Gainfully Employed

Day four of a new job is better than day three, which is better than day two, which is far better than day one.  Day one is like the first day of middle school.  Every time.

Now that I have achieved day four, however, I know some things.  I know where the coffee is, the name of two thirds of my colleagues, and which printer to select.  I know that it takes between sixteen and twenty minutes to walk to work, depending on the route, and that includes getting up the elevator to my desk.  I know that teleconferencing is exponentially more awkward if you’ve never met anyone involved, and that from my gorgeous view on the seventeenth floor, Dorton Arena looks exactly like a Pringle, nestled carefully in the Raleigh landscape.

I do not know, however, where the binders are, exactly how “casual” “casual Friday” will be, or how to pedestrian commute with grace.  Pedestrian commuting requires a level of consideration for your footwear above and beyond the normal call of wardrobing.  One must make it into the office in professional attire, and one must commute in walkable shoes without looking like, say, Dianne Keaton in an eighties movie about working women in business suits with ruffled collars and Reeboks, power-walking down Fayetteville Street. My new work bag, on day four, looked like this:

Is that too much stuff? If you answered yes, you are clearly male.  Or not a pedestrian commuter.  Or not in Week One of a new job.  Because, of course, you have the walk-to-work shoes, and your I-got-a-new-job-where-I-can-dress-like-a-girl shoes, and your I-didn’t-realize-how-badly-these-wedges-would-hurt shoes, just in case. (I didn’t need the back-ups.  Those canary yellow ones are surprisingly comfortable.  Also, I am a writer, and therefore can sit on my duff all day in pretty shoes.)  You also need a jacket, in case it’s overly air-conditioned on a 90 degree May day, and a water bottle, and fizzy water for when it’s 3 pm and you can’t think straight any more.  And you need your third cup of coffee, and 100+ sunblock, because You Just Never Know. (As my mother told me as a teenager, “There are two things in this world you don’t have to be, and that’s sunburned, or pregnant.” So, okay.  100+ sunblock, at all times.  Thanks Mom.

I had a complete meltdown after I got home the first day.  That wasn’t really job related, though.  I just missed Dawg all day, and when I got home I accidentally bonked him in the face with the metal end of the leash, which triggered a massive wave of guilt and an emotional cascade about change, commitment, becoming a writer rather than an architect, moving on.  You know.  All good things. Even good change will unravel you, though, if you get up at 6 a.m. after ten weeks off, and entrust a stranger to walk your Dawg in the middle of the day for the first time while trying to make a good first impression on your new grown-up office.

At my fantastic new job, we work long days Monday-Thursday in the offices with beautiful views, and leave at noon and wear jeans on Fridays.  Tomorrow’s my first half-day casual day.

I think I’m going to like it here.

Guitarheels

Tonight all of these fine folks kicked up a huge ruckus at the Haw River Ballroom.

I love it when that happens.  Things like this are why I live in North Carolina.

Word to the wise, if you see Phil Cook’s name on something, go.  Go every time.  Go twice.  

The Disco Ball Is my Spirit Animal

I threw a party last night.

I planned it way before I had a job offer, because “throw a cocktail party” was on my 2013 list, and I needed a project.  Also, I know myself well enough to know that I am excellent, just really gifted, at starting things and then not finishing them.  It’s not my best trait.  So, to hold myself accountable for putting my house back together after I rearranged every single room last month, I put a house party on the calendar.  And then invited people.  It’s a pretty good motivator.

Then I got a job offer and took a twelve-day road trip, so things got a bit compressed, there at the end.  It was all fine, and I felt like celebrating a whole new chapter starting Monday.  I did, indeed, get my house put back together, and all of the pictures re-hung, and even managed to frame my new posters from Hatch.  I tidied the yard, kind of.  I looked up cocktail recipes.  I put on a dress and a sparkly piece of my grandmother’s jewelry, and shiny red heels. My people dressed up.

It went really well, because my friends are, to a person, really great people, and you want as many of them in a room together as possible, and I love them.  I can’t say I completed a conversation, what with the hostessing and the trying to keep the Dawg from jumping on people’s biscuits and him pulling them around by their dress hems (sorry, Willow, Fletch feels bad about the ungentlemanly behavior at his first grown-up party) and forgetting to DJ every time a record ran out.  Fletch got really quiet, just angelic, for a thirty-minute stretch and everyone complimented his good behavior.  I realized as soon as he stood up again that he had been orchestrating a Shawshank Redemption, and had chewed through his leash down to one tiny thread, because he was not getting any biscuits.  Punk. Now we have to go leash shopping, and he is going to have to take that out of his allowance.

I had fun anyway.  Party bonus, I have enough beer and party food left over for another party.  I always over-prepare, but that way you get to spend the next few weeks saying “Beer on my porch? I have plenty!”  For the record, the cocktails were a success, too.  There were Sazeracs, which are mostly just straight bourbon.  I’m sure it’s good but I am just plain dumb after half a liquor drink, ask anyone, so I stuck to the beer cocktail.  Snakebite and Black might be my new favorite.  We went through three pitchers of that.

And then a bunch of us went out to the show at Deep South with the Ryan Adams covers, and all kinds of great Raleigh folk were playing.  My favorite, hands-down, was Wylie Hunter, and the two songs he did under the disco ball were powerhouse songs.  That man can play.

So, disco balls. All sparkle and glitz and music, so glam.  I love the little twinkles of light they throw around a room. My crowd are not divas about camping, but we always take the disco ball to Merlefest.  I think I’ve told this story before, but nomadic cultures carry a hearth stick with them wherever they travel.  They carefully place the hearth stick at each new home, and the tribe orients its temporary architecture accordingly, and that’s how everyone knows their place in the world.  So it sits in front of the Merlefest tent, and then it was in my car with me all the way down Route 66 to Amarillo and back, and yesterday I swept the porch and put out a big ice bucket for ginger ales and hung party lights, and I put my disco ball back up on the front porch where it belongs.

Glad to be home.

Following Signs

3600 miles, one music festival, five nights of camping, eleven days in the car, sixteen cups of gas station coffee.  And now we’re home.  Route 66, really, is the quintessential road trip.  I only did the middle piece of it, but it was enough.  I loved it.

Tonight I started doing laundry, since Dawg and I are still on Texas time and are wound up from all the driving.  I realized there is no setting on my washing machine for “four days of camping at Merlefest followed by eight days on Route 66.”  I think I’ll just wash everything twice three times.  I’ve figured a few things out along the way:

1. Drinking gas station coffee is far preferable to drinking no coffee.
2. Eating nothing is far preferable to eating gas station food.
3. The same applies to the “free continental breakfast” at a motel.  I will likely never be hungry enough to eat that cellophane-wrapped muffin.
4. For a true “road trip” experience, look up the estimated driving time to your night’s destination on your smart phone.  If you’re going to have any fun along the way, the actual driving time is about 1 1/2 times what your phone says.  Plan accordingly.  Stop a lot.  (I budgeted for six hours’ actual driving time each day, knowing that it would take us probably nine including stops and gas station boot purchases and tennis ball throwing at roadside parks.  That was about right.)
5. Photo opportunities at every roadside attraction may annoy all of your Facebook friends, but I still think they’re totally worth it.
6. When you have reached the point in your driving day when things are no longer fun, or no longer safe, it is time to pull over at the first roadside motel you see, share an apple with your dawg, and throw tennis balls on the lawn and go to bed early.  Watch some trash tv.
7. Should you choose to ignore this rule and push an hour or two too far, you are guaranteed to find yourself stopping at four different exits to find a place to stay.  One exit will have a sign but no actual motel; one motel will not take dawgs; one will have absolutely nobody at the desk; one motel will usually take dawgs but this one in particular is not configured that way.  This will also guarantee that your contact lenses will fail and it will start to rain just as you are entering a badly-lit nighttime construction zone on a major highway, and you will find yourself regretting every choice which has led you to this point.  When you finally find a motel which ends up being twice your budget, and the clerk gives you a $40 discount, you will want to give him a big fat kiss although it is age-inappropriate, because you can finally get your yowling dog off the road.  Or something like that.
8.  I am happy to pay the $10 “pet tax” at any roadside motel.  Proprietors, please note that if I have paid the $10 “pet tax,” I am going to allow Dawg to shred a roll of your toilet paper.  It will make him extremely happy, you’ll come out $9.50 ahead, and it will give me ten minutes of peace.  I will clean up the mess.  But I will not bother to hide the evidence.

I loved every bit of my road trip.  I am aware that there are more relaxing ways to travel, and more ecologically sensitive, and more efficient.  But that’s not the point, for those of us who are lovers of car songs, and frivolous destinations, and the open road.

The last time on Route 66 when I got five miles down a dead-end road, about twenty miles outside of Amarillo, there was a whole lot of cursing from the front left quadrant of the car.  I didn’t mind being on a piece of Route 66 which dead-ended, again, but I sure as hell minded being five miles down a dead-end road before there were any signs indicating such.  And then I laughed, because that is so Route 66.  Efficiency is not the point.  It’s about the ride.  It’s about the scenery.  It’s about the challenge.

Metaphor metaphor metaphor, I have wandered way more than 5 miles down the wrong path, a time or two, in recent history.  That’s fine.  I wouldn’t take any of it back.  I learned a few things along the way, and I have some stories to tell.  There are also plenty of roads I didn’t choose to go down, and don’t we always wonder what might have been?  At least on Route 66 you’ll hit a sign that says “DEAD END,” eventually, or the road will just fall apart in front of you.  It’s pretty clear when you have to turn around.  That’s not always true with other dead ends.  When do you cut your losses and backtrack?  When do you stubbornly push forward, because look how much you’ve already invested?  Everyone’s answer to that one is different.

When I traveled around the world, more than a couple of people were snarky about it.  Downright judgemental.  ”That’s so American,” they told me, and not in a nice way.  They implied that the only correct form of travel is to go to a place, and stay as long as you can, and immerse yourself in it.  That’s fine, if that’s what you need, but after all of those years sitting still at my desk in graduate school, I had no desire to go sit still some more.  I wanted to move as fast as I could, get as far as I was able, and see as many things as I could afford to take in in the time that I had.

Sometimes it’s about stillness, and sometimes it’s about motion.  Sometimes it’s about just seeing whether you can find the path.

Good heavens, I love a road trip.  And thirty-six hundred miles and sixteen gas station coffees later, I have gotten some of that motion out of my system, for the time being.  I’m ready to sit still for a bit.

I can’t wait to start my new job next Monday.

Road Songs

I am not especially organized when it comes to car music.  This is problematic on a long trip.  See, I don’t have the technology to use my iTunes in the car, or stream satellite radio, or anything fancy like that.  In the car, it’s cd’s or radio or me singing to Dawg, or nothing.  I have a red box full of cd’s, and they get scuffed and spilled under the seats, and I have to root through fifty or so to find the ones I want.  I’ll upgrade in my next car.  That next car is a long way away, so for now, I’m not proud.  It’s the red box.

It’s a double challenge when traveling, because you have to match your music to the trip.  It’s the same with books.  When I traveled around the world, I had a book for each country.  It was a ridiculous plan, with all the precious baggage weight allotment they took up.  It was worth the hassle, though, to read Siddartha again visiting the Buddhist temple Borabudur in Indonesia, and West With the Night in Africa, and so forth. (I had a lot, I mean a lot, of sitting-and-waiting-in-airports time.  Those books saved me, along with crossword puzzles.)  I’m not reading much on a road trip, so it’s music keeping me company.

At Merlefest a couple of years back, every single set had a gypsy song in it somewhere, just as I was trying to decide what to call this blog.  All the gypsy songs sealed the deal.  I can’t remember an overarching theme last year, but this year it was definitely train songs.  Every set I heard had at least one train song, as if they’d all agreed on it ahead of time, but I know they didn’t.  I’ve wanted to hop a train out of town before after Eilen Jewell sang Dusty Boxcar Wall at Berkely, but the train song she did at Merlefest this year was twice that potent.  I was on the lawn with the girls, first set of the day at the Americana stage, and I was torn up from the beginning of that one.  The girls all looked at me.  ”Pull it together, KB. It’s not even 10 am,” they said.  But they know that train songs always get me.

Not like car songs, though.  A car song makes me weak in the knees.  Thunder Road.  Me and Bobby McGee.  Won’t Be Home.  One zillion others.

Leaving Merlefest Sunday and heading west in the rain, I wanted Merlefest music back, so I listened to Peter Rowan, and then both of my new Honeycutters cds.  I was trying to find the song that was playing when Julia and I walked up to the Creekside Stage to get ourselves situated.  ”Do you HEAR what they’re singing?”  I asked her.  ”Totally,” she said.  And then we spread out our blankets and I was all, “ARE YOU LISTENING TO THIS?” and she confirmed that she was, and then they kept going and I continued to badger Julia with “OMG. Do you hear that?  Are they seriously writing about me? Did we just have a conversation about that? Did I just say that to you yesterday?” and she patiently said, “Yes to all of that.”  And then they sang a song about a gypsy and I was all “!!!” and Julia agreed.  So I had to listen to their cds more than once.

Coming into Nashville felt very Johnny Cash, so I had to listen to his greatest hits.  And I woke up in Nashville with Willie on my mind, and I played the Phosphorescent cd of Willie Nelson covers that Veronica gave me.  Which I just plain love.  I played it more than once.

Cutting across Tennessee into Kentucky it was Yarn, which is great outlaw music, and that was about the time I got pulled.  For the first time this trip.

Missouri felt like Jim Croce, for some reason.  His character studies are my favorite, but there’s not one song of his I don’t love.  I kind of got stuck on “Rapid Roy” after my speeding incident, with “He do a hundred thirty mile an hour, smilin’ at the camera with a toothpick in his mouth” being my favorite.  That man? Knows how to tell a story.

I think it was in Oklahoma that I had to stop for more music.  I played Chicago 17 just for pure nostalgia, and some of it is awful, and some of it absolutely holds up.  And then I switched to Merle Haggard, for the sheer joy of outlaw country, and that is when I got pulled for the second time.

Waylon and Willie were the only people I wanted coming from Oklahoma into Amarillo.  Those boys understand Texas. And I love them.

We hit Cadillac Ranch, and Dawg and I celebrated and had a photo shoot (Dawg was a little freaked out and barked a lot at the front car, I think it’s haunted,) and we turned around and headed east.  All I wanted, after the grittiest part of Route 66 in Amarillo, was Quiet Quiet Quiet.

And then suddenly I realized that I was driving through east Texas while failing to listen to the Old 97′s.  And so I blasted Alive and Wired, and Dawg and I sung along at the top of our lungs.  When we got to One Old Brown Shoe, we were actually on 35 South.  Pure honky tonk joy.

It was two day’s drive home from Amarillo.  The stop-at-every-whim part of the trip was behind us, and Dawg and I were just trying to cram as many miles in as we could each day while staying on the right side of the law.  There was a lot of driving and thinking, and a little less soundtrack. In my head I started about a hundred honky-tonk songs.  They were all entitled things like “East Out of Nashville,” and “Amarillo By Morning,” and “One Hundred Miles to Texarkana” and all sorts of other beautiful place-sounding songs.  I have maybe one line of each.  (I am not actually a songwriter.)

Until our last driving day, and I had to listen to my favorite song from the Honeycutters about a thousand more times.  This verse, ” Well I bought myself a brand new pair of blue jeans, ‘cause I’m tired of being righteous, playing every game for keeps. But most of all I’m tired of riding shot gun in my dreams,” may or may not have been written entirely with me in mind, but wow.  Another perfect car song.

And now? Home sweet home.  And that’s a different sound track altogether.

Outlaw

Apparently I am on a multi-state crime spree. I got pulled again today.  This time, it was about the hundredth time I lost the Route 66 thread this afternoon. I had to zig onto I-40, then zag back off at the next town to try to find it again.  I followed instructions heading into Erick, OK, and went from 55 mph, to 45 mph, to 35 mph, according to the clearly posted signs.

One block later, there were blue lights in my rear-view mirror.

I handed the nice officer my license and registration.  ”Was I speeding?” I asked him.  ”43 in a 35,” he said.  He had the grace to look a little bit embarrassed.  ”So, um, a little bit.  Speeding just a little bit.”  And he took all of my paperwork and left me with the Dawg to wait.

We had only made sure to turn off at Erick because I wanted to see the Roger Miller Museum.  I mean, he wrote “King of the Road,” after all, and that’s kind of Route 66′s unofficial theme song.  I could see the Roger Miller Museum from the spot where I pulled over, with the blue lights still flashing in my rear-view mirror.  I do not believe in crying my way out of tickets.  I believe in taking it on the chin when I get caught, because I probably deserved it, and I do not use the Girl Card for that.  Not going to lie, though, when the nice officer walked off with my paperwork, I got a little emotional behind my giant sunglasses.  Because one speeding ticket equals an expensive inconvenience, but two speeding tickets in five days equals making phone calls to out-of-state attorneys.  In two different states.  For eight miles an hour over the limit, transitioning from a 45 to a 35, that just feels personal.

Other than that, it had been a nice day, but it felt all day like my wheels were spinning and we weren’t getting anywhere.  We were an hour outside of Oklahoma City when we woke up, and we had to visit the fabulous giant boot store my uncle recommended as our first priority.  Tragically, there were no boots there that were exactly what I needed.  No boots, and no fringe dresses.  (I actually have an unreasonable amount of fringe in my life already, for someone who is not a country western star.)  I was also tired of all of my road music, and I needed something that wasn’t gas station food.  I stopped for a handful of $5 CDs and apples at Wal-Mart.  We stopped at a couple of playgrounds to get Dawg and me both some exercise, after all that driving.  I kept seeing signs for Amarillo.  They always said “Amarillo: still one million miles away.”

I woke up this morning thinking about Lonesome Dove, because I had it in my head that Clara’s farm was in Ogallala, Oklahoma. I kept hearing Angelica Houston say, “So what if you ain’t never lived in Oklahoma before, and you ain’t never raised horses before.  You ain’t nailed down, and you ain’t stupid.”  An argument, in fact, I have used many times. I passed a place that looked exactly like her horse farm, and saw miles and miles of fields like this one:

And it was a beautiful drive.  Beautiful, but challenging.  The good people of Oklahoma are not quite as concerned about signage as are the good people of Missouri. I lost the Route about every half an hour.  I’d drive for really long stretches, not even sure I what road I was on, and then see a gas station with a cheerful “Route 66!” sign and figure I was still heading in the right direction.  At several points, I had to pull back onto I-40 and find the Route again an exit or two down the road.  I pulled off to give Dawg a break around Weatherford, OK, and bought us water at a gas station.  The gas station had a little booth off in the corner with cowboy boots.  I saw  a pair I liked, asked if they had them in my size, and the clerk said, “Sure, hon, go on to the back and see what we have.”  So I did, and there was a whole boot store back there.

Oklahoma magic.  I bought a pair of gas station boots.  I instantly felt better about a few hours of being on and off the road and getting absolutely nowhere.

I looked up Ogallala on my phone. Damnation. Turns out it’s in Nebraska. We could not go re-enact any scenes from Lonesome Dove.  Dawg and I kept driving.  I kept seeing signs for Amarillo.  It kept being an eternity away.  I thought we’d hit Cadillac Ranch, then find a place to stay for the night.  While I was figuring out a plan and listening to my $5 Merle Haggard CD, we lost the Route again.  Cursing.  I went from Lonesome Dove to True Grit.  ”Trail’s gone cold.  Ah bow out,” I told Dawg in my best Jeff Bridges accent. I was feeling road-weary.

The song “Highway Is My Home,” the one about the fugitive, was playing. And then we turned off for the Roger Miller Museum, and I got pulled, and cried very discreetly behind my sunglasses.  The nice officer confirmed that I was not truly an outlaw on his radio, and handed me all of my papers back, and said, “Everything’s fine.  I know you’re just passing through town.  I’m just going to ask you to slow down a little.”  I thanked him kindly and told him that was great news, since I’d just gotten a ticket on Monday.  Just as I realized I probably shouldn’t have told him that if he didn’t already know, he actually apologized.  He told me to have a nice day.

We took a picture at the Roger Miller Museum.  I figure Roger would have gotten a kick out of the blue-lights-flashing scene across the street, with the strangers passing through town tryin’ to make Texas by sunset and the Merle Haggard outlaw song playing.

We did not make Amarillo tonight.  I was feeling fragile after The Incident, and when we stopped again a few miles later to take a picture at the Texas state line, Dawg flopped down by the side of the road and refused to move.  I didn’t blame him.  I had to bribe him back into the car with peanut butter.  We were driving into the sun when we saw another one-million-miles-to-Amarillo sign, we hit a sleepy little Texas town with the Cactus Inn Motel, right next to the Red River Steakhouse.  Dawg and I think we could get used to this.

Amarillo in the morning.

The Mother Road

Today Dawg and I woke up east of Joplin, Missouri, bound for Oklahoma by way of Kansas.  It’s day 2 on Route 66, and I’ve figured some things out.  I’d done some preliminary research before I came, but just enough to be dangerous.  I knew that you couldn’t just find Route 66 and drive it; it doesn’t exist any more, not like that.  I kept hearing about “turn-by-turn” maps, and places where the road fell apart, and how you needed to plan ahead.  I didn’t really plan ahead.

Route 66 is actually pretty easy to follow.  I don’t have time to do the whole thing, but you can pretty much pick your starting point and a direction, and go from there.  I started in St. Louis, since that’s the closest place I could reach, and I’m driving to Amarillo, or thereabouts.  I found Route 66 with no trouble, and it’s pretty well signposted.  It’s not nearly as high maintenance I as I thought.  There’s a lot of kitsch.  That’s part of what you sign up for.

 

Route 66 has been replaced, moved, and rerouted a whole bunch of times, and then it got overtaken by the interstate highway system.  Most of it is still in use, one way or the other, but it hasn’t functioned as a cross-country route for decades. In Missouri, long stretches of it have been turned into frontage roads along I-44.  It’s kind of disorienting to drive the frontage road on the south next to a major highway.  It feels like you’re trying to drive in the left lane.  Other long stretches jog around and through small towns.  Other long stretches are countryside.

If Route 66 is easy to follow, I’m here to tell you that it’s also easy to lose. Sometimes you’re cruising along and you see this:

and then you have to backtrack and figure out where you missed a sign.  Coming through the backwoods of Oklahoma today, I would have sworn I hadn’t missed a turn, and suddenly I was on fifteen miles of this:

and I figured I was about to drive off the face of the earth.  When I finally hit real road again, we found this:

and I realized we’d been on a tiny piece of the original road, long since left to time forgot.

Speaking of forgotten, there are some towns along the road that need saving.  There are miles and miles of what we’d call “placeless space” in architecture school: strip malls, the same ten chain restaurants, the same big box stores that could be anywhere, USA.  There are some places with real character in there, too: “God’s Storehouse” self-storage (what would be in there, exactly? The locusts? The Ark of the Covenant? Do we really want to know?) and “Last Ride Motorcycle Hearses” for those who want to go out the way they lived (is it “Live Hard Die Free?) and all kinds of other fabulous places.  And then there are the crumbling towns, the ones where all the jobs evaporated and the people left with them.  Galena, Kansas is the one I want somebody to save.  Imagine what you could do with a place like this one:

And there are pieces of the post-war boom, still there as placeholders for the next big thing,

 

and little downtowns which are fighting to come back, with beautiful old storefronts and details which, back in architecture school, we’d refer to as “finely textured.

All of that, plus the endless miles of rich farmland, dotted with barns and homesteads.

Oh, ‘Merica.

Dawg and I pushed it too far by about an hour, yesterday, and were a little travel-weary.  It started raining around noon today, and the skies are quite literally threatening snow after yesterday’s 87 degrees. Today I was pushing, pushing, pushing for Oklahoma City.  And then a little roadside motel, a string of cottages with benches and a little lawn overlooking the highway, sprang up on our right.  We stopped early.  We threw the tennis ball.  We repacked everything that had become a jumble.  We rested.

Tomorrow: Oklahoma City, a dangerous boot purchase, and Texas.  Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise.