Driving Across This Country

On Saturday night at 9pm I left Pittsburgh for Washington DC. A couple of hours later I was driving through the Appalachian mountains underneath a gigantic, almost-full yellow moon. Rupert was asleep in the backseat, I was listening to the new Shins album and I felt completely free. I started thinking about how great it would be to drive across the country with Beth. I've done it twice: once alone from LA to DC in four days when I was 16 and then with my best friend Ben from DC to LA when we were 18. I began to try and figure out how Beth and I could make this happen. Then I started thinking about the obstacles that would arise: money, hotels that don't take dogs, etc., etc., etc. I began to get sad and depressed, feeling old and like all my adventures were over. Then I had a miraculous thought. But, I'm doing it, I realized. I'm doing it right now. I don't have to be sad at the prospect of not being able to drive across the country in the future because I'm actually driving across the country right now! As I thought about that near miss more and more I saw that so much of my life is like that: I imagine how great things will be in the future, completely blind to how great things are in the present.

That's Jack Kerouac on the right and his best friend Neal Cassady on the left. Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty in the book. (This one goes out to you, BK.)

Happy Fathers Day, Dad

Dad, Aunt Kym and Uncle Steve

I found this picture of my Aunt Kym's wedding day in the garage. They look pretty cool. The look on my dad's face reminds me he was once like me.

*Addendum: My brother Josh commented on this post and said, "He still is like you."

C.S. Lewis Would Have Hated CNN

Beth always says she's in good company with C.S. Lewis whenever I give her a hard time about not staying up on current events. After reading this quote, I must admit he (and she) has a point. This one's for you, Shorty:

I can hardly regret having escaped the appalling waste of time and spirit which would have been involved in reading the war news or taking more than an artificial and formal part in conversations about the war. To read without military knowledge or good maps accounts of fighting which were distorted before they reached the Divisional general and further distorted before they left him and then "written up" out of all recognition by journalists, to strive to master what will be contradicted the next day, to fear and hope intensely on shaky evidence, is surely an ill use of the mind. Even in peacetime I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read the newspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in New Zealand.

The Aughts

Felix Post, an English emeritus psychiatrist who performed a close study of the biographies of the most eminent men of our century in the arts, science and in politics noting, as have other authors, a higher prevalence of mood disorders in his sample, supposed that the psychological discomfort itself which accompanies to a mental disorder is the main drive for creative effort: many writers, in fact, asserted that through the act of writing they hold off depressive anguish. For him this relationship can be biuniform, meaning that even creative effort, like other types of stress, could favour a psychological breakdown: the intense intellectual work of the creative process is associated with higher neural activity in the brain, and this hyperactivity can determine the onset of mental problems in those already vulnerable. Even in the past, during the Renaissance, there were philosophers who supposed that intellectual work could lead to melancholy, and this was the explanation they offered for the proneness to depression in poets and other men of letters.*

*From The Gift of Saturn: Creativity and Psychopathology