kavana

Since I got back from my grand bicycle/hitchhiking tour of half the world in November, I've been spending most of my daylight at a little coffee shop in my town with a fireplace and wood everything. I get up in the morning (with luck), get something to eat (maybe), and hop on the bicycle for a quick ride through the neighborhood, past the cemetery, and across the bridge, parking the bicycle against the limestone brick wall.

I had been planning this book for months before I even made it back to the states. The idea had come to me while on the road in Mexico and as my own attitude toward the trip and my goals for the travelling and the destination all changed, so did the direction of the book change. By the time I got to Panama City, which LeCarre calls "Casablanca without the heroes," I was filled with anguish and despair. The whole point of the trip was to reach Argentina and go to school there, but in Panama City, after a chat with the consul at the embassy, the dream completely fell through. So I wandered the streets of the city and hated everything for a while until I just had to get out, and I flew to Hungary.

Hungary was cold and harsh and they spoke a language so ridiculous that I couldn't even begin to grasp it, and I get by quite well with languages. All of Europe was out there to explore, but I had no particular ambition any more, and no prospects for anything at all. In short, I was travelling without direction in all four dimensions.

I breezed across Europe, revelling in the travelling but not the arriving. As soon as I would reach a city, I would try to get out as fast as I could. I saw Lyon, Brussels, Munich, Budapest, Zagreb, Prague, Torino, Le Havre, and god knows how many other cities this way. Not particularly because I wanted to see the sights, but rather because my ride let me off on one side of the city, and I needed to get to the other to hitch onto somewhere new.

In a month, the purchasing power parity brought me down, and ended up in Croatia and Serbia with a friend from college who was living in the Balkans at the time. I conserved money, and floated around Zagreb's thousand cafes, writing and planning.

The book was going to be a reflection on the prospects of being young in today's world, or today's America mostly. How even college graduates end up working in retail without the chance of any kind of real advancement, in droves. How we're no longer really allowed to have our dreams, much as our kindergarten teachers drive it into us that we can do absolutely whatever we want with out lives. I do believe that with extraordinary perseverence, most folks can. But it's the fact that it's -extra-ordinary perseverance that sets it apart. The majority of young people, who create the average ordinary, are left working jobs that are not satisfying, and are left looking at a future which doesn't look like it will be much more satisfying.

I had planned to use my own travels and conversations to help tell this story, but I never came to a useful way to conclude it. It seemed wrong for the characters to have a happy ending, because in order for that to occur, the way our country and culture is run would have to observe a profound shift, not easy to make happen in 300 pages. So it stagnated. I was lost. My new college prospects shattered, and nothing to fill their place that seemed to provide real satisfaction.

Back home, I went to the cafe, drank double shots of espresso, and hammered away on the keys of my laptop. I put out three chapters, then started over, and started over, and started over. I had a new idea, purely fiction- three kids who push a car across the country. After starting to write it, I realized that even though I had been to all the states in question, I still didn't have the basis of knowledge to write it well without going travelling again, which I couldn't afford at the moment.

So back to the first story.

All this time though, I was working evenings at a Mexican restaurant, and as winter gave way to spring, and the fog and rain began, I would sometimes sit at the bar, waiting for someone to come in, and watch the Chinese restaurant across the street. Two parallel worlds, two immigrant-run restaurants from opposite sides of the planet, each dealing with immigrant issues -language, immigration, customs, etc- in opposite ways.

I was an exchange student once, in south america, and I had a great friend who was also an exchange student, but to China. She had worked at the chinese restaurant, and without even pausing to consider that, here I was, working in the other.
The dark and melancholy fog cemented this idea of parallels and that same theme of prospectless youth, and I started writing again, pulling themes and imagery out of the other story and weaving them into this one.

And the pages are just coming and coming.