Yeah, so I’m way behind on this goddamn blog. Tell me something I don’t know. See, I’ve got a lot of stuff going on, all of which I hate and none of which is making my life any better, and it’s only going to get worse until at least January. But I’m going to bust ass today to at least get caught up a little.

I’m going to start with the big Sacramento reading of 20 September 2005. I’d caught a pretty wicked cold the week before, and I wasn’t in my best voice, not that my best voice is all that great to begin with, so I was a little worried that 1) my voice would come out all scratchy and much weaker than usual and 2) that I wouldn’t be able to get through more than a line or two without bursting into a coughing fit. I’m a worst-case scenario kind of guy, so I was ready for it to be a disaster, but we’ll come back to the level of disastrousness in a minute.

Let us start with the three-hour drive. According to Mapquest, the trip shouldn’t have taken any longer than 2.4 hours. But it was pissing rain for the entire drive and it took me three hours to get there. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have minded having to be on the road for so long. In fact, I would have loved it (if I could have figured out a way to spend all of my time driving around aimlessly with my stereo rattling the windows, I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t find life to be such a fucking drag), but I can be a nervous driver because I’m convinced (really convinced) that most drivers aren’t any good to begin with and become much, much worse under adverse conditions because said drivers don’t factor said adverse conditions into how it is that they drive.

An example: in late December of 1996, I was making the drive from Seattle back to Madtown for the holidays. The day that I was driving out was the second day of a pretty brutal days-long winter storm and this was also around the time that the nitwits really started to get wood for SUVs. What did I see all along I-5? SUVs, at various angles, in ditches. It was almost as if the SUVs had been parked there, but, no, the SUVs were in the ditches because the drivers of the SUVs were morons who couldn’t figure out that they needed to adjust how they were driving for the fact that, hey, it was really, really snowing and, hey, the roads were really, really slippery, and, hey, top-heavy vehicles are pretty unsafe to begin with. Yeah, I’ve got no faith in people.

Here’s where it gets tricky for me. I want to write about the whole trip, but something happened that doesn’t have anything to do with the reading, and I’m not sure if I should include it or not. To talk about it in the context of my sad, little (literary) life seems wrong. To not talk about it would be to hide (though “hide” is probably not the right word) the event from the reader (that would be you) and to completely misrepresent the entire experience. If you don’t want to read anything that has nothing to do with the trip/cough/reading and that turns a horrific event into a paragraph in a blog entry, skip the next paragraph.

A few minutes after making the switch from the 152 to I-5, traffic was all of a sudden going really slowly, then we went from two lanes to one, then we went from one lane to driving partway on the shoulder. I thought that something bad had happened further ahead on the freeway. Then, just past the high point of an overpass, there it was: a big rig turned sideways across most of the two lanes of the freeway; one of it’s cargo, one of two olive drab metal structures (somehow, I thought of tank turrets) tossed upside-down on the asphalt; it’s nose driven deeply into the driver’s side door of a white pickup. The pickup was against the center divider, facing the wrong way, and it had been folded into a “V” shape. The cabin was now no more than a few feet wide. It was just like one sees it in the movies. There was an ambulance at the scene, but the lights weren’t flashing and the paramedics didn’t seem to be in a hurry. There was a gurney near the accident, but there was no one rushing to get somebody out of the truck and onto it. Then I whispered some stupid thing that comes into my head whenever I see anything sad/cruel/fucked up: I hope everybody will be as okay as is possible.

Okay, if you skipped the last paragraph, I just need to let you know that I was a little freaked out when I finally got to the place where the reading was going to take place. My big bro, my mother, and Ivan, poker player deluxe and designer/programmer of this here website had driven up separately for the reading, but they weren’t around when I got there. I called my big bro and discovered that they were at a nearby coffee joint, but I needed to get my head on straight, so I decided to stay near the venue. I did the meet and greet with the relevant parties—Art, the host, and Linda, my fellow reader—but then headed downstairs to get some air.

After a while, me people came back and we took four chairs in the front row. Linda read first, and she really got a good response. Then Art introduced me, and it was my turn to go. Remember my wicked cough? Somehow, it went away. You know how a person can summon forth great strength to lift a felled tree from the legs of an injured person? It was like that, but not really.

I have this weird thing where I can simultaneously be both inside a moment and outside of it as well. All I kept thinking as I was reading my poems was, “Hey, I’m not coughing.” I did my usual bits. I have this one where I say that if I read too long to just start booing, but then I say, “Please don’t boo.” That always gets laughs. Then, later on, I did the bit where I talk about the idea that I had had for doing a series of ninety-nine poems about Highway 99, the highway that runs through the Central Valley and that has been a large part of my life, but then say that I ran out of ideas after the fifth poem. That’s high-quality comedy right there.

Everybody’s a Critic: It’s after the reading now, and I’m sort of just milling around, not really sure what to do with myself. Can I just split immediately after I’m done? Do I have to stick around until everybody in the audience leaves? Am I supposed to work the room? Does anybody even want to be worked by a poet to begin with? I have no idea, but I end up in a group that includes Linda. I’m trying to say goodbye to her when this guy pipes up with, “Can I make one little suggestion? Next time, read a little more slowly.”

Look, I know how to take criticism. I learned how in poetry workshops because they won’t be of use if you’re resistant to critique, but that’s because I was in pretty amazing workshops all through college, especially in Fresno, and I was always surrounded by people who were good writers and whose opinions I wanted to hear. This guy, though, hadn't earned any cred with me, especially when he seemed…well, like a weirdo, and, frankly, it was a little presumptuous of him to tell me how to read. I wanted to express to him what he could do with his insights into my performance (that expression involving several of my favorite words, along with some vigorous and graphic hand gestures), but I decided that since we were in a high-culture atmosphere that I shouldn’t go ghetto on him. Ivan is witness to the fact that I handled this dude in a respectful manner. Linda, bless her poetic heart, spoke up for me and said that she had loved how I had read.

Shortly thereafter, I left. Thankfully, by then it had stopped raining, and the trip home was less scary than the trip to Sacramento.

It’s All About the Green: I managed to sell four books and make $40. I had planned on selling them at the cover price ($13.95, if you're thinking about ordering a copy from Amazon, with free shipping if you order two [I’m just saying]) but nobody had any change, so I knocked it down to $10. Basically, the four books barely paid for the trip, but I did manage to come out a little bit ahead.

Oh yeah, I coughed all the way home.

The title of this post, Wherever I Have Been and Gone, is a line from Blues Run the Game, one of my all-time favorite songs.