Here's photos from the trip, driving from Green River, Utah through Oklahoma south towards Texas. I went above 10,000 feet in Colorado down to the flat flat lands of eastern Colorado and Kansas.
Just east of Green River, Utah, I passed by these majestic cliffs that looked like heavily-fortified castles.
As I drove south through Oklahoma City, I saw the billboard again. On a stark black background, the message in white letters said "I love you" in English, Spanish, and Chinese. It was signed "God."
Last month when I'd also been passing through here during a family reunion, I'd seen the same billboard. And another one that said, "One nation under me." It too was signed "God."
Now Oklahoma is squarely in the middle of America's Bible Belt. When I lived in Tulsa in 1972, I remember you couldn't walk far without running into a church. One I remember had orange flames of hell painted outside, no doubt warning you what lay in store if you strayed or was some sort of heathen.
Why does God need billboards in such a place?
And did he go to Clear Channel or CBS or whoever owns the billboards, turn in an application, a design of his own choice, and submit a rental fee? Did he have to show a bank account or a credit card? Was he asked for his SSN? Did he pay month to month or for eternity?
While he was filling out the forms, did he pause to consider alternative means of getting his message across, such as skywriting? But that would have required him to hire pilots and rent airplanes, and again, there would be pesky forms to fill out. He'd probably need clearance from Homeland Security.
Would it not have been simpler for God to simply shape some cumulus clouds into letters and words? And if he'd done that, wouldn't people have marveled at it and found it more believable?
I kept seeing the signs. On Overland Avenue in L.A. near where I stopped to visit my sister and nephew, as I walked each morning towards Venice Boulevard to get my morning coffee, I passed three small houses with signs. Psychic. Readings by Maria. Palm readings. Tarot cards. During earlier visits, I'd passed by those houses many times, but this time a part of me wondered, "Should I enter one of these houses — just for the lark of it?
I'm a hardcore skeptic, finding it hard to believe that lines in your hands or a random pick of cards from a deck can tell anything about your life.
The skeptic in me prevailed. I kept walking.
In Boulder I would make a different choice.
I drove today from Las Vegas, Nevada, to Green River, Utah. In Utah, especially on I-70 headed eastward towards Colorado, you see some of the most spectacular vistas: mountains in formations that look like human-built monoliths, ranges that change color from shades of red to gray and black, twisted trees, and rock arrangements that look like children put them together. Here's some of my favorite photos:
I hit my first thunderstorm soon after turning off to I-70 from I-15 North. It wasn't too bad.
"Vegas is king, baby. Woo hoo," my friend W. wrote back from New York after I'd dropped her a line saying I was in her favorite vacationland yesterday. She grew up in Hawaii. I remember her telling me the playground city in the Nevada desert is the destination of choice for many Hawaiians when they migrate to the mainland U.S. When traveling back home to Maui herself, W. often stops there.
Perhaps Vegas is king if a) you're a gambler; b) you're not just stopping there on the way to someplace else; and c) you go there with company.
Nothing really to say, but here's some photos from the drive down to Los Angeles.
Heading south on 101 from the Bay Area
Zen? It felt so.
I stopped for lunch at Morro Bay. For several summers I used to come down here from Oakland to write for a few days.
My traveling companion who accompanied me from Providence to Oakland in 1997 has come along for this ride too. Say hello to Celia.
A paper cut. A pain between the shoulder blades that felt like I'd been stabbed by an instrument of torture. Too many sad partings with friends and favorite places. Such are the scars with which I drove away from my home in Oakland at 6:27 p.m. on the last day of July.
Thanks to two band-aids, the paper cuts are history. The back pain worsened from sleeping on an air mattress that I had not fully inflated — blame the exhaustion — but with a rest from driving, a letting go of tense muscles, and a few doses of naprosyn, that too shall be memory.
The scars of saying goodbye are not so easily healed. The pain was for the moment anaesthetized by the anxiety and bustle of storing or getting rid of accumulation. It hasn't really hit me yet, but I know it will get worse before the edges are dulled and the sorrow becomes the kind of memory that brings a wistful smile.
The first week of March I flew to Austin, Texas.
When I stepped out of the hotel to find something to eat, the sun had disappeared. My ears were immediately assaulted by a cacophony of bird sounds. The trees swarmed with birds that looked like crows but didn’t sound anything like crows. What birds were these?
For dinner I chose the closest place I could find, The Boiling Pot on Sixth. It served crawfish, crabs, and shrimp, boiled up Cajun style. When my order was ready, the young waitress, all smiles, tossed it on the sheet of butcher paper that she had earlier rolled out on the table. With a friendly pat on my arm, she said, “You eat with your hands here.” No problem, I’m used to doing that where I come from. Next to me, four Japanese men snapped photos of their meals. I’ve done that too, but my dinner wasn’t photogenic. It tasted great, though.
I was in Austin for the annual conference of the AWP (known today as the Association of Writers and Writing Programs). When I was in the MFA program at Mills College, I was familiar with the AWP through free copies of their magazine, the Writers Chronicle. But I’d never considered attending their conference.
This year I was invited by the novelist Sorayya Khan to join a panel of South Asian writers on “Writing War, De-scribing Empire.” Last year I had reviewed her book “Noor,” the first novel by a Pakistani writer to focus on breaking the silence on the Pakistani war that birthed independent Bangladesh. We came to discover that we shared an interest in writing about war, specifically the war in 1971, for me the defining moment of my coming of age. As it turned out, the same panel would also present a reading the day before at the University of Texas.
I wasn’t sure what to expect in Austin, but I’m glad I went.
books, travels, writing | Mahmud | 
Comments (6)
Forget inspiration, forget talent, don’t worry about imagination: her advice for a new fiction writer was simple.
"Persist," she said.
Around the time I discovered Octavia Butler’s writing advice, I was still new to writing fiction. I was anxious about both inspiration and talent. I worried about imagination, since in my rather complicated life I had picked up a thousand or more ‘real life’ stories, enough to write many, many pages of narrative. I remember telling my first fiction workshop teacher, Elena Rivera, that I wanted to learn how to break out of the grip of real-life experience.
Twelve years after I typed out my first ’story,’ I have to say, Octavia was on point. Persistence rewards.
While speaking to a few dozen friends recently, I tried out a confession. I said that I was not really who I claimed to be; I was not as old as they knew me and that I had stolen the identity of someone older, someone who had gone through a much richer vein of experiences than I.
It was a joke, and it fell completely flat. Only a few people knew the references. None seemed to care.
I was making fun of two figures from the writing world who had just been in the news. James Frey had been exposed by The Smoking Gun for having exaggerated many chapters in his life for his memoir A Million Little Pieces. And J.T. Leroy had been exposed as not the bad boy male writer he claimed to be, but a woman who had apparently done none of what the author had claimed.
Perhaps we writers get more excited by what other writers do than most people.
But I understand the impulse to make believe.
fiction, memoir, writing | Mahmud | Comments (4)
© 2004-2008 Mahmud Rahman |
Powered by WordPress | 
Entries RSS | Comments RSS