I need to stop starting these entries with explanations for why I haven’t been writing these entries. Such explanations shake with age and cloud the pages with dust. Or, to put it more plainly, bore the hell out of you and me equally. As the photographs below show, Doolies and I returned yesterday from our road trip. We drove Doolies’s car from Newport Beach to lovely Seattle. I should have taken notes and documented our happenings (and taken more pictures), but I didn’t. I haven’t been much of a writer lately. With preparing for Doolies’s arrival, work, and excuses (lots of the latter category), I’ve spent little of my time leaning over the keyboard to pound out words.

During my silent time, I managed to write a few paragraphs here and there. Nothing of note, regrettably. The most interesting (topic-wise, not word-wise) was a musing on reinstituting my 2,000-word days. It didn’t get posted after I managed to write only 400 words that day. Not an auspicious beginning to my program.

And so here I find myself, on Doolies’s second night in the Castle, trying to say something. The Doolies is busy working away on her newly decorated desk. The day has long since passed, and even in Seattle, where in late June the night is coy and hides away until the wee hours, darkness has fallen. It’s almost time for sleep, but I’ll try to squeeze out the remaining paste. Always start from the bottom and work your way up. That’s something you learn if you read life’s instruction manual.

Since I have nothing but complaints, I’ll continue in that vein. I have not started the next pong story yet. Chuck sent me a topic (well, it wasn’t so much a topic as a solitary thought about the narrator), and I have thought of some interesting approaches. I haven’t turned any of these ideas into words, though. I thought I was waiting for something, waiting for the germs of the story to take hold and spread throughout my system. It hasn’t happened yet. For me, it’s less about freewheeling ailments and more about pounding out words in moments of inspiration, and then stretching those words until they cover the naked skeleton of the story. I have only a few bones now, and none of them are connected. I’m afraid if I start stretching the skin, I’ll end up with rolls of fat that are impossible to shape. I’ll leave the analogy there instead of brutalizing it any further.

Even my consternations seem forced. I miss the days where I would spout words about my inadequacies. They’re there still—my inadequacies, that is—don’t you worry. I’m finding that at the end of the day, I don’t leave myself with enough energies to get through more than a semblance of writing time. This moment and these words feel better all of sudden. More words are coming out. I still can’t find the dark cavern but maybe it’ll pass. Trying is the first step, regardless of what Yoda claims.

As easily as I say it, the inspiration (or is it perspiration—at least my clichés are well and ready for me) passes. This is again hard, and I find myself reaching for distraction. I’m going to continue sitting here and staring at the page for at least another thirty minutes. I owe myself that much.

The page is as it was, white with parts of gray. I feel like I’m missing something. I spent the day without my Moleskine. I had two eureka moments, and I managed to catch only one of them on paper. Of course, eureka moments are nothing if not mundane when seen without the light of inspiration. When I reached for my notebook for the first one, I realized I didn’t have it, and I felt naked, as if I left my clothing on the nightstand when I meant to dress this morning. That didn’t happen, of course. I’m very meticulous about wearing clothes before going outside. Although, with the terrible heat wave Doolies and I have been under the last few days, you might forgive me for not wanting any sweat-collecting agent to fall between my skin and the suffocating air.

To pass the time while driving, Doolies and I spent much energy perfecting our road theories. In the hopes of throwing down words (and, yes, passing time), I’ll spend a few moments sharing them. As I drove toward each day’s goal, I tried to devise ways of passing the time, my attempt to wash away the intervening time between start and finish. This is not the best way to live in the moment. It’s not very Zen or NEQID, but driving for five to seven hours each day, I found it difficult to focus on improving myself while staring at the backside of cars.

The thing about long-distance driving is that you can figure out rather easily how much time you gain by speeding. During my trips to college and graduate school (three and a half and four and a half hours, respectively), I spent many hours calculating in my tiny head the risk and benefit of speeding. I’ll take a simple example (to waste some words and time in my thirty minute writing quest—and, yes, I opened a spreadsheet to double check my math). Say you’re traveling 400 miles. You have a couple of choices as to what speed you will drive. The lowest stress is the speed limit, let’s say 60 mph. To drive 400 miles at 60 mph, it will take you 6:40. If you drive that same 400 miles at 70 mph, it will take you 5:42, a saving of almost an hour. The longer the trip, the faster you drive, the more time you save. It’s really simple math.

Of course, it’s never that easy. The first thing you notice when you try to speed is that the other cars may not cooperate. You must maintain an effective (or average) speed over the course of the entire trip to gain the benefits of speeding. If the road is clear, this is not much of a problem. Of course, the roads are rarely clear. I can understand and accept when there’s lots of traffic. Roads are designed for a certain capacity, and once that capacity fills up, there’s no way to go fast. What provides the sport, however, is not when the roads are crowded but when the roads are relatively empty. It’s deep in the relative part of the empty roads that we hit upon our road theories.

The general rule on roads (and the law in some states) is that slower cars should stay to the right except to pass. In a perfect world, all cars would obey this simple rule, and the faster drivers, who are trying to take advantage of the law of higher speed, would zoom on by, slowing down only when there’s a slower car passing an even slower car in the left lane, which while painful, is acceptable, as long as the slower car moves to the right after passing the even slower car. The problem, however, is that there are left lane hogs. A left lane hog is a person who thinks they belong in the left lane, and clearly does not because they’re not passing cars in the right lane (or if they are, it’s indiscernible), and they’re holding up a line of cars behind them who only want to effectively use the law of higher speed. The easiest way to identify a left lane hog is to count how many times the left lane hog is passed on the right.

The trick to getting around left lane hogs is to approach driving as a game. The object is to effectively remove blockages from the road. (I have a disintegrator ray button in my car that I use for left lane hogs and line cutter-inners. After pushing the button, the offending car is disintegrated fifteen minutes later. This gives me plenty of time to separate myself from the victim so there is nothing to trace it back to me. This also has the advantage of me never knowing if the ray worked or not. I assume it always does (or will) work, which greatly improves me mood without pesky reality butting its annoying head into the mix. Of course, the ray doesn’t do much to clear blockages because of the time lag.)

The trick to clearing blockages is to identify the worst culprit, i.e., the left lane hog who is causing the backup, and maneuver your way past them. This is usually but not always the person leading the pack in the left lane. The best way to get around blockages is to find openings in the middle or right lanes and weave your way past the left lane hogs (or the cars driving behind the left lane hogs, who themselves may be left lane hogs, or, like you, patient drivers waiting for an opening). If you take it one car and one blockage at a time, the game becomes fun, with small feelings of vindication as you get through blockages.

There is another problem with the law of high speeds: cops. Depending on what state you’re driving through, there’s a good chance that there’s a state patrol car waiting behind bushes to chase you down and give you a speeding ticket. I spent a good part of my driving time while in college and graduate school worrying about receiving my first speeding ticket. It wasn’t until late in graduate school that I made a startling realization: it’s not that big of a deal. It still pays to be observant and to look out for hidden police cars, police cars approaching you from behind, or sudden brake lights, but in the end, the worst that will happen is you will receive a speeding ticket. The world will not end, you will not be thrown in prison (unless you’re driving ridiculously fast, which I never do—but I always get out of the way of people who do!). Once I figured that out, the stress surrounding my speeding decreased significantly.

There was more I wanted to write here, but I’m lagging. I managed to fight through the last thirty minutes of writing, providing me with a solid hour and about 1,740 words. Not bad for a first night back in the saddle.