On Why We're Headed To Russia.

Of the dozen or so sad notes I've written myself in my life, few are more so than the one I composed at the midway pole of a bottle of wine I was drinking by myself at my dining room table last summer. It was past midnight; I was at that part of the bottle where you have to make a sort of quasi-economic decision between corking it or just making the push; to kill time I had been listing a few dozen names of bands[2] I would one day like to start if/when I learned finally to play any musical instrument at all; and then, a propos of almost nothing, I wrote in urgent and very enthusiastic bock letters, "I want to go somewhere where I can marvel at something" and underlined "marvel" like three times and put a few stars before and after. Forty-five minutes later I was awestruck by a photograph on a poorly translated web-page titled something like, "Ride The Trans-Siberian Railway Yes!" of an ancient train muscling its way through a snow bank and felt that rush of recognition you feel at one in the morning – you know the one -- that says, "You're really on to something here. Don't forget this. You always feel this stuff at one in the morning, and you always forget it the next day. Seriously – don't forget this one." Then I hit the bookmark button and made the turn with the bottle of wine and listened to Boys Don't Cry and then there was some slow dancing[3] and I ended up going to bed feeling something close to total elation.

Six hours later[4] I woke up in a world where I was, "The Type of Guy Who Apparently Commits Julia Roberts Movies To Memory"[5], but at one in the morning I was falling head over heels in love[6] with a train out there in Russia.

*****

This thing you are only another sentence or two from giving up on is the first entry in a series of only vaguely travel[7]-related blog entries Pennlive has graciously allowed me to write. Before I get to the actual travel-blogging part – which is the part with the "Here's A Thing I Ate and A Thing I Drank With the Thing I Ate" stuff -- I find myself simultaneously in need of some kind of statement of purpose for what comes next here and also trying not to write a statement of purpose for what comes next here because to do so would presume, you know, actual purpose[8]. Perhaps all that I can say to speak towards intention here is that a kind of flatness has found its way into my life recently -- lately I've found that I can kill three hours on the internet just by hitting refresh on about 6 websites[9] and telling myself, "I'm only going to check [X lifestyle website] one more time"; that I watch travel shows now with the same soul-crushing envy my wife feels for Here's How To Rebuild Your Kitchen shows and convince myself that watching Anthony Bourdain eat the brain of a sheep makes me sophisticated; that there is this small Empire of Things taking over my house that make me less happy and less self-aware and less present-in-my-life merely for its existence in mine -- the source of which has left me very suspicious that I, with apologies to Senator Ritche (R, Florida), have come to make being unengaged something of a zen-like state of existence.

*****

Here, I'll juxtapose a story that is only tangentially related to the Trans-Siberian Railway:

There are these enormous trees that keep growing in our front lawn pretty much overnight and one day when I was out front admiring one of them -- and sort of thinking about their perspicacity, and how they could probably grow right through concrete if they really wanted to -- a neighbor-lady who was very actively walking by in, like, tights and some kind of sports bra or something, said, "I know, right!"

I said, "You mean, they grow!"

And she said, "Weeds, boy, I don't know!" and she laughed and put her hands on her hips and adjusted her iPod shuffle.

I sort of laughed the way I do when my sense is I'm supposed to laugh even if I have no idea what's actually happening around me, which is to say I laughed loudly enough that I could instantly be identified as the neighborhood crazy person.

She said more quietly, "I mean, you know they're weeds."

And I said, "Yes!". But loudly.

And she said, "And you've got like more of them then anyone in the neighborhood!" and then she walked off really quickly in her big, white sneakers.

*****

Last summer during something of a low moment I plagiarized for myself the trailer to Eat, Pray, Love[10]; five weeks from now I'll be boarding a plane from Philadelphia to Moscow, and three days after that I'll be sitting in a pretty cramped compartment for the 150 hour train ride across Siberia to Irkutsk, Russia; then Ulan Bator; and then Beijing. I'm too old to believe that fourteen days in Russia and Mongolia and China is anything more than it is -- it's just two weeks of flying, and sitting, and pressing my wet face up against a locked window, and maybe drinking a little vodka, and maybe doing the thing where I say to the one friend I've wrangled into coming with me, "Can you believe we're really doing this?" – but so too do I know that the laundry list of things that I'm afraid of[11]has grown incomprehensibly long in the past few years and if I don't actually marvel at something soon I'll marvel at absolutely nothing, ever. That without even trying I'll fill my days with the same six websites, and the same television shows, and the same cups of coffee, and the same Saturday nights; I'll cut down weed trees and worry about my neighbors and I'll mow my lawn and I'll walk my dog and I'll forget to look at the world around me and I'll march myself closer and closer to death[12][13].

Next Up: A Week in Wine Country[14]. But for now, follow me on the twitters here: twitter.com/miketsimpson, or email me at miketsimpson@gmail.com

[1] This entire piece of writing is meant to serve as a sort of, "Hello, and welcome to Travelblog" sort of thing. But my wife read what follows and looked at me like, "Okay...?" and then said it doesn't make any sense and also that it's too melodramatic. For my money, that's about as accurate an introduction to TSO Blog as is imagineable.

[2] The list was long and since forgotten, but it's here that I can't help but mention that there is a band in the world whose actual name is, "Test Icicles".

[3] Solo.

[4] ...my gleeful wife found me head-in-hand by the computer and whispered, "I'm just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her".

[5] This is the part where we all pretend we can't quote like 60% of Pretty Woman from memory. And then one of you goes, "I totally dug Mystic Pizza but since then all her stuff sucks". Aren't you tired of being that person, you?

[6] Other things with which I have fallen in love at one in the morning: learning to play piano; documentaries; any blog with the word "zen" featured heavily in its title; wearing scarves; Joan Didion; "taking a photography class or two at the local community college"; volunteerism; P90x; composting; eating whole foods; seriously, reading the whole New Yorker and not just buying it and putting it on the coffee table; walking my dog; cleaning little bits of the house every day as opposed to big chunks all weekend; listening to other people.

[7] I have serious reservations about calling this a travel blog for two primary reasons. First, over the course of the next two months I'll be going to a total of three places: 1. San Francisco; 2. Cape Cod; and 3. Russia. That's not bad for a summer, but I'm not sure the first two constitute anything so unusual or exotic that they necessitate a guy known most for writing about Double A Girls Soccer giving the world his "take" on them. Second, I think "travel blog" implies a certain set of writerly parameters and obligations, the majority of which I'm unfamiliar with and perhaps even uneasy about. For example, I don't think the world is anything other than slightly worse off for the existence of yet another stultifying article called, "Here's A Thing I Ate and A Thing I Drank With the Thing I Ate"; nor is the world a better place for another article titled, "Tourists Always Do X, But I'm Going To Show You Y, Which Merely For Not Being X Is Therefore Preferential". But of course both of those articles are major components of travel writing, and of course it doesn't say much about me as a writer of travelling if I'm essentially going to distance myself from that which travel writing is.

[8] Which, of course, gives you ample reason to stop reading and instantly head over to Bill Roddey's irresistible "A View Askew" humor blog.

[9] I'm looking at you, Lifehacker. And Deadspin. And Martha Steward dot com.

[10] It's worth mentioning here that I carry with me a reasonable amount of guilt re: my General Taste in Things -- which is to say I almost immediately ran out and purchased a copy of Elizabeth Gilbert's apocryphal travelogue and as such let me also say this: to call it awful is unfair even to awful books like Twilight (which I also ran out, purchased, and read in a similar state of guilt)(when do I write the footnote where I say, "Like, you guys totally know it's about vampires, right?") which are awful but nonetheless do not deserve to be ranked next to, or even near, Ms. Gilbert's slight tale of Made-for-the-Oxygen-Network redemption.

[11] Things I'm afraid of (an abridged list): Bridges; the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard; the house centipede; Heights; Cancer; Prison; Watching Television Shows About Either Cancer or Prison; the Dark; Horses; Other Drivers; the Laundry Room; Unfamiliar Dogs; and, more than anything at all, flying.

[12] This sentence was described as "criminally melodramatic" by my wife. I also thought about going with, "...and suffocate beneath my Empire of Things" but that seemed, you know, criminally stupid.

[13] From George Saunders in Oprah Magazine, a passage to which I can't stop referring:

"The scariest thought in the world is that someday I'll wake up and realize I've been sleepwalking through my life: underappreciating the people I love, making the same hurtful mistakes over and over, a slave to neuroses, fear, and the habitual. But wow, how to avoid this? Aren't I actually doing this even now, every day? Prayer helps, meditation helps—and so does reading. Reading is a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we're someone else, disrupting the delusion that we're permanent and at the center of the universe. Suddenly (we're saved!) other people are real again, and we're fond of them. The world is bright and new, workable, worthy of our attention. This grass (that sun, these emotions) are the same grass/sun/emotions found in Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf, Zadie Smith and Tolstoy: What a privilege to be here, in this recently Literature-sanctified world! Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another; rather, it teaches us to abide with the fact that, in their own way, all things are true, and helps us, in the face of this terrifying knowledge, continually push ourselves in the direction of Open the Hell Up." Oh, oh.

[14] Which is where I am currently (Glen Ellen, California), hammering away hopelessly at the above. I'm sure I'll do a whole thing about this later, but I have to say this: I was trying to drink wine at a vineyard today in a way that was normal and forgettable-enough that no-one working at the vineyard would ask me any questions at all, my opinion of the wine inclusive (because my only opinion is ever, "Wow – it's fruity!"), when I was suddenly-and-absolutely-out-of-nowhere asked by the Retired Man Who Now Runs The Wine Tasting Section of Some Vineyard how closely I "follow the industry".   It's obviously the worst question I've ever been asked in my entire life, but perhaps even worse was my response – which, I have to add, was formulated only out of abject horror that my willed Impenetrable Field of Unnoticeableness was such a categoric failure – wherein I said, "Oh, you know, I read the magazines."   I would have done anything at all to knock myself unconscious even as the words were leaving my mouth. Even now as I listen to the recording I made of the conversation (not a joke) I can't possible imagine what I meant by that.