that can’t believe the things he’s seen. And you think: what a weird, lucky life this is.

A Brief History of World Travel (part 5)- Notes on Toronto, ON

May 31, 2016 by tom mcallister in Travel, other writing

1. I was twenty-one but most of my friends were still twenty. It was the summer before our senior year of college, and we felt more urgently than ever that we needed to have some adventures. On a whim, I’d bought ten tickets to a music festival, headlined by AC/DC and the Rolling Stones and aimed at reviving Toronto’s economy in the wake of the SARS outbreak. We were going to cross the border, raise some hell, and come home with enough stories to carry us through the next two semesters. The tickets weren’t as easy to unload as I’d expected; after running through a checklist of all of my friends, their friends, and their friend’s acquaintances, I still had three leftover tickets. Finally, LauraBeth asked why I hadn’t invited her yet. We’d been dating over two years but somehow I had categorized her on a list adjacent to, but not overlapping with, my friends. “I think of you as my best friend,” she’d said. I responded, “You’re my girlfriend, not my friend.” The only thing I can say in my defense is that I am now acutely aware of what a shitty thing that is to say to someone.

2. LauraBeth’s mom didn’t want to her to go. She was convinced we’d invited her in order to gang rape her in the hotel. We didn’t know each other well, but I’d always thought she liked me. It’s very difficult to assure someone you’re not going to gang rape her daughter without sounding like that’s exactly what you’re planning to do.

3. It didn’t take long for us to figure out that I’d booked a hotel in a gay neighborhood. A mural near the hotel portrayed two cowboys leaning on a fence, their hands in each other’s back pockets. At the first bar we visited, the bartender, a dead ringer for Freddie Mercury, wore hot pants and a referee’s shirt. He called us adorable when we sat down. We spent the next several hours doing shots in this gay bar and reassuring one another that we were totally not gay, that it was okay for a group of heterosexual men (and one woman) to sit down in a gay bar and have some drinks. It was very important to us to keep reminding one another of our collective straightness. This was still a time when we casually used the word “gay” to indicate something was bad. Later that night, we got lost on the way back to the hotel. When we passed a bar filled with men were wearing revealing leather outfits, Steve yelled at me for putting us in this neighborhood, and then spent the next several blocks screaming about how much he hated gay people. “I hope those fucking faggots can hear me,” he yelled, projecting his voice up toward bedroom windows. “I’ll fuck them all up.” I’d been friends with Steve since sixth grade, and I had never seen him so angry. Later he blamed it on the alcohol, but the anger was too intense, the disgust too palpable.

4. For a group of ostensibly intelligent college students, we were remarkably incurious about this new country. Every morning, we ate breakfast in the same diner. In the afternoons, we bought beer, and some of the guys napped. At night, we drank. LauraBeth and I had been upgraded to a suite because our keycard malfunctioned at check-in, so everyone came to our room at night. It was the nicest hotel room I’d ever stayed in. We filled both sinks—there were two sinks—with ice and beer and then played drinking games that were simultaneously convoluted and extremely simple (despite endless permutations of rules, the penalty is always to take a drink and most of the rewards are also taking a drink). We were determined each night to reach levels of drunkenness we never would have achieved in the United States. I tell my students now that there is nothing interesting about a story in which the plot arc is: first we weren’t drunk, then we were drunk. But when I was twenty-one, this seemed like the most interesting story in the world.

5. Ask LauraBeth what she remembers most about this trip and the first thing she’ll say is I spilled a full pitcher of beer directly into her lap on the first night. The next thing she’ll say is she hates omelets; because of her celiac disease and our lazy dependence on one diner, she had a greasy ham and cheese omelet for four consecutive breakfasts, and even now the sight of one can make her retch. She was never a perfect fit in this group, and I did very little to make it easier on her. I’m certain some of my friends resented her being there, because we were still at the age when it was considered a great betrayal for one of the guys to choose his girlfriend over the group. Swanson refused to believe she’d even heard of AC/DC, let alone enjoyed their music, and reminded her several times that this concert probably wasn't for her. She sprained her ankle on the second day, so she spent the last three days limping behind us as we rushed from one bar to the next. Later, I realized how isolated she’d felt, the lone woman in a group of drunken boys talking about sports and The Simpsons. But back then, I was too distracted, too caught up in my own interests, to do anything about it.

6. In the afternoons, LauraBeth, Kevin, and I visited a few tourist attractions, because she insisted we do something besides drinking. Here are the things I can tell you about sightseeing in Toronto: The CN Tower is very tall, and there is a glass floor through which you can see your own death unfold; Casa Loma is a castle in the city that looks very much like a castle in the city and that is all I remember; the Hockey Hall of Fame is in the basement of a mall and has exactly the atmosphere of a museum in the basement of a mall; the downtown area is very clean and the people are unfailingly polite, and I’m not just saying this because those are Canadian stereotypes.

7. The concert—unofficially dubbed SARSfest—drew approximately 500,000 attendees, making it one of the largest outdoor concerts in North America. It was hot and we were hungover, and we spent part of the afternoon stealing water bottles from distracted vendors. We saw many bands perform. The Isley Brothers were good enough to restore my faith in international travel. Justin Timberlake, still trying to emerge from the shadow of NSYNC, was booed off the stage while Steve, and thousands of others around us, shouted gay slurs at him.

8. This trip was not the last time I saw those guys, but it was much closer to the end of our friendship than I’d realized. I married LauraBeth and I still see Kevin semi-regularly, but have had fewer than a handful of interactions with the rest over the past decade. This is natural, the way friendships fray and then fade away, but when you’re twenty-one, it seems impossible. We went on that trip expecting it to be another chapter in the endless, unfolding story of our friendship, but now when I think about it, what I remember is a sweaty desperation to hold on to something that was never going to be the same.

9. We stopped at Niagara Falls on the drive back, but stayed for less than a half hour, because the guys were eager to go home. LauraBeth and I looked at the falls for a few minutes, and then followed the others back to the parking lot. Two of them had bought cheap Niagara Falls boomerangs in the gift shop. While we laughed at them for making such worthless purchases, they both threw them high and far. Both boomerangs got caught in a tree along the parking lot’s edge. We stood beneath the trees staring up at the cheap boomerangs that would never return, and I resisted the urge to suggest it was a metaphor for something. Probably it wasn’t a metaphor. Probably it was just a dumb piece of curved wood stuck in a tree.

*some names in this piece have been changed to protect people’s identities

A Brief History of World Travel (part 4) - Notes on Boston, MA

May 24, 2016 by tom mcallister in Travel, other writing

1. Nearly everyone I know who has lived in Boston hates Boston.

2. Four of us —me, LauraBeth, her brother Tim, his fiancée Keri—drove to Boston overnight after watching the Flyers lose game six of the Stanley Cup Finals. We were all in our twenties and we thought we were still young enough to power through a sleepless night on the road. I don’t remember most of the drive, and I’m not sure how we got there safely. The first thing we did was take a long nap in the hotel room. Our return trip would be an overnight drive too, but none of us were so confident anymore.

3. Usually I’m very self-conscious about going to places that are obvious tourist traps, places that have three tour buses parked outside and idling, waiting to vacuum up the groups of seniors and schoolchildren who have descended on the place. It makes me feel dumb. It makes me feel lazy. When I enter, I want to announce I am here under duress. I would much rather blend into the crowd on vacation; partly this is a defense mechanism because I don’t want to make myself a target, but it’s also about my vanity. I want to feel somehow above all the other travelers there, like I’m enjoying a more enlightened experience of the place than the fanny-packed masses. The desire to defend myself just for going to a popular place reflects badly on me, I realize. But still I feel judged by the locals who see me entering any place with a gift shop. The point is: we had lunch at the Cheers bar, and it was a fine lunch. I think I had a burger. I’m pretty sure I bought a beer glass.

4. We were in Boston primarily to go to a Phillies game at Fenway Park. Fenway Park is like any other baseball park, except that it’s old and therefore less comfortable than modern parks. When something is uncomfortable but also very old, we say it is charming, because we are a sentimental nation afraid to let dead things die. The Phillies’ 47-year-old starting pitcher Jamie Moyer gave up nine runs in the first inning, which freed us to explore the park. We met the Red Sox mascot, Wally the Green Monster, a clear derivative of the Phillie Phanatic. One of us asked him how it felt to be a second-rate mascot, and Wally’s human handler made fun of Tim for wearing jean shorts. This insult, delivered from a native Bostonian, seemed like a quintessential instance of the pot calling the kettle black. Later, we ate ice cream out of souvenir helmets. The rhythms of an endless baseball season are better for my mental health than football’s weekly explosions of anger. When I was young, I wanted sports to save my life. As I get older, I mostly want them to distract me for a couple hours.

5. I went back to Boston for a writer’s conference in 2014. Every time I go to another city for a conference, all I end up doing is eating and drinking in the same three places within a block of the convention center. These places are hollow and soulless and designed to be malleable enough to appease attendees of any convention, from creative writing to duck hunting. There’s something about their practiced adequacy that makes me very sad. There’s a reminder that what you’re doing isn’t really traveling so much as going to different places. There’s the nagging feeling that everything is the same everywhere.

6. On the second night of the conference, I followed everyone to the convention center-adjacent bar that shared a name with a famous misanthropic writer. It was hard not to feel like a cliché entering this place, where so many writers were still wearing their nametags, drinking brown liquor, and engaged in so-called networking. This bar was a sad footnote in Phillies history, as it was the site on which former Phillies pitcher Brett Myers had been witnessed punching his wife in the face. Nobody in my group was interested in this story. I ran into a friend who introduced me to another writer. It was loud, so I asked him to repeat his name. “You should know my name,” he said. “I am a famous poet.” He walked away, clearly offended. I’ve been a part of the literary and academic worlds for over a decade, and still sometimes I’ll have an encounter that makes me want to disavow the whole thing and just get a real job around some normal fucking people.

7. The bartender took a twenty from me for one beer and never gave me change, effectively giving himself a fifteen dollar tip. I told him he owed me change and he pretended not to hear me. Probably he does this to new convention-goers every week, counting on them to be too drunk to notice or too docile to put up a fight. I wanted to grab him and tell him I was not like those other people he’d robbed, I was somehow more streetwise than them, and I'd caught on to his scam. But instead I sat there and sipped as angrily as I could for an hour, muttering terrible things about Boston and its people. When I left, I stole two salt shakers out of spite. I spiked them into a mound of snow before I got back to my hotel.

8. The thing I remember most about my 2010 trip to Boston is that the valet in a parking lot downtown killed my car battery by leaving my lights on, then crossed the wires when trying to give it a jump. This meant LauraBeth and I got to ride in a tow truck with a driver who did very little to defy the stereotypes of either tow truck drivers or Bostonians. We waited at a stop sign for a line of Asian schoolchildren to cross the street with their teacher and he laughed. “There’s just something fucking hilarious about a bunch of Asian kids, you know?” he said. He went on to share with us a number of theories about Asian women and the shapes of their vaginas. He dropped us off at a Honda dealership, where we spent most of the day waiting for them to check if they had the eleven-dollar spark plugs I needed. We arrived in the middle of what seemed like a seven-hour break for the mechanics, who had just settled in to an intense game of Uno in the parking lot. In the afternoon, we took a walk around the neighborhood, where we saw, but did not enter, JFK’s childhood home. As of the date of this writing, I have been alive for 12,505 days. This was perhaps the most pointless of them all.

9. I’m sure there are people who love Boston, for what I’m sure are perfectly valid reasons.

10. On the return trip with Tim and Keri, we drove overnight again. Within a couple hours, we were all nodding off in the car. We rolled down the windows, cranked the music, pulled over frequently, drank more soda than any of us had in years. We were a danger to everyone on the road. Somewhere on I-95, we saw flashing lights ahead. Flares indicated a lane closure. We drove cautiously past the scene of an accident: a single mangled car, a body being loaded into the back of an ambulance. They moved with no urgency, and we knew the driver had died, probably just minutes ago. The next day, we would try searching for more information on that accident, the cause, the name of the driver, something to put it in context and make sense of it, but we found nothing. The driver was dead and we were not. I wished we could pull over and never drive again.

A Brief History of World Travel (part 3) - Notes on Orlando, FL

May 17, 2016 by tom mcallister in Travel, other writing

1. Last time I was in Orlando, I found myself walking alone along a freeway hoping to find a place to eat. I’d been in Jackson, Mississippi to speak to creative writing students, and a blizzard in Philly had grounded my return flight. My hotel had a weird lunch counter-ish cafeteria in the lobby, offering a variety of options from frozen chicken fingers to frozen chicken nuggets. I was convinced that there were gators in the marshy roadside land, waiting for some dumb human to step into their open mouths. I walked a narrow line between roaring trucks and lurking gators, and for a mile I found nothing at all that served food. I turned around and by the time I got back to the hotel, the cafeteria had closed. I spent eight dollars at the vending machine and ate Reese’s Pieces and Cheez-its for dinner.

2. My dad was not famous for his childlike sense of wonder, but he loved Disney World more than anybody I've known. For most of his working life, he was a manager: of warehouses, of people, of information systems. He liked order and accountability. And so he admired the military precision of Disney’s operation, in their desperate desire to provide a very specific kind of enjoyment to the people there. Once, while we waited outside the bathroom, we heard an employee’s walkie talkie call for someone to report immediately to another location in the park to pick up a dropped fork. It’s The Happiest Place on Earth, unless you happen to be a piece of unwanted debris.

3. My mom’s oldest friend, Anne, lived in Orlando. They went to nursing school together, then she got married to a nice guy named Doug and moved to Florida, where they had two children. I knew very little about their life, and I don’t even remember the name of their daughter, who was a few years older than me. I do remember myself, at twelve or thirteen, waiting by the pool and hoping for her to come outside in a bikini. I wasn’t sure what, exactly, would happen next, but I assumed she knew and would lead me through it. I still hadn’t kissed a girl or even come close. My first official kiss would happen in the dimly lit corner of a friend’s pool at an eighth grade graduation party, when the popular girls started pairing people off and demanding they hook up. “It’s your last chance,” one of them said, pushing me and a girl named Katie together. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized quite how many muscles are in a person’s face. I’d never realized how many teeth people have.

4. Anne’s son Chris was roughly my age, so we were expected to be friends. We got along fine, though I resented him over the years, as I gained weight while he developed an athletic body and had a fashionable hairstyle and started looking very much like a cool kid who went to the beach and kissed many girls. One afternoon, Chris and I went to a park and played basketball for about twenty minutes until some older kids showed up and drove us off the court. While we sat on a bench, he gave me a painfully detailed summary of the movie Drop Dead Fred. I interrupted him to tell stories that are supposed to impress teenage boys: rumors about drinking and drugs, stories of breasts I’d nearly seen. I’d heard that one girl in our class had recently smoked a lot of pot and then had sex with an older boy in the shower. “Yeah,” he said. “Sex.” He scribbled in the dirt with a stick. “We get a lot of that around here too.”

5. The last time I went to Disney World with my family, I was eighteen. My brother and his future wife had to pick me up in Ocean City, NJ before we all went to the airport. I’d spent a week in a beach house for Senior Week, an unsupervised, beer-soaked sneak preview of college for graduating seniors. Almost every story I have from that week is about how drunk I was not in the morning, and then, later, how drunk I was. I slept very little. For the first time in my life, I slept in a bed with a girl: she was smart and sarcastic and pretty and I was so intimidated by her when I was sober that I had no idea how to speak to her. We would go on to have a quasi-relationship over the summer before I pushed her away with my immaturity and my anger. Once I arrived in Disney World, I settled into my room in the treehouse-themed resort and I waited the whole day for everyone to go to bed so I could log on to AOL Instant Messenger and chat with her. Most nights, I went to bed after three AM. On the third day, when my family took a safari ride in Disney’s Animal Kingdom, I fell asleep so soundly, despite the jostling jeep and the presence of actual lions and crocodiles, that my mom told my brother to make sure I was breathing.

6. On our family’s last night in Disney World, we saw a show called Fantasmic! It combined water effects, pyrotechnics, 3-D projection, and all manner of spectacle to tell a story that, according to Wikipedia, is a trip through Mickey’s imagination. At the end of the show, the screen broadcast a marriage proposal. The woman said yes and everybody applauded. I muttered, “We’ll see how long that lasts.” Back then, I had this reflexive need to be cynical, to assume the worst of every person and event, to hear good news but only absorb the negative spin on it. I thought it made me mature. I thought it made me sound smart. My brother’s future wife shook her head. “Why is he so bitter all the time?” she said.

7. My parents returned to Disney one more time without us, when my dad had cancer. My mom is an oncology nurse, and she knew enough about his health to know this could be their last chance. Some of the last pictures of my dad looking healthy and hearty come from this cruise. He’s been dead so long I sometimes forget what he looks like, and then I see the pictures and I think: was that really him?

8. My brother and his wife go to Disney World every chance they get. If they had the option, I think they would go three times a year. They have children, which I assume is a significant motivating factor, though it’s not the only consideration. We don’t have children, and we’re not planning on children, and so it’s hard for me to imagine spending more than one week every decade in a very expensive place designed to attract as many young children as possible. The more money I spend on a trip, the fewer people I want to interact with.

9. LauraBeth spent the final two years of college working at the Disney store in the mall, and had accumulated enough discounts and free passes that we were able to go to Disney World very cheaply after graduation. The Disney World that greeted us was exactly as it has always been: everything was clean and polished and safe, and there were giant anthropomorphic dogs and bears everywhere. There were fireworks and parades. There were smiling employees eager to help us at every turn. There was hilariously overpriced merchandise. It was all very pleasant. During the days we rode on rides and waved to the characters and took pictures at the spots that had been labeled as Kodak Picture Spots (“chosen by top photographers”). We spent a lot of time in Epcot, which had always been her favorite part of the park. Most nights, too anxious to approach the swim up bar at our resort, we filled two giant mugs with Coke and brought them back to the room where we’d stashed a bottle of rum. With two days left in the trip, she got a call from a major hospital in Philadelphia offering her a full-time job as a nurse. She accepted, and started working a month later. Two months after that, I moved to Iowa City for graduate school. We had no idea how things would change over the coming months, or whether this was the last trip we would ever take together. We tried not to think or talk about it. We tried to enjoy ourselves and pretend those other things weren’t going to happen. We indulged in the Disney fantasy that we could live in an endless present, where everybody is always happy and the future only exists in a distant corner of the theme park.

A Brief History of World Travel (part 2) - Notes on Portland, OR

May 10, 2016 by tom mcallister in Travel, other writing

1. On my first morning in Portland, I threw out my back while brushing my teeth. I was thirty-one, and thought I had at least ten more years before that kind of thing happened. I wanted to call for help, but the thought of speaking, of sending any vibrations at all through my chest, terrified me. I felt as helpless then as I ever have as an adult. The night before, I’d lifted suitcases and walked several miles and generally felt like a young person. And now I was reminded that all of these activities are enabled by the whims of a body I can barely control. LauraBeth found an office chair nearby and rolled it behind me. She forced me to sit, though I was afraid any movement might tear me in half. I sat motionless for a half hour while she gave me Advil and found a heating pad and eventually forced me into the first, painful steps of a new chapter in my life. Then I went to the zoo.

2. LauraBeth’s childhood friend, Chrissy, joined us on this vacation. They’re both tall, thin, short-haired, and pretty, born five days apart. People often mistake them for sisters. Chrissy was divorced a few years prior, and this would be our first vacation as a group. That first morning, with my bad back, I thought: I am going to have to go to the hospital. And I thought: I am going to ruin this vacation. I pictured LauraBeth and Chrissy exploring the city while I stayed in bed watching Law & Order reruns and taking as many painkillers as I was allowed, plus an extra one or two. They would come home after a late lunch, a little drunk from afternoon wine, and ask me how I was doing. I would tell them I was fine and listen to all the things I’d missed, wondering if I was even there at all.

3. We stayed in an immaculately maintained Airbnb in a small complex of townhouses in the Alphabet District. There were newspapers on every doorstep, so we knew this was not a complex for young people. All the tenants were middle-aged gay men who’d moved here during the eighties when this place had a reputation as a safe haven. On the second morning, I went out to get coffee for the three of us. My back was feeling a little better, but I spent most of the vacation afraid of stillness; I thought the next time I sat down might be the last time. On my return from the coffee shop, I met a neighbor, sitting in a lawn chair on his front steps, a purring cat in his lap. He offered me a cookie. He told me about how he’d become an accidental gentrifier, how the rents here used to be very cheap. “We made this place trendy,” he said. “Now I’m just an old gay. Nobody cares about us anymore.”

4. Above the bed where LauraBeth and I slept, the owners had hung a surprisingly detailed painting of two men in Ancient Greece engaged in anal sex in front of a crowd. It was, I thought, a bold design choice.

5. The water in Crater Lake is so perfect, it feels like you’re on another planet. The lake was formed when a volcano collapsed, and is the centerpiece of a sprawling National Park. We took a boat tour of the lake that lasted a half hour longer than it needed to. We learned about various rock formations, plus a tree stump that is famous for having been a floating tree stump for a very long time. The guide showed us the stump and we all agreed that it was, indeed, a floating stump. I was badly sunburned, which is as much a vacation tradition as anything we do. I asked the guide a question, and when he said that’s a great question, I felt an embarrassing surge of pride, a remnant of my days as a grade-obsessed student. Chrissy and LauraBeth also asked great questions. A young gay couple sat in the front of the boat, and they were so in love it was inspiring. They held hands and locked eyes when they spoke, and the way they smiled at each other it was clear they felt like they were the only people in the boat, like they’d been set free to explore the whole planet on their own. Chrissy took a picture of them, an act we later decided was a little creepy, but also I got it: it’s good to have confirmation that love is a true and possible thing.

6. The homeless and panhandlers in Portland were so much younger than their counterparts in Philly. Homeless kids crouched on corners throughout the city with skateboards and dogs and begged aggressively, confrontationally, with all the arrogance of young people with nothing to lose. I hated the part of me that felt contempt when they reached out and touched my arm, and I also hated the part of me that guiltily threw a handful of change into the cup of a kid who was obviously going to use it to buy heroin. I hated feeling so small in the face of a problem I barely understand. Sometimes when a homeless person asks me for money, I freeze because I don’t want to deny his essential humanity, and yet I also find myself unwilling to give away money. Usually I pretend I don’t have any cash, or, if I actually don’t have cash, I feel an embarrassing need to explain myself. I’m afraid one day a homeless person will ask me why I deserve the life I have instead of theirs, and I won’t be able to answer. I donate to food banks, but that seems so insignificant. I have five half-finished essays on homelessness on my computer; I have the luxury of sitting around and thinking about it for a while.

7. We ate at a Peruvian restaurant where the food was so good we’ve been talking about it for three years. I have no memory of what I ate. All I know is that we left that restaurant talking all night about how good it had been. Most of our travel is built around food. We try, in a few days, to fill ourselves with as many of the essential local foods as possible. We collect those experiences and try to absorb every detail, and then we go home and the details become blurred almost immediately. We just have the memory of a brief period when there was food on our plates and it was incredible. We’re the owners of a series of half-remembered things that add up to something, though we can’t quite put our fingers on what that is.

8. I have an internet friend named Justin who lives in Portland. We’re friends because we both like the same football team, and we talk about liking that football team in the same places online. I knew a lot about a very small portion of his life, and very little about the rest. He and his wife took us to a local winery, where we sat outside and looked at hills and valleys and fields of grapevines. We drank a couple bottles of wine. This place had one of the most impressive bathrooms I’ve ever seen, though it’s been long enough now that I can only remember thinking: how does anybody afford this? Justin and his wife met us for drinks a few days later in Bend, Oregon. At this point, they had become real life friends. They had a son two years later. Among the hundreds of child pictures I see on my Facebook feed, theirs are among the best.

9. Driving from Portland to the Oregon coast, we saw a forest fire. We saw a Native American reservation on a small stretch of utterly useless land. We started seeing a lot of Confederate Flags and trailer homes owned by people who strongly preferred not to be tread on. I was in charge of the music, and LauraBeth was the driver because otherwise the winding roads would make her motion sick. Chrissy sat in the back, scrolling through her phone and reading us the latest headlines about the royal baby. Every mile we drove, it got colder and grayer.

10. The last place we stayed was a riverboat bed & breakfast in Newport. We were greeted by three dogs—Charlie, Jazz, and Arf, all Westies—who jumped into our laps as soon as we sat. At night, we sat on the top deck of the boat, drinking wine and beer with Michael, one of the innkeepers. He and his wife, Gloria, were planning on selling the boat soon and retiring after two decades in the business, so he was feeling wistful. He told us stories about the various men who lived on the docks. He warned Chrissy to stay away from the fishermen, who he described as ne’er-do-wells, but to find herself a rich logger while she was in town. “You can tell the loggers,” he said. “The smell of them.” In the morning, Gloria served us breakfast and broke down into tears several times. She was waiting on medical test results, but didn’t want to talk about it. At the next table, a white man named Tyrone and his wife ate plate after plate after plate of food. They wore all white every day, and they had the persistent smiles and disconcertingly enthusiastic voices of youth ministers. Nights when they saw us drinking on the top deck, they didn’t even step through the doorway, as if they were afraid of catching a contact drunk. I assumed they were missionaries, or maybe ghosts.

11. On the last night, we walked to the rocky coast and hopscotched along rocks out into the water where we saw seals so close we could have named them. Later, we sat on the sand and watched the sun set. What possible thing can I say about a sunset that hasn’t been said? We watched it because we were on the coast and we felt just a little bit closer to the sun than we’d been at home. We watched it because we were tired and it was nice to sit down. We watched it because what else was there to do? We were on vacation and had spent a lot of time and money to have a moment where we could do something like this: to feel calm and comfortable and alive for a while.

A Brief History of World Travel (Part 1): Notes on Portland, ME

May 03, 2016 by tom mcallister in Travel, other writing

1. The first vacation my wife and I ever took together was to Portland, Maine. I was twenty and she was nineteen. I’d bought the tickets for her as a gift for our first anniversary. It was, I’d thought, a grand romantic gesture. I’d spent an afternoon at the mall trying to find an adequate gift, but the only gifts they want to sell to young men buying gifts for their girlfriends are baskets of shampoo and lotion, or bad jewelry, or candles that smell like s’mores. I passed a Border’s and saw a travel guide to Maine in one of the window displays. I vaguely remembered LauraBeth having said something about how she’d like to see the foliage in Maine. I called my dad from the mall and asked him if he thought it was crazy to just go and buy plane tickets to Portland without checking with LauraBeth first. I could tell that his answer was that he did think it was crazy, but he viewed me then as ambitionless, as smart but lacking direction, so any time I showed enthusiasm for anything, he encouraged it. “Sure,” he said. “If you think it’s the right thing to do, just go ahead and do it.”

2. She had to drive me to pick up the tickets. I’d ordered them online, but had them shipped to my parents’ house. At the time, I was living in an off-campus apartment in North Philly, in a place where we didn’t have a mailbox or a functioning door (it had been kicked off its hinges by angry fraternity guys, chasing a friend of mine who had stolen money from their doorman; at night, we leaned the door in the frame and pressed a kitchen table against it as a brace). My dad had somehow missed the delivery and the tickets had been returned to the FedEx warehouse. He had cancer, and was deep into chemo treatments; probably he’d been too weak to get to the door in time, if he’d even heard it in the first place. When he told me he’d missed the delivery, I tried to swallow my rage and I hung up. I thought terrible things about him. I called him lazy and I called him fat, and I thought: why can’t he just answer a fucking knock on the fucking door? I thought: you try to count on him for one fucking thing. I thought it hard enough that I hoped he felt it. A year later, he was dead. Most of the things that cause me the greatest shame are things nobody even knows about.

3. I didn’t know anything about Portland. I knew there was a place called Portland, and I knew it was in Maine. I knew there was foliage, somewhere. I booked a room in the Howard Johnson in South Portland, which turned out to be an entirely different city. In the mornings, we took a bus into Portland, then wandered around town, not knowing what to do with ourselves. We’d skimmed the guidebook, but had no idea how to plan a vacation. For lunch every day, we ate at the same Italian restaurant where they served enormous portions of a pasta dish with lobster and alfredo sauce. Most nights for dinner, we ate fried rice at the Chinese takeout place down the road from the HoJo.

4. At the time, LauraBeth was being tested for celiac disease. The doctors were pretty confident she had it—her mother had been diagnosed a few years earlier, and she had all the same symptoms—but they wanted her to eat regularly for three months as a trial. Every day was another opportunity for a last meal before being sentenced to a lifetime of gluten-free eating: the last brownie, the last lasagna, the last soft pretzel. In 2002, on a college budget, it was almost impossible to conceive of a gluten-free life. For a year, the only thing she would eat for lunch was rolled up ham and cheese slices. Some days, we would drive over an hour just to go to places that had a flourless chocolate cake on their dessert menu. We mail-ordered gluten-free cookies for unfathomably high prices. The trip to Portland was the only one we ever took where she could eat anything she wanted. For years, the primary consideration in all travel decisions was the availability of gluten-free food options. When we went to Disney World in 2004, the chef came to our table to ask her what she wanted, and when he brought her gluten-free spaghetti and meatballs, she nearly cried. Things are easier now. Her disease is trendy and there is a profit to be made. Back then, we never imagined her being able to walk into a restaurant and order normally off a menu.

5. On the third day, we took a whale watching tour. I was still harboring my fantasy of switching my major from English and becoming a marine biologist. I’d never seen a whale in the wild before. I didn’t see any that day either, though we saw some seals and a dolphin and hundreds of birds. Ninety minutes in to the tour, a storm rolled over us. The boat rocked like it was trying to toss us all overboard. Half the passengers got sick. LauraBeth laid on a bench trying not to vomit. I wondered if a storm was a good thing, if maybe the weather would for some reason draw more whales to the surface. There was the possibility, I thought, of coming eye-to-eye with a breaching humpback. When I was a sad, lonely child, I thought often of the logistics of living inside a whale; if you could handle the smell, if you could ensure a steady food supply, it seemed like a tenable situation. You could be alone and always in motion and so deep inside an ancient animal that you could actually touch the blue whale’s soul. It seemed safer than life on land, and there was no possibility of rejection. Choosing to be alone seemed safer than trying not to be and failing. I live in a house now, where I have my own office and I have a basement with a wet bar. I like it here, and I can now see the downsides in living inside the stomach of a large mammal. You can’t really live inside a whale’s stomach. I understand this. But imagine the speed. Imagine the sound of the whale’s calls from the inside.

6. We didn’t have a lot of money then. We were lucky not to be accruing extra debt—I had scholarships and she paid no tuition because her dad worked at the school—but that wouldn’t become meaningful until years later, when we realized how many of our friends were crippled by loan payments. I was lucky to have had enough money to pay for the trip, but most days we couldn’t afford to do much besides walk along the coast and look at things. We climbed to the top of a lighthouse and looked over the land and said the sorts of things you’re supposed to say from the top of a lighthouse: look how high it is; you can see so far from here; imagine what it’s like to be out there by yourself on a boat; what should we do now? LauraBeth’s mom loved lighthouses for reasons I only vaguely understand. We went there partly so she could show her mom a picture of the lighthouse and say: see, we saw a lighthouse. Her mom had cancer then too. She was dead two years later.

7. Five years after that trip, we got married. My dad wasn’t there and her mom wasn’t there, and I hate to keep harping on it, but, look: that’s fundamental to who we are. They were dead and we wanted them to not be dead, and no matter what I set out to write, it bubbles to the surface in some way. We were alive and, on that first trip together, we felt like adults. We were still learning so much about who we were, what we wanted, how to go to another place and claim part of it as your own. I was much more impatient then than I am now; that’s why I’d bought the tickets in the first place. I wanted to accelerate everything and get older so quickly, to rush past the tentative, fearful stage of the relationship into the comfortable, reassuring love we have now, but I didn’t know how to do any of it. I wanted to open my mouth wide like a blue whale’s and swallow a decade worth of experiences. I wanted to swallow myself and live inside my own belly.

8. The storm intensified and the whale tour boat had to turn around. They gave us a lifetime voucher for a free return trip, and I was impressed by the confidence: they expected to outlive us, and they expected us to come back. I carried the voucher through seven years and five moves, but I lost it during our move to our new house. We’re going back to Portland this year, to celebrate fifteen years of dating. We’ll get on a different boat—voucherless—and we’ll look for different whales. We’ll climb the lighthouse again and we’ll look all around us. Everything will look more or less the same, but so much will have changed that there isn’t enough time to explain it all.