help me write my book

[PhillyB]

i know i've been serially creating threads lately, but i could really use some help with this. i'm in the final stages of writing my book, but i'm also in the most difficult part. all the in-between stuff was really easy but i'm trying to craft the first couple chapters such that they (1) flow into the main part seamlessly and (2) actually create a compelling interest in what happens for the rest of the book. a hook, if you will.

 

i think the premise (that i dropped everything and went to australia and trekked around the world) is compelling enough as a story that anyone who's going to read it in the first place will be interested by the subject material alone. however, i don't want to bore anyone.

 

in light of this i'm interested in putting together a sort of focus group, informally. if i post the rough draft of a chapter or two up here would any of you be willing to read it and give me honest feedback on whatever elements come to mind?

 

i'll thank you bastards in the foreward if this thing actually takes off.

[Darth Biscuit]

I would

[Chimera]

I would but you like too many big words :(

[PhillyB]

I would but you like too many big words :(

 

not in this. it's written for a popular audience

[KSpan]

Sure - sounds interesting. 

[Cat]

Sure

[Bronn]

absolutely

[sharkkiller]

I would be willing to take a look at it. If you would take a look at a few chapters of my book that I have been putting off writing for a while and give me some feedback as well.

[stirs]

Love to see it.

 

I remember hitchhiking back from Wyoming/Montana in the 80's, that was about as big as my world got at that point.

[PhillyB]

you guys are awesome.

 

i write short chapters; here's the first three, which comprise the first section of the book. before moving forward to edit and reconfigure the rest of the book it is crucial that i get this part right, or at least right enough, as it sets the tone for the entire manuscript.

 

the main things i need to know are (1) does the first chapter make you, as a casual reader, want to read the second chapter, and (2) does the entirety of the three chapters make you eager to read the rest of the book and find out what happens? After that I'm interested in rhythm, flow, style, prose, anything you can think of. be mean, don't spare me. i wrote these three chapters in two days with zero editing, so you'll be criticizing a scribble, not the mona lisa.

 

 

Chapter One

 

Malaise

 

There are days when your very bones twist for adventure.

 

It’s amazing how something otherwise mundane, a smell, a breeze, a particular combination of temperature and sound, maybe the note of a song, can transport you instantly back to a specific moment in time, a moment so vivid, so powerful, so real, fully engaged in the senses, every memory, every wistful glance, every ache, every cut, every plan, every dash of excitement and pang of fear as real and full and present as it was on the day of its birth.

 

And there is a great welling of emotion, a brightening of the eyes, an unconscious lean forward, a mute tremble of excitement, a race of the heart, a paralyzing rush, but for a moment in time, an immersion in that past, in the greatest moments of your life, the irrepressible days of wild, of freedom.

 

Those days are sacred.

 

Of course I didn’t know the first fuging thing about that, and I was well aware of it, because I was a broke, angry college drop-out and professional waffle fry chef in the back of a kitchen Chick-fil-A. My life sucked and that’s where this story begins.

 

Chick-fil-A is a fast food restaurant that makes delicious chicken sandwiches and makes you say “my pleasure” to all the customers, which was great in 1955 but sounds kind of insincere now. I worked in the kitchen cooking fries in peanut oil and and stacks of chargrilled sandwiches, which sucked, but kept me from the front line and thus spared me from sounding like a tool. The owner’s son was the evening shift manager. Matt was in his early twenties, a year younger than me. He looked like an Abercrombie and Fitch advertisement and smelled like a middle schooler who’d just discovered Axe and he took “my pleasure” a step further by asking customers if they’d like their beverages refreshed.

 

He made my job pretty miserable, as most incompetent owners’ sons do when put in charge of people who just want to get a job done. He was spiritual in that really overplayed, annoying way where it was obvious he was putting on a show. 

 

“Are you cool if I work the prep station today?” (which is not even close to a big deal.)

 

“I’ll pray about it bro!”

 

Or, “Hey Matt, do you need me to stay an extra hour until Chelsey comes in?”

 

“Yeah bro, get that treasure in Heaven!”

 

It was super annoying. But I’d grown up in a charismatic Christian background myself so it wasn’t terribly far out of the ordinary. In fact I actually lived with Matt, on an unfortunate decision made when we met and hit it off, before I knew he was an insufferable douche. Such a bad idea. He was basically a frat bro without a frat. He worked out constantly and made excuses to take his shirt off in front of girls. One time we were sitting on the couch playing Mario Kart and one of the girls from work texted him and said she was coming over to hang out (we lived in an apartment half a block from work.)  He promptly took off his shirt. “I want to make sure she sees me shirtless,” he said, because he had no shame. He didn’t even like her.

 

Another time I was sitting in my room at the end of the hall scrawling a four-page journal entry about my existential crisis and listening to him trying to impress the two girls he was hanging with in the living room. It was right around the corner and I could hear every word. “Sometimes I just want to work out so bad I can’t even help it,” he was saying. And then he ran down the hall and opened my door.

 

“Dude I want to get a chin-up bar so bad.”

 

“Yeah me too,” I lied. The girls were behind him and they were pretty hot.

 

“If I go to Dicks do you think they’ll be open?”

 

It was midnight. I said no instead of the obvious joke. He groaned and then bounced down the hall and did pushups. How much of a caricature can you possibly be?

 

Normally I just took this stuff in stride, but then one night he broke a rule. I paid a little extra rent each month so I could use the apartment’s office, a tiny little box of a room that had enough space for a few guitar amps and my guitars, cords, and dozens of album jackets taped around the walls where they met the ceiling. It was a sweet little spot and I spent a ton of time there writing emo songs about girls that I liked and angry songs about my dad who I didn’t like. And then he brought a girl over and I was penning some thoughts about how I needed to find out who I really was in this world and then I heard her say “Wow your guitar room is so cool!”

Do the right thing, Matt. 

 

“Yeah, we love to just hang out here and jam.”

 

Oh helllllll no.

 

Matt had been in that room once, and it was to take my guitar strap and put it on the Rock Band video game guitar. This time I broke protocol and left the word “cosmogony” unspelled (I was reading a John Polkinghorne book about belief in God in an age of science) and meandered down the hall. I grabbed a Mountain Dew from the fridge while she admired my pearly blue Epiphone Les Paul, which was a Gibson knockoff but priced for a Chickfila employee to afford (sort of.) I adored it. I cracked the tab and took a swig and turned around the corner to ask him to play something.

 

“Play me something,” she demanded, and I decided I liked her.

 

“I’m not really that good,” he said, modesty overwhelming.

 

She looked at me. “You play something then.”

 

I tuned up and played All Apologies an octave higher than the album and she didn’t know the song and then Matt took her back and banged her, and that was kind of my life.

 

***

 

It wouldn’t be accurate to say that the idea of dropping everything and moving to Australia hit me completely out of an empty sky, though I often consider it that way, because the idea itself blew on like a spark in my brain all at once. The truth is it was a spark that never would’ve existed had it not been for a number of preceding events that created an environment where it could exist in the first place.

 

Leaving everything you know and going to a place on the other side of the world with none of your stuff where no one knows you is a ridiculous idea. And making the leap from ever considering it in the first place (a huge step by itself) to actually doing it signals some pretty gigantic changes in your basic mentality. One way or another the things that kept me staying at home living my pretty average life had to be knocked out of the way before I could go.

 

Those things were fear, a lack of desire to go, and attachment to my things. In reverse order I will explain how I came to knock them out.

 

Two years before I decided to go to Australia I became an existentialist. We all ponder our existence in the universe when some dies, especially when it’s someone who shouldn’t die. Richard, my long-time martial arts instructor and mentor, a gigantic, gentle, humble badass, a paragon of health and vitality, fell off his couch dead of a heart attack. As a kid it was drilled into me that showing any emotion is weakness, and I embodied that mentality pretty well, so the fact that I cried at his funeral said volumes about what he meant to me. Three months later my grandfather died of cancer. On the way home from the funeral my cousin drifted into the opposite lane, hit a semi head-on and died instantly.

 

How do you not become an existentialist when that happens? How the hell does that not completely affect everything you think about your life and your place in the universe? Why are people on the earth and then just leave? It’s either mean or it’s arbitrary and either way it’s pretty terrifying when you actually sit down and consider it.

 

For some reason all my big epiphanies in life have come when I’ve been furiously sick. This one was no exception. I got murdered by the flu one spring, puking buckets over the side of my bed, writhing in cramp pains, and wondering if I was going to die too and be someone else’s existential musing, and then there on my sweaty twist of sheets all the death and dying kind of all collided with my worldviews about what success meant.

 

Basically I grew up with certain ideas institutionally impacted into my head, primarily by my father, but also by other sources (but mainly my father.) Success, above all else, meant money and security. Those were the two big things. You didn’t take chances, you didn’t rock the boat, you buckled down and worked until you couldn’t work anymore and then you retired with a ton of money and enjoyed life with the satisfaction of fifty years of dedication and labor bolstering your enjoyment. 

 

He used to give me all kinds of poo for working at Chickfila. I couldn’t go home for Christmas without being leered at and asked if I was handing out newspapers on the streets of Winston-Salem with the homeless yet. Yeah Dad, I just ate some bugs before I got here.

“You need to cut your hair,” he kept complaining. “You look like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo.” That was actually true.

“Are you trying out for Mötley Crüe or what?”

 

And I laughed, because Crüe was the only rock band he could even name, so every time I played music he didn’t like he’d sneer and say they sounded like Mötley Crüe. Everything was Mötley Crüe or the Liberal Hippie 60’s. I blame this one on half a lifetime spent absorbing Rush Limbaugh monologues. Everything he equated with the 1960’s was evil. One time I came home wearing flip-flops and he lost his mind because only hippies wore sandals. Another time I wore cutoff knee-length khakis and he called me Bart Styles. To this day I don’t get it.

 

“Look at your sister,” he kept telling me. “She’s a year younger than you and a thousand times more successful, like always.”

It was true. She was working eighty hours a week at her job, getting ready to start her own business, and newly married to a guy with a beard. A paragon of success.

 

All this stuff about my Dad is to illustrate the enormous effect his worldview had on my mindset. And it was my worldview too, honestly. I’d been socialized with it, been raised in a household where values stemming from it were constantly reinforced, and so his displeasure with my status in life was rivaled only by my discontentment with it myself. And I think all those different conflicts met at the same time - everyone dying all of a sudden and being unsuccessful and futureless and living with the biggest narcissist in the universe who was simultaneously a complete shithead and very successful - and it sent me into a tailspin of discontentment that released itself in an existential crisis.

 

Existential crises are overrated because everyone says they have them. Every college sophomore who failed anatomy and got cheated on in the same semester calls it an existential crisis, but mine was real. Ineffable forces compelled me to figure out if I had a place in this universe, and if I did, what it actually was.

 

Just to clarify, I would not say I was unhappy. I had a ton of friends actually, an a solid inner circle as most of us do, and even though I worked a lot of hours I still got to see everybody reasonably often. Sundays were the best: church for some of us, football all afternoon (playing it in the spring, watching in the fall) and then everyone would meet up at the sand pits at the UNC-Greensboro campus and we’d play until everyone was exhausted and then go grab taco bell and goof off. It was a pretty typical existence.

 

But discontentment creeps in the happiest of hearts, drifts like some curling roll of smoke across the floor, catching you in your unguarded moments.

 

I don’t know where I’d be in my existential crisis if Guilford College hadn’t been located right across the street from Chickfila. I began to take refuge there after work. At ten o’ clock I’d shut down the vats and finish the dishes and wipe down the heaters and grab my bag and head for the door. Matt drove home to play Rock Band with my guitar strap and have pushup contests with himself in front of the new girls at work and I parked across the street in visitor’s parking and hung out in the library until 2am reading books.

I guess maybe it’s obvious why I didn’t have a girlfriend. I was in decent shape and I could’ve been doing pushups in front of the new girls from work too, and then I could have played guitar and maybe they would’ve liked me, but that wouldn’t have done a damn thing for my desperate desire to figure out my place in the universe, if I had one.

 

Maybe I was meant to work at Chickfila the rest of my life. Maybe I just had to learn to be happy with that.

 

I read a lot of different books in the library as I attempted to expand my mind and learn about the universe, and as I read a 17^th-century book by Blaise Pascal about how meaningless life ultimately is and books about the universe and the trajectory of time I began to realize that my life was going to be over in the time it took to blink.

 

I became an existentialist, maybe a fatalist at that time. Think about it this way. Let’s say someone gives you a thick book and tells you to map out your life in it. Your average person is going to open it up, point to the preface and call that his parents’ story, and then the first chapter is his birth. The next couple are his childhood and then he goes to college in chapter four and then the rest of the book is his life unfolding, ending with his death in the final pages and his eulogy in the afterword. But that’s not realistic. That’s a view someone takes when they consider their own existence the beginning and the end. That’s stupid. If we looked at it realistically, the book represents all of time and human experience. Each chapter is an epoch in time and space, not what happened when you started your logistics network. The most influential humans and ideas would be incredibly lucky to earn an entire sentence in the book, let alone a paragraph, and you - you and your boring shitty life - if you ever amount to anything comparable to a dot of ink on one of the periods somewhere in the book you’ve lived a damn fine life.

 

The point is we are nothing measured against the vastness of time and space and human existence and it’s a folly to think we count for anything outside of the webs of meaning we weave for ourselves. Nothing really matters. In a blink I’m going to be dead, so who cares if I’m successful? Who cares if I make tons of money or die homeless? The end will come and it will always be the same. So why fear stupid things like hunger and loss and death?

 

These realizations compounded upon one another and gradually shifted the way I thought about life and then one day I was sitting in my room trying to pick out the intro to Say it ain’t So with my acoustic guitar and a few synapses fired and "go to Australia" flitted across my frontal lobe and I decided right then and there, in the middle of F sharp, that I was going to go to Australia. One day I was going to die, but before that day I was going to do something that I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing yesterday. And I was going to bring my bike. I was going to bring my bike and ride it across Australia. I wrote it down in my journal and swore a pact with myself. I was an electric spark in time and space and I was going to burn out bright.

 

[PhillyB]

Chapter Two

 

Giants

 

 

The morning after I decided to go to Australia my mind and all my senses gathered together and beat the hell out of me. I had the day off work with nothing to do, so I slept in. I woke slowly. Sunbeams drizzled through my double-pane window, saturating me with warmth and happiness, toasting me while I nosed under my pillow in a knot of sheets and semi-lucid dreams. I smiled and thought of Australia.

 

“WHOA!” my mind screamed, jolting me out of my reverie. “Chill idiot! You have a JOB! You’re SECURE! You’re SAFE! You can get up and go to work and come back and not worry about where you’re gonna go tomorrow! You can eat some food and drink some drinks and you’re SET! You’ve got it MADE!”

 

My mind had won this battle countless times in the past, suffocated the spark with reason and all the nuanced bits of pragmatism that compose logic and were so effective at assassinating ideas that let my heart run wild. And everyone knew it, too. When I told people about it I was met with a ton of skepticism. This was just another in a long line of Phil-ideas all ready for take-off that got all kinds of steam built up in them and then blew up in the hangar. Like the time I was going to move to Wyoming, or the time I was going to start my own dojo. Great ideas that never happened. They probably could have, but they didn’t. I killed them first.

 

But this time I was going to do it. I was going to leave after the end of the year and I didn’t know how long I would be gone. I would save up money and fly there. I would ride my bike and land a job somewhere and keep reading Pascal and do some writing of my own. Maybe I would meet a cute Australian girl and settle down with her. Actually I’d bring her back with me. I liked America a lot and I didn’t want to leave my friends permanently.

 

Which I might. Hell, I might die. That was kind of a scary thought. But that, I determined, was the worst possible thing that could happen. Poverty? Who cares? I’d realized material possessions were of no consequences. I no longer cared about all the stupid things I used to. If you don’t take any chances you won’t have any stories to tell, right?

 

In retrospect I was completely ignorant when it came to planning for a bicycle trek across continental Australia. I made tons of assumptions that would come back to bite me in the ass once I actually arrived and began this whole thing. But I tried. I knew, at at the very least, that there’s no way I could just show up on my bike and start going. I had to map out a route and I had to train.

 

Training came in the form of simply riding my bike a lot. That was all I could think of to do. I didn’t bother with a gym or anything, I just wrote my bike everywhere I went. When Matt would bring a girl over and dominate the living room with unbearable makeout sessions and I was out of patience with my room I would jump on and ride over to Guilford College and glide around the campus, or occasionally sling my acoustic guitar over my back and pick a spot and play. Other times I would ride to the UNC-Greensboro campus early in the morning and hang out there before I had to make it back for work. It was six miles each way up and down a few hills on Friendly Avenue and one big one on Walker.

 

I got in shape pretty quickly. It was April when I decided I was going to go to Australia, and by the end of summer my arms were bronzed and my calves toned and my resolve steeled with the will of a man who knows he’s got nothing to lose.

 

Only three giants needed to be slain before I could launch off on this greater adventure. One of them was the lack of an actual plan, one of them was the fact that I had no money, and the other was The Italian Chick. 

 

…okay back up. I missed a giant. The first giant was the resolving of my will, which involved assuming control of my own destiny. Until this point it hadn’t happened in a way necessary to allow myself unfettered desire to leave home.

 

The first giant was my father.

 

He actually didn’t care that I was leaving. Other than telling me I could die, of which I was already acutely aware, he didn’t really express an opinion either way. He complained that I was abandoning my duty to society to go on vacation, but it was a only a passing comment where no other could be formed.

 

One day in August my Mom called, sounding unusually upbeat for no reason at all, and then she casually mentioned that they were going to have to get rid of the cats to put them out of her misery. Her voice quavered when she said it and I instantly knew she was full of poo. My Dad hated the cats. He hated all other living things and he had a long history of making my mom get rid of pets that got on his nerves, like Kiwi, an admittedly obnoxious bird that got on everyone’s nerves. He was very good at wheedling impressionable people who lacked a will into thinking that his idea was their own, and my mom, perpetually a wallflower, defended it accordingly, but she’d betrayed her hand.

 

“Let me talk to Dad,” I seethed into my shitty phone.

 

“Hello,” he stated, his voice rising slightly and formally on the last syllable, the same way he answered the phone with an unknown number.

 

“Why are you killing the cats?” I asked, tone forceful, one I realized I had never actually adopted with him.

 

“Well, they’re getting old it’s not fair to keep them in misery.”

 

“Well why don’t you just take them out back and shoot them in the head.”

 

He laughed. He hated those cats. He terrorized them like six-year-old Hitler.

 

“Seriously, what’s your problem?” I spat, and I realized I’d crossed a line I wouldn’t have dreamed of a few years before.

 

Pause. “You just said shoot them.” He sounded incredulous.

 

“I was being sarcastic.” I added, “I’m not surprised you thought I was serious.”

 

“Listen,” he demanded, his tone frosted over. “If you have a problem you can come get the cats yourself.”

 

That wasn’t possible. My apartment didn’t allow cats. “I can’t.”

 

“That’s your choice then.”

 

“It’s not my choice,” I yelled back, my left hand trembling in spite of itself. “It’s your choice. You know Mom doesn’t want them dead but you’re killing them because it’s convenient to you. You need to admit it.” I added the last part because I knew it would piss him off. At this point I didn’t care.

 

The thing about my father is he’s got a way of cleaving half your heart from your chest with incredible nonchalance. Words hurled from the scorching twist of an open furnace can be pinned on a quick temper; the worst things he’d ever told me were calculated with terrible precision.

 

“Well honestly I don’t consider you to be related to me.” He spoke evenly. “As far as I’m concerned you’re not my son and as far as I’m concerned you can never-“

 

I don’t remember what I said, and I don’t know what he was going to say, but I yelled it in the phone, ripped it from my ear, and hurled it into the floor the instant after the call ended. I yelled fug and punched my door and slammed it shut and stormed down the hall. Matt Eller was there with the play-me-a-song girl, who looked alarmed. He had told her I was disturbed and I think she felt sorry for me.

 

I had to leave for work in about ten minutes, so I didn’t have long to stomp around in hooded rage, so I went back and got ready for work and then suffered through the next hours with migraine that raged ever-worse, a look of pure blackness written across my face that I only knew was there when I got a startled look from the drive-thru cashier who happened to glance at it through the salad chute.

“Please don’t kill anyone,” she said, and I laughed. I loved Rachael.

 

The worst thing my father had ever told me was that he wished I’d never been born, and that was when I was ten, but that was when he was angry, so somehow this one affected me more deeply. For a day or so I slogged around in a blackened bog of smoldering rage and then I biked to UNC-Greensboro and logged onto a computer and wrote a two-hour email to my Dad, leveling accusations at him and surfacing incidents that had never been mentioned aloud in either of our lifetimes. It was calculated and I could not return from it and I sent it with a keystroke and logged out of my account feeling strangely light.

 

I walked up the library ramp to the bathroom, relieving myself at the urinal and closing my eyes with a sigh of relief I hadn’t known before. The truth is I’d just shoveled two decades of poo out of a deadbolted container that’d been baking in the sun for as long as I could remember. My outlets had been songs with pen-holes stabbed through the lyric papers and sludgy powerchords, boxes hurled uncaringly into the back of the truck during a stint loading trucks at UPS, (I was a terrible employee) and every once in a while an accusatory barrel unloaded in the direction of my mom, who did her best to play both sides evenly enough to keep the peace, which was her goal for as long as I could remember.

 

And now I knew a lightness very foreign to me. I yanked my fly up and paused in front of the sink, staring into the mirror, looking into my own eyes, into the face of Philip Arthur Blattenberger. “I am a man.” I said it aloud, impulsively, and then I looked around the room self-consciously. Empty. Just Philip Arthur Blattenberger and the man in the mirror.

 

Something subtle changed inside me that afternoon. I rode my bike to my friend Dan’s house and we got Taco Bell and watched a movie. I went home and I didn’t care about Matt Eller and I sat down with a detailed atlas of Australia and began mapping out a route. I was no one’s son and held no one’s expectations; I was Philip Arthur Blattenberger and I was going to go to Australia.

 

***

 

The second giant came in the form of the fact that I had literally no idea what I was going to do in Australia besides “bike across it” which had become something of the tagline for my adventure. 

 

“I’m going to bike across Australia.”

 

“Wow how far?”

 

“Two thousand miles down the coast from Brisbane to Adelaide and up through the desert to Darwin.”

 

“That sounds dangerous.”

 

“I know, lots of people have died doing it.”

 

That was a typical conversation I had. Maybe I overplayed the dying part a little, but these were my days in the sun, and I was going to enjoy them.

 

Honestly I had no idea where to begin. Seasoned backpackers would go grab a Lonely Planet guide and start from there. I had never heard of Lonely Planet, and I didn’t bother looking for specific guides because I wasn’t going to be hanging around in one place. Road maps were all I needed, I figured, so I spent most of my time on Google Maps and Google Earth looking at distances and elevations and routes.

 

Several months of casually doing this, and one very influential blog by a guy named Jonathan Cho  who rode from Darwin to Adelaide, I laid out a rough plan: fly to Brisbane or Sydney, whichever was cheapest, and then ride south along the Prince’s Highway, which followed the eastern coast before cutting inland and heading west, bound straight for Melbourne, and through it, to Adelaide, at which point I’d be on the very bottom of Australia, where it curves upward to fit a sea that I read is chock full of great white sharks, and where the highway curves away from them, north, across the desert, through Coober Pedy, where everything is underground because it’s so hot out, through Alice Springs and that giant red rock, and then all the way to Darwin, which was green and jungly and had crocodile warning signs as far as a hundred miles outside the city.

 

“That’s going to be three thousand miles,” Nate said. Nate was a real live Australian that I knew when he was on an exchange program from a place called Geelong, which was pronounced jee-long and sounded quintessentially Australian.

Ha! No big deal.

 

“The desert gets hot,” he told me. “People die out there.”

 

“I’ll bring water,” I countered.

 

At the end of summer I decided to take a two-day bike trip loaded down with gear. I’d been grinding it out all summer a couple times a week around town and I felt decently in shape, and although I was confident I figured it made sense to make sure I could handle at least two days in a row of long-distance riding if I was going to be doing it for a month in Australia.

 

I was estimating something like a hundred miles a day in Australia, which was a figure I mostly pulled off the top of my head, but it seemed like a reasonable goal to shoot for. I picked a two hundred and fifty-mile route to the beach from Greensboro, figuring if I could knock that out in two days I’d be fine on the Prince’s Highway.

 

My alarm went off at four on a Thursday morning. I have a bad habit of talking myself out of anything I’ve decided on if I wake up before 8am, and after twice convincing myself with the snooze button that Australia was a really stupid idea I forced myself to ooze out of bed and get on with it. The early morning air was chilly but I was bathed in sweat a mile down Friendly Avenue. Maybe Australia was a bad idea.

 

But I got into a rhythm and then I was doing ok. I navigated downtown Greensboro and jumped on Liberty Road, which ran parallel to highway 421 south, and then I was not doing ok. I didn’t want to ride on a highway but Liberty Road, for all its woody scenery and farmy charm, was a bitch to actually ride. My pack, loaded down with my tent and spare parts and a can of beans I was going to eat for dinner, didn’t do a thing to help. I decided I’d rather take my chances with speeding dump trucks and hopped onto 421 on the other side of Julian, which was all of the rural south’s stereotypes rolled into a stretch of pavement bordered by railroad tracks and a rusted Sterling Marlin hood bolted to some guy’s garage.

 

Highway 421 was no joke either but I made progress. The hills were long but shallow grades and I found I could take four or five at a time without any kind of a break, and when I was worn out I stopped under lonely overpasses and drank water. I felt fine, except for my back, which hurt. The backpack had been a terrible idea, or at least the beans.

 

I ran out of water and sputtered into Sanford half dead. That’s how the hostess at Junky’s Diner candidly described me. I took it as a compliment, and she looked three quarters dead anyway, so whatever. I devoured cheap pancakes and went light on the syrup, killed a plate of cantaloupe and asked the waitress if she would fill my water bottles at the drink fountain.

 

“It’s gonna get hot out there,” she told me with a squint.

 

“I know,” I said.

 

“Real hot,” she expounded.

 

“I drained my water on the way here.”

 

“Where’d you come from?

 

“Greensboro.”

 

“Where are you going to?”

 

“The beach.”

 

“You’re gonna get hot.”

 

I haven’t been back to Sanford.

 

***

 

It took me all day to get to Dunn, over a hundred miles from Greensboro, and at dusk I rolled my bike down an embankment on the shoulder into the woods and picked out a flat spot to camp. I learned two valuable lessons: be careful what you scratch after getting IcyHot on your hands, and don’t leave silhouetted objects like biking gloves on the transparent roof of your coffin of a tent. I felt these were valuable tips I could bring with my to Australia.

 

Day two was less distance but somehow twice as hard. I stopped for breakfast in a place called Spivey’s Corner that made Sanford look like Boulder and hurried on to Warsaw, chased by the stares of overalled men named Wilson and Clyde. There I learned another lesson, which was to avoid Waffle House, which should’ve been intuitive, but some lessons are hard learned. A half an hour in a gas station bathroom in Kenansville was worth not eating shitty waffles mid-day in the outback, where consequences were sure to be more dire.

“Ain’t no goods in there boy,” some guy guffawed toothlessly when I emerged. I haven’t been back to Kenansville either.

 

In the end I reached Jacksonville and got a hotel and slept until Dan came and picked me up the next day. I had done 220 miles in a full day and most of a second. I was going to make Australia my bitch.

 

***

 

There is actually a fourth giant too, called affording this damn thing, but I’m going to combine it with this one because they’re related.

Sometime in the summer I quit Chickfila. I know every disgruntled fast food worker in the history of french fries has complained about how terrible they had it, and Chickfila is actually a pretty good company to work for, but I had taken on the responsibilities of managers with all of the duties and the blame and none of the recognition, title, or pay that came with it, so I penned a ballsy ultimatum demanding a promotion, raise, or the execution of my two-weeks’ notice, which I kept in a separate envelope.

 

There was no raise and no promotion so I quit Chickfila.

 

“You know if you’re late on rent this month I’m kicking you out, right?” Matt told me that night.

 

“You’re not even on the lease,” I laughed. “I’m letting you live here.” He got snarky and then I got a job at American Express three days later making twice my old pay rate and then he got really hostile and one day I came home from work and all of his furniture was gone.

He owed me rent and didn’t pay it and that led to a whole episodic feud that’s only interesting if you know everyone involved, so I’ll skip that part. The point is I got a job make a wage where I could actually save some money. I excelled at my job answering phones and telling people why they couldn’t use their cards, which was usually because their statement showed $300 bar bills every night and an outstanding balance over the credit limit. I worked as much overtime as possible, which was a lot because of so many people running outstanding balances over their credit limits and getting declined at Fleming’s.

 

Anyway, the third giant. I met The Italian Chick (such as she is known among my friends) out of pure circumstance. She lived two buildings down and had a perpetually drunk friend named Bridgette who hit on Matt every time he was at the pool tanning, which was a lot, and one day she knocked on our door, sloppy drunk, and asked if Matt was home. He was at work and I spending a rare evening off. I told her that. Then her very very very attractive dark-haired friend who could only be The Italian Chick exploded out of the waning moon wearing some kind of a sarong and smelling like an angel dipped in honey and told Bridgette to stop bothering people, and then she smiled at me and told me her name was Sophia. I yammered something in response and then wrote about it my journal.

I don’t think I had really hit it off with anyone like I did with Sophia. Ever. She liked that I was dorky and she liked that I was smart.

One time before Sophia and American Express Matt and I were goofing off in the living room and talking about dating. “Historically, I’ve been attracted to girls,” I began, and then he cut me off laughing and told me that no girl will date a guy who uses the word “historically” in a conversation.

 

Sophia liked it and thought Matt was a humungous douchebag. I think I loved her.

 

Anyway Sophia had a kid. He was a year and a half old, and I gave him high fives and he liked me. She told me she’d made a mistake with a guy she thought loved her and she was moving on and living for her son and done with the party scene and even decided she wasn’t going to have sex with anybody else until she got married. One day I took her to get her belly-button pierced and then another day we went to Outback Steakhouse. One night she drank too much wine and we made out and she asked what I was looking for.

Here’s the thing. I had been planning Australia, at this point, for probably six months. I hadn’t bought my tickets yet, or set a date, but I was going. And yet I couldn’t help but catch myself in the quiet moments at work, in between calls, catching the scent of her perfume on my shoulder, wondering if maybe I could settle down with her. I had a hell of a job. I could spend my days there and then come home to her every night for lots of sexytime and we could go to the park on weekends and I could be a father to Landon and maybe we would have several Landons of our own. Who wouldn’t be happy with that?

 

Every kiss loosened my resolve and I was seriously considering abandoning Australia. I could go there when I was sixty-five. Then one day she told me she was going to visit relatives in Canada for a week. She took Landon with her. It was a shitty week. I went home and played Madden and watched Netflix and texted Sophia and told her I missed her.

 

A week later I saw her Jeep parked in front of her building. My heart leapt. I hurried inside to drop off a load of groceries and saw she was signed onto instant messenger.

 

“Hey!” I exclaimed, and sat down.

 

“Hey,” she replied.

 

“Welcome back!”

 

“Thanks”

 

“Want me to come over?”

 

“Maybe later”

 

Something was off. “You ok?” I asked.

 

“Yeah I’m ok.”

 

“Are you sure you don’t want me to come over?”

 

“I do, but I have bad news.”

 

Damn. That was never good.

 

“Well why don’t I come over and you can tell me.” I was trying not to be pushy.

 

“You’re going to hate me.”

 

Damn. “No I won’t.”

 

“You’re never going to speak to me again.”

 

“That’s ridiculous. We are friends,” I told her, and with a small essay assured her I couldn’t ever hate her.

 

“Promise?”

 

“Promise.”

 

“Ok well a week before we met I had sex with this guy Robbie and I just found out I’m pregnant.”

 

…….WHAT.

 

A lot of emotions ran me over at the same time, but my first reaction was gut-busting laughter. I leaned back in my pleather computer chair and laughed my ass off. (I’m glad she didn’t tell me in person.) The part of me that was crushed was overwhelmed by how much of my heart surged with the adrenaline of a stomped accelerator because this meant I was quitting my soul-sucking cubicle hell and going to Australia.

 

I moved on instantly and never looked back.

[PhillyB]

Chapter Three

 

Seeing the Elephant

 

 

Three monsters lay dead before me on a field of blood. 

 

Of course, they came with their share of ghosts. Their deaths did not completely signal their ends. The Italian Chick came back in the form of Sarah Marlowe, who I met a month before leaving. We hit it off and I cursed myself for meeting two girls in a row who I hit it off with like never before on the eve of following my destiny.

 

We walked near my apartment and talked about my trip. We held hands and I felt stupid because I had just met her and mean because I might be leading her on when I was about to leave. I told her I was leaving and she looked up at me with soulful eyes. “Don’t go,” she pleaded, and I realized she was kind of insecure. “Stay here with me and we can be together.”

 

What? That was a bit soon. I wanted a girl who would kick my ass if I thought about saying. I wanted a girl who knew I had a great journey before me and wouldn’t obstruct it any more than she’d obstruct Frodo from hauling ass out of the Shire. Some things transcended ordinary human actions and this trip was one of them. This trip was transcendent.

 

In the middle of the 19^th century the saying “seeing the elephant” became popular among descriptions of western territories. Guidebooks and gossip and local lore became textured with the phrase, and with cracked boot straps and pearly stocks and all the wisdom of the wilds explorers would pass around breathless tales of fertile fields and splendor and gold. And then whenever people would set off down the Oregon Trail they would write in their buffalo-skin journals about how they were off to see the elephant, and when they arrived, they’d shout “I have seen the elephant!” and that pretty much became a thing until everyone forgot it around World War One.

This was a pilgrimage, and dammit I was going to see the elephant.

 

I found a one-way ticket to Sydney and bought it. Layover in Fiji.

 

I traded my shitty Walmart mountain bike for a shitty Walmart road bike because the beach trip had taught me that energy gets absorbed by springy shock action.  I outfitted it with extra water bottle holders and paid a guy at a bike shop in Greensboro to weld a luggage rack over the back wheel. I strapped some cheap saddlebags onto this and rigged up some carrying cases to the top with bungee cords.

 

I bought shoes and a thick blank journal and a snakebite kit. I arranged for Dan to drive me to the airport. I got my passport in the mail. I printed my flight information out.

 

I did all this and said goodbye to everyone and then one day Dan stumbled down the stairs of his apartment and gave me a 3am kick in the shin. “Time to go,” he said, and I awoke and my heart constricted with icy fingers of terror. What the hell was I thinking?

 

But I got up and we loaded up my bike and drove to Raleigh and then I went to Australia.

[PhillyB]

That's it. after that the next chapter picks up in sydney and i begin chronicling my bike trip.

 

again, the main thing i want to know is, as a reader, do you actually care to keep reading at this point? are you at all invested in me and the journey i've taken up? are you annoyed by me? do you like me? do you identify with me at all? am i difficult to believe? kitschy? am i too dramatic? 

 

tear it apart, any and all impressions, good, bad, ugly. this is a work aimed at the general public, so if people that hang out on football forums don't like it neither probably will my target audience, and i need to know if i should adopt a different strategy to make the introduction palatable. i think sometimes as a writer it's easy to get trapped in this little hole where you have no idea if anybody actually gives a poo about what you're writing and you wonder if maybe something is interesting to you because you're completely deluded.

 

anyway take your time, i'm biking to south bali with a backpack tomorrow and then jumping on a plane to sulawesi, so i probably won't be back on until late tonight your time. thanks everyone

[Cat]

will read tonight or tomorrow. my internet is suckiing balls at working right now.