We miss you…you make us think.

The Shrub apparently stays in five-star places with putting greens and spurting-nymph fountains and a speed-dial number for the in-house masseur. Not McCain2000, which favors Marriott, Courtyard by Marriott, Hampton Inn, Hilton, Signature Inn, Radisson, Holiday Inn, Embassy Suites, etc. Rolling Stone, who is in no way cut out to be a road journalist, invokes the soul-killing anonymity of chain hotels, the rooms’ terrible transient sameness: the ubiquitous floral design of the bedspreads, the multiple low-watt lamps, the pallid art-work bolted to the wall, the whisper of ventilation, the sad shag carpet, the smell of alien cleansers, the Kleenex dispensed from the wall, the automated wakeup call, the lightproof curtains, the windows that do not open-ever.

Catching up on my reading. There’s so much. After reading Tim Dickinson’s excellent but frightening article, “Make-Believe Maverick“, I pecked around a bit and found out that the late David Foster Wallace wrote an article about McCain in 2000….

It’s impossible to know what McCain’s face is doing during this story because the monitors are taking CNN’s feed, and Randy of CNN’s lens is staying hard and steady on Donna Duren, who appears so iconically prototypical and so thoroughly exudes the special quiet dignity of an average American who knows she’s average and just wants a decent, non-cynical life for herself and her family that she can say things like “family values” and “hero” without anybody rolling their eyes. But then last night, Mrs. D. says, as they were all watching non-violent TV in the family room, the phone suddenly rang upstairs, and Chris went up and got it, and Mrs. D. says a little while later he came back down into the family room crying and just terribly upset and told them the phone call had been a man who started talking to him about the 2000 campaign and then asked Chris if he knew that John McCain was a liar and a cheater and that anybody who’d vote for John McCain was either stupid or un-American or both. That caller had been a push-poller for Bush2000, Mrs. Duren says, knuckles on her mike-hand white and voice almost breaking, and she says she just wanted Senator McCain to know about it, about what happened to Chris, and wants to know whether anything can be done to keep people like this from calling innocent young kids and plunging them into disillusionment and confusion about whether they’re stupid for trying to have heroes they believe in.

Now you have to pay close attention to something that’s going to seem real obvious. There is a difference between a great leader and a great salesman. Because a salesman’s ultimate, overriding motivation is his own self-interest. If you buy what he’s selling, the salesman profits. So even though the salesman may have a very powerful, charismatic, admirable personality, and might even persuade you that buying really is in your interest (and it really might be) — still, a little part of you always knows that what the salesman’s ultimately after is something for himself. And this awareness is painful … although admittedly it’s a tiny pain, more like a twinge, and often unconscious. But if you’re subjected to enough great salesmen and salespitches and marketing concepts for long enough — like from your earliest Saturday-morning cartoons, let’s say — it is only a matter of time before you start believing deep down that everything is sales and marketing, and that whenever somebody seems like they care about you or about some noble idea or cause, that person is a salesman and really ultimately doesn’t give a shit about you or some cause but really just wants something for himself.

Salesman or leader or neither or both: the final paradox — the really tiny central one, way down deep inside all the other boxes and enigmas that layer McCain — is that whether he’s For Real depends now less on what’s in his heart than on what might be in yours. Try to stay awake.

The water seems to have cleared now. And after tonight’s debate, despite repeated efforts, I don’t think McCain hit the talking points hard enough to ring the bell and win the big prize.

Well, that’s not it, it’s just that he was playing the wrong game. He hit the talking points again and again, but the real game was happening elsewhere. I heard what Barack was saying.

It’s easy nowadays or so says the hitchhiking guru, Anton Krotov, but you don’t know it until the end. And to the armchair traveler, Siberia seems a wild and windswept place. Not uninhabited but wild wild west for sure, and in that — not even counting geography, culture, history, languages — completely foreign.

My friends, Mac and Aaron, hatched up a plan to follow the merchandise from Vladivostock to Moscow traveling by green power alone — that’s right folks, the almighty dollar. This tale and these photos are the result. As Ken Kesey once said, “the intrepid traveler never fails”.

Well, I spent a good bit of today catching up on reading my friend, Dave’s, blog. After some deliberation earlier this winter, he decided to accept another stint as a videographer/filmmaker in Sudan. He was there briefly last summer, but this commitment is big for a young man with a huge community here in Seattle and a future poised like a weather vane, perched like a bird ready to fly, but in what direction?

So today I read back through his February posts. Perhaps after our soccer game last night, I am missing him. At any rate, I’ve been meaning to read his blog for a long while now, but what can I say? Life with a 14 month old is busy.

This though provides a wonderful contrast for Dave’s stories. It was like reading about a far away planet. So focused is my world around my home and providing for my family. I often feel like I just yoyo back and forth from work to home and have to prod myself to keep eyes open to actually see the world and take in any spontaneous, unusual beauty. There’s is the amazing spontaneity and constant flux of my home in which Jill and I watch Dylan grow, steering a bit here and there, but it’s easy to forget about the rest of the world entirely.

And I don’t want to forget. There is so much there. So suddenly Sudan! Trying to imagine the villagers reaction to Dave’s health education films as he sketches out the plot lines. Trying to conceive of their mindset. And imagining Dave there with the teacher writing songs about him and hanging out under the tamarind tree with his translator and the witch doctor.

The reading is incredibly exciting. Yet the pace there must be slow. Slower certainly than here. I mean 6 hours where the primary activity is waiting (in one entry)! Amazing what routine does to one’s sense of time. In the routine, days pass, weeks pass and it can seem like nought has happened. If nothing stand apart from the routine, it can be like that and you have to think hard sometimes to remember what happened when. But Dave is out there, way out there, seemingly away from the routine and every moment seems so rich and storied. God, it’s been a long time since I’ve traveled! But good to live vicariously and be reminded that the world is large and perhaps beyond imagination. This is what I bring home tonight.

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Since I didn’t know where Dave was in the Sudan, I did a bit of research and created a couple maps to locate him (below). In the entries I read today, he spent some time in the Ayod compound and went up to Gar which I hope I have located correctly and there is mention of the “the guy from Old Fangak” who can sit on his plastic chair in the shade forever.

Just checked this out thanks to Load. I see it raised a lot of commentary, a lot of profanity, but I enjoyed it. Read a blog by an old high school classmate of mine recently who went to see him speak hoping for magic and came away nonplussed. I haven’t gone to see him personally [Jill went down to the Key Arena to see him 2/8/08, but couldn't get in and had to watch him on the big screen in the Center House.], but I find this inspiring and the words moving.

Went to see William T. Vollman read at the UW Bookstore last night. It was free and Jilly was kind enough to clear her night for me. I was hoping Steve or Marty, fellow fans, would come with, but fatherly duties kept them both away.

I nipped in just in time for the reading which was held upstairs near the fiction section. They had arranged the chairs into rows creating an intimate space perfect for the 40 or so people there. Even got a seat (one benefit of going solo)!

After a flattering introduction by a young woman employee of the bookstore, Vollman lumbered his way to the stage. Perhaps he has a limp, perhaps this is just his walk. An unassuming fellow in a green and black checked flanel shirt, he took the podium eyebrows flinching and eyes blinking behind large, nearly rectangular glasses. His rather large and pear shaped dome was shorn in a spiky grown-out crew cut.

He read two passages from his latest work, Riding Toward Everywhere, a song of the open rails–about his adventures alone and with friends “hopping”, hoboing, riding the freights through the “unexplored west”. They were beautiful, lyrical passages in his particular style with his personal revelations and trials. Freights, because they are so heavy, will go a mile out of there way to avoid even the slightest incline and as a result curve and wind there way across the land often far far away from any roads. His description of travelling across Wyoming in one of the passages was particularly beautiful and it was really wonderful to be brought there from the rainy U-district.

After reading, he took questions. I found this moving. He represents a lot to me I guess even though I don’t know too much about him and I have only read The Rifles by him. I know he is a very rare breed of writer and person. Someone who puts himself in dangerous or undesirable places to examine the life there and the humanity. He said it himself in answer to one question about his Europe Central, that he seeks to put himself in the mind and life of people who he cannot understand in order to understand them better. Here is an adventurer of the highest sort.

And I thought that he might be destroyed or burnt out by his wanderings and deep searchings, but here was an erudite man proud of his work, a generous free-spirit and free-thinking man with very definite goals. A very bright man who sees the world very clearly I think. A man of compassion and spirit and pride. A humble, hard-working, driven man. Inspiring.

To another question, he answered that there is a danger in this country that ‘real thought’ will become diminished or imperiled. The question was a complex one about how artists can affect change on the system or alter the status quo and Vollman fielded it in light of our present political climate where you have a political administration (and perhaps system) which threatens ‘real thought’ insofar as people might be afraid for some reason to speak out, to speak their minds.

The imperative is clear though that we must speak and continue to speak our minds.