50 x 50
I saw this country once.
All fifty states.
And by the time I turned 50, which should be some sort of new social media challenge, or something.
On a slow, years-long crawl across the North American continent, I eventually visited them all.
It started with family vacations to neighboring states and progressed to a crossing of the Rockies in my 15th year.
When the veil of illusion remained intact.
I did not choose to go on that trip anymore than I chose to be born on August 23, 1975, but go on that trip I did.
I wanted at that time to be a touring musician, yes, in a rock and roll band.
A band that bothered itself primarily with the problem of writing incredibly great songs, recording them masterfully, and then giving only the best live performances in the world.
I learned to write songs and I learned to perform them and I never gave up on the dream of traveling and seeing America for a living, whatever else became of those more grandiose desires.
Over the course of many subsequent journeys across its amazing landscape, I have watched this nation as it changed.
In real time, one might say, if one believed in time as substantively as free will.
Also it must be the case that the nation has changed me, for how could it be otherwise?
Today I pause to reflect with much gratitude and not a little remorse upon what it means to have lived half a century in the United States of America.
***
In college I had the good fortune to encounter many different people from many different places.
I had escaped bodily from the confines of that small East Texas town where I had gone to high school.
I had seemingly done a thing that placed me among a rare group by moving away from home and attending college at all.
By now who can say how many of them escaped that fate - I hope many more have over the intervening years.
At the time, there were only about six boys from a total class of 48 who proceeded directly from high school into college the following year.
I started my adult life as part of a rarefied 25% from that vantage point.
Among the many amazing people I met in those years at UT Austin, one of them in particular showed me what a special thing it could be to visit farflung places and to see not just one's own country but indeed, the world.
I have often reflected that, in a manner of speaking, she infected me with her contagious love of travel and, although by that time I had begun to perform in bands and still wanted desperately to tour as a musician, I began to feel this other reason to desire a less than fully sedentary lifestyle.
I trust that she will recognize herself in this part of the tale if she ever gets to read this, and that even though our relationship ran its course quickly in our youth, her influence on me as regards an appreciation and a love for travel continues to the very current day.
If the walls of life that enclose so many had not been fully knocked down by this early brush with seeing more of my country, they had taken their first battering.
***
If the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, then a real philosophy must begin with a single true observation.
In my 20s, I did that thing for work where you criss-cross back and forth across the map, except back then we used Mapsco.
On many of the same highways and byways that authors and poets of decades recently passed like to write about more than perform, I scrawled my itinerary across the longitudes and latitudes of several more states.
Thank God for those philosophies that offer us more than mere shadows on the wall, even if they had to be saved from some of His most devout defenders.
Theatre got me out there, to over half of those landlocked places that make up the great interior of our country.
It took me to a few of the coastal states also, coastal states being fewer by default.
In service to the world's most ancient art form and loving it for that reason above all else.
Hundreds of children, teachers, parents attending each performance.
Sometimes as many as ten performances per week.
I observed for myself the slow, steady, unstoppable march of monoculture, terraforming shopping centers from sea to shining sea with a more uniform set of giant plastic letters.
What man's life could ever withstand the critical scrutiny of time when he has no choice but to be sculpted by the heavy hand of milieu?
***
So it began as an obsession with touring in a rock band, and at least part of that vision came true in the form of theatrical performance, instead.
Then the real part of that vision came true when I got to tour with a band from El Paso in the early 2000s.
We toured for over three months that year, performing dozens and dozens of gigs, selling many copies of their record too, as I recall.
That was fun, and gave me the glimpse of America I had longed to see for many years, in all of its fading glory.
It was a fluke to join that band and I probably didn't fit in well with that group either, but they played very well and they took the business seriously of presenting their music to strangers.
That's something that only a fraction of a fraction of humans actually do, for the everloving record.
To this day, if you want to impress me the most, you'll talk to me seriously about live music performance and the writing of original songs.
Anyway, by the time I'd finished touring up the east coast with those guys, I had traveled to over 30 states.
***
Presentations on behalf of Mothers Against Drunk Driving got me to most of the rest of the fifty - those fifteen or so states that I hadn't visited up to that time.
As one of only a dozen or so national field representatives for MADD, I was one of the guys that brought those large video installations into schools and tried to educate children about the dangers of drunk driving.
I could cite so many amazing stories from those six months, but among other things that job helped me to see more of my own country, even if it had the countervailing effect that the isolation and constant driving (all of which, in a situation much different from my experiences touring theatrically or with the band, I had to do myself) actually drove me to drink more, not less.
I decided to go back to theatrical touring and proceeded to rack up even more miles on the road right through my 29th year.
***
I have spent time trying to calculate this figure and I suppose it would be possible to put together an even more accurate approximation, but I believe that through a combination of all those means - touring in plays, touring in a band, and touring for education/public speaking, I must have reached around 1 million spectators during those years.
When I know that the United States holds within it some 335 million people, the fact that I have looked into the eyes of a full million of them permits me some small insight into the human reality of that metric.
You may not have visited as many places in quite the same way as I did, but if you search for it, you could find a similar analogy from your own experiences that permits you a similar correlation.
That's a million Americans - most of them youth - that I was able to put myself in front of bodily as a function of the work I did in my 20s.
Is that not enough to make a real difference among the broken-hearted, the downtrodden, the abused children of this country?
***
So why did I do all of that?
Was it all just to see a little bit more of the world than I would have otherwise had the chance to in Troup, TX?
Back in my 20s, when I still searched for answers to performance within a spiritual context, I would pray backstage before every performance.
I would call upon the God of the universe to bring my voice into the ears especially of those children who needed to hear the message our theatre company brought to them in the form of our play.
Oh sure, I wanted everyone to 'enjoy' the show.
I wanted all audience members to have a good time, to think and feel a little more deeply, and to leave satisfied that they had chosen wisely by purchasing a ticket to see live theatre instead of some other use of their money, such as shopping at Wal-Mart or gambling on sports.
But inwardly, I knew that I did not perform for all 100% of them.
I knew secretly that I was there that day to perform for a few of them.
I knew logically that, of all the children and adults that would watch me perform on any given day, exactly one of them would leave the most moved, the most inspired, the most motivated to continue this chain of tradition that extends backwards into history to the very dawn of writing in the west.
Did I perform for so many people in those years that I spread myself too thin to have made any meaningful impact?
What makes for a meaningful impact by any one person in a world so completely overflowing with need?
I scoff at those who scoff at performance, as if your entire life does not resemble some poorly rehearsed act.
At the same time, in real life, you have to be as good at making it up as you go along.
***
By the time I was 30 I had only missed out on a handful of states in my journeys, and then I started grad school.
Fifteen years later, I would witness that many of my fellow Americans - almost precisely the same number for whom I performed in my prior years of touring - killed dead by the preventable disease, COVID-19.
The pandemic that did not have to be.
The life's work of a lowly man obliterated by the ignorance of the asshole class.
Should we call that poetic irony or crass tragedy in the index of bad ends?
When I remember those audiences, I think to myself I have seen the faces of my own fellow citizens who fell victim to viral genocide at the hands of a criminal class of politician.
Never far from me, the memories of all those lost.
The friends from my childhood who would have wanted to make it this far.
The ancestral peoples who inhabit our DNA - how much sorrow must be bound up in them.
Never forgotten, the conversations they might have liked to have had with their own parents, with their own children.
***
To believe that travel is good for the soul may or may not prove that I believe in God which in turn may or may not imply that I accept the doctrine of predestination, but if I accept predestination as the true paradigm of existence, as a co-believer in quantum physics I could only accept it on the most empirical of grounds.
***
I have fought this fight almost since leaving the womb that bore me and it bores me to fight them so.
Yes, they've beaten me back for too many of those years or else they've beaten me down.
The mouth breathing, knuckles dragging, rock throwing know-nothings have had their awful way with our country for long enough if I have reached 50 and they hold more power than ever before.
Time for all the good little boys and girls out there to embrace their inner imps and learn to revel in misbehavior.
Better to accept that all favor must be found at the expense of someone else's imposition and then get about the business of choosing your enemies well in life.
***
I'm not likely to see another fifty, so this spin around the tiniest corner in the universe has got to be half over by now hasn't it?
I ask the question with equal parts dread and hope.
They've taken away the promise of an ever longer, ever more healthy, ever more prosperous version of life in America, and they're still at the task of making things worse.
Not for nothing this birth, or else free will must surely be a lie.
It would follow then that Trump has no choice but to be a racist, or that the voters of Texas have no choice but to appease their blatantly white supremacist government officials.
It would truly not be their fault that they're a bunch of degenerate know-nothings.
On the other hand, if free will is merely a myth, then of what worth your choice to worship an invisible god?
Might as well believe you were born to play the hypocrite in that case.
Might as well take this opportunity to say what no one else is saying, even if no one else agrees with it and maybe neither do I.
To pursue freedom in a lukewarm manner seems like a squandering of so divine a gift as thought, no matter from where you hail.
That thought should lead to language seems like a foregone conclusion and since the mathematicians tell me that predestination is so, I'll take their gospel to heart.
***
By the time I turned 40 I had only three states to go and getting to them took no small amount of effort even if it required no free will on my part, or so the scientific consensus would have us believe.
It took several years to tick through that last group because they were about as far apart from one another as this nation's borders would allow them to get.
I lived with a lot of fear in those years that I would die in a car crash or something before I got to complete this achievement and, as I crossed off one, then the next one, and finally had only one last state to go before seeing them all, this irrational fear intensified.
It would just seem so disappointingly appropriate, wouldn't it?
To die on the eve of achieving this minor life goal?
Maybe God saw my fear and took mercy upon me.
Sometimes, I guess your heart desires a thing and the universe listens.
Alaska, Maine, and then the best for last - Hawaii.
And then I had done it.
And although the visits didn't all necessarily happen in the ways that I might have designed with the advantage of more wherewithal, and although there is no one now to remember and recall and relive all those travels with, yet I did it.
I saw my own country before I died.
What percentage of my fellow Americans can say the same?
Getting around to see other places and to meet the people who live in those places must expand the mind at the very least.
Confronted with an ever-changing landscape, whether geographically, visually, linguistically, or indeed spiritually, the malleable brain has no choice but to accommodate the proof of one's own senses.
Seeing as how mind and soul get taken as synonymous by any number of conflicting theologies, we can say it probably expands the soul as well.
I don't even think that quantum theory can disprove that.
***
So call it TRUE that travel is good for the soul, even as I grow weary on this road.
Should we, like the know-nothing lot would do, just demolition the entire architecture wherever it seems to make no sense to us, as they have done?
If tasked with matching nihilism for nihilism we're not just in a race to the bottom we're into a state of explosive disintegration.
Pray for an end so obliteratingly fast that you never even see it coming and, as Trump is God's man on Earth, it just might happen that way.
Then who would get to match the 50 x 50 challenge?
Like characters from a half-written play, we're all stuck in the dilemma that we don't yet know the fundamental nature of our own story.
Have I attended a comedy or a tragedy for all these many decades?
Will there be a cake at the end or bloody murther?
Who can be bothered with grand guignol now that small victories seem as ambitious in scope as the gilded delusions of yore?
In summation, given the ephemeral nature of circumstance, one might posit an author to existence, else whose boredom do we placate with the many shifting vicissitudes of life?
We find ourselves at the inky end of a lazy cosmic dramaturg's pen and he's spinning in a vortex of revisionist historical genre fiction.
Like God, like man, like and subscribe.
Perhaps it would seem more funny if the Great Playwright in the Sky didn't let the clowns practice their finger-tap-dancing-routine on the nuclear button?