Time Out

Hello Internet. Sorry the posts have been thin this week. Smitty's been a little depressed about his job and hasn't felt like or had the time for posting here. But I'm going out of town to recharge for a little while, which is a good thing. Have a nice weekend!

The Jump

Last Dance with Mary Jane

I have a shiny new car.

Let me back up a moment. This is Mary Jane. She was my car until Saturday.

Mary Jane was a wonderful car, a Subaru Impreza WRX (2003, the best of all body styles and far better than the current one). I liked driving her very very much. I highly recommend this car. It's fun to drive, comfortable, and I had no maintenance problems with her except the time her passenger door stopped locking with the remote. I took her to the dealership and they reconnected a wire. Didn't cost anything.

But Mary Jane drank premium fuel. Although I managed to squeeze about 23 mpg out of her (I usually beat the estimates; I assume this means I don't know how to drive), that extra 20 cents per gallon adds up after a while.... like, a month. Also, it was costing me $1100+ every six months to keep her insured. That's no fun whatsoever. And at 54,000 miles, Mary Jane had entered middle age. Although she had entered it gracefully, age is not kind to turbochargers and intercoolers and other things like that. She was going to start costing some serious money.

Years ago (three and a half or so), I bought Mary Jane in a bit of youthful exuberance. I thought I would be racing her by now. Three years later I have come to recognize--as many of my friends probably recognized immediately--that I am never going to race my car, certainly not so long as I have only one car. Since I don't expect to ever be rich and have extra cars... well, you get the picture. Why drive a middle-aged racecar that's never going to be raced and is expensive to keep fuelled?
Well, because you love her. And I did.

I'd thought about selling her earlier this year, even did a few test drives. But I wanted to pay her off; gave me more options on the trade-in. So the last two months have been my last dance with Mary Jane. She's a fun car. I'll miss her, just as I miss Buffy and Sally who preceeded her. But she deserves an owner who'll race her, or at least rice her. It's what she wants. I'm sure she'll get it.

Incidentally, if you are such a person, I know where a well-maintained white WRX is for sale in Tampa, and I know how much the dealership paid for it, so if you want one... well, you know who to call. Seriously, I want to know how much they charge for her. I may drive by the lot later this week just to look at her. I imagine she'll show up on Autotrader in the next couple days.

So, as I said, I have a shiny new car. I bought Mary Jane when she had less than 4000 miles one her. She was basically new, but someone else had paid the no-longer-new depreciation. I went the same route again on Saturday. Having scouted the dealerships and the cars available, and talked with several noted sources on cars, I settled on a particular vehicle at a particular lot in north Tampa, a red Mazda 3 5-door (touring edition), manual transmission, leather seats, sunroof, and less than 8000 miles.
I knew what Mary Jane was worth. I knew what the new car was worth. I estimated the difference in values and used that as my bargaining tool. It was a satisfying transaction. On the way home, the car told me her name. Her name is Zora. I don't know why, but it's what she told me.

So without further ado, Smitty's World proudly presents Zora:

The Jump

Safari Post VI

We had to leave Lake Manyara National Park. The sun was going down and it was time to get on up the hill to the lodge. Lake Manyara Lodge overlooks the lake and park. I don't know who runs the thing, possibly the Tanzanian government, but it was fairly nice. We were surprised to see that, rather than four rooms, we had only two. We'd arranged for "a double and three singles." What happened instead was a room for a double, and a room for three singles. Our room was a little tight, but we adjusted quickly. Besides, what exactly were we going to do in our room apart from sleep? The electricity cut off after ten and you couldn't drink the water.

So the first thing we did was grab our cameras and go outside. Standing at the edge of the rift valley escarpment we saw the very same herd of elephants we had driven by on our way out of the park. Of course from this distance they were more like dots than elephants, but if you're creative you can make them out. I like the colors in this photo; the horizon is somewhere out there between the lake and the pink line of clouds.


Then I turned around and took a picture of the lodge itself. It was wonderful out, in the seventies, and had been all day and would be most of the week. The pool looked inviting, but it was extremely cold. Behind the pool is the dining room. Every day, we got dinner and breakfast at the lodge, and made a boxed lunch for the trip. All the meals were paid for; unless you wanted booze you didn't have to pay anything out of pocket for the entire safari. Pretty sweet deal. On the left side of the picture, behind the palm tree on the second floor, is my room.


To the south down the escarpment... it was really freakin' pretty out. You can see the lake, the plain, the forest, and then the face of the escarpment beneath those incredible late evening clouds.


Same time of day, looking to the west. You can see the northern end of the lake, and the forest.


So that evening we had a wonderful dinner, and a nice cup of tea (I had a nice cup of tea about fourteen times a day on safari), and sat out on the patio to read and chat. And then... then there were the dancers.

Previous visitors to Lake Manyara had raved about the tribal dancers. So we decided to stay and watch. They were going to be performing native ceremonial dances. Native. Ceremonial. Um.

I was not, personally, aware than the bump 'n grind was a native ceremonial dance among the Maasai people. Or the dance where the guy acts like he's starting a motorcycle. Never would have guessed. Then they passed the tip bucket around. We... um... slipped out through the dining room.

The next morning there was a glorious sunrise. I have 23 pictures of it. Here are four of them:




Next time: Off to the Serengeti!

Safari Post I (Introduction)
Safari Post II (Nairobi)
Safari Post III (Arusha – The Safari Begins)
Safari Post IV - Lake Manyara A
Safari Post V - Lake Manyara B
Safari Post VI - Lake Manyara Lodge
Safari Post VII - Off to Serengeti!

The Jump

Safari Post V

We'd spent half our time at Lake Manyara already, and seen a lot of different animals. One thing we had not seen, however, was the horizon. It kept disappearing into the haze, so that mountains at the south end of the lake appeared to just float in the middle of nowhere.


But there was one direction in which we could very clearly see a horizon. That is in fact not the real "horizon," for you sticklers. It's a line of flamingos standing at the edge of the water on the east side of the lake. You can see a bit of water in front of them. If you're extremely creative, you can pick out individual flamingos. Or, maybe it's better if you're drunk.


Wild poultry is always an amusing sight. Africa is swarming with the local version of pheasants or whatever, known as "guineafowl." They have funny blue heads and speckled bodies and they're shaped vaguely like boxes. These particular guineafowl are accompanied by a grey vervet monkey hanging out in the shade of a particularly tall weed.


Later we were driving along and saw two giraffes. One of them was taller than the other. They ambled along together, and then we realized that the little one and the big one were related. Now what's most interesting is that this nursing baby had been happily browsing on acacia leaves moments before this picture was taken. But it never hurts to get a little supplemental snack in... and after all, those acacias are covered in thorns and can't possibly taste good.


Then we came upon a family of elephants. I don't generally think of November as the time for babies... but then, we were south of the equator, so November is more like May, and babies come in the spring, so... okay. Babies in November. Africa is cool like that. Isn't he a cutie?


Now, Africa has large birds to go along with the large animals. You know all about the ostriches. These birds are much more interesting. These are ground hornbills. They form lifelong mating couples (like the dik-diks from yesterday), but live in groups of a dozen or so. This pair look very loving, don't they? Note the youngsters over there under the log on the left.


Unfortunately, our day at Lake Manyara eventually drew to a close. The last place we visited was the Hippo Pool. It's a pool. With hippos. Hippopotamuses, to be exact; hippopotami is also an acceptable pluralization, but if you've ever heard the silly Christmas "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas" you know the only appropriate word is 'hippopotamuses', if not 'hippopotamussesses'. In any event, this pool is formed where the Msasa River runs into Lake Manyara. This picture has at least 27 hippos here, and maybe more. See if you can spot them all.


On our way out of the park, leaving the hippo pool, we drove right through the middle of this herd of elephants. There are at least a dozen here, including a baby. They were just enjoying the late afternoon sun at the edge of the forest. It was a nice note to end the day.


Safari Post I (Introduction)
Safari Post II (Nairobi)
Safari Post III (Arusha – The Safari Begins)
Safari Post IV - Lake Manyara A
Safari Post V - Lake Manyara B
Safari Post VI - Lake Manyara Lodge
Safari Post VII - Off to Serengeti!

The Jump

Safari Post IV

Okay… when last we were on safari (which was two months ago; I'm really sorry about the delay here. Technical problems suck), we had finally arrived in beautiful Tanzania and begun the real safari. The first park we visited, just outside the town of Mto wa Mbu, was Lake Manyara National Park.

We drove into the park and stopped at the visitor center, which like visitor centers at national parks in the United States has knick-knacks and books for sale and a few simplistic displays about the geography of the park. A lot of the trees on the visitor center boardwalk look vaguely familiar. The visitor center is in a part of the park that is a lush forest of fig and mahogany, without the acacias and other thornbushes that you associate with Africa. It sort of looks like the forested parts of the Southeast. Also, there are no animals at the park entrance apart from millions of ants and a solitary, possibly dead, spider with nothing in its web. Never having heard of Lake Manyara, I began to wonder what we were doing here. Bryson (our driver, if you can recall back from our last post several weeks ago…) assured us this was a very good park—lots of animals, but no lions. Bryson had put the top up on the truck, so we could stand up and look out the roof.

We drove into the park on a dirt road. All roads in all national parks in Tanzania are dirt, although the road to the park was very nicely paved. This isn't so much a matter of wanting to preserve the natural habitat as it is a convenient excuse to cover for the government's inability to pave the country's roads. The dirt road soon crossed a large stone bridge, and sitting on a tree near the bridge was a lone baboon. We took a picture. Thus far the park had been as devoid of wildlife as a highway median.

Later we were passing through dense trees and came upon two stopped vehicles sprouting camera lenses. We looked and looked into the dense underbrush, but saw nothing, not even a moving tree branch. We heard… idling truck engines. Nothing. Bryson drove on.

We made a few turns through variable flora and finally started up a hill. Through breaks in the trees we could see the actual Lake Manyara*, and the short plain leading to it. It was pretty. There were no animals, but it was pretty. Pretty is good.

It was pushing one. We were hungry. I was ready to tear into the first bag of chili-lemon chips when we stopped at a picnic area. Bryson produced boxed lunches, which had been hiding on the floor of the front seat, out of the sun. We scrambled out of the truck, cameras in hand, hoping to catch a glimpse of… something. The picnic area ended in a near-vertical drop of eighty or a hundred feet, beyond the bottom of which the park sloped slowly down through thick forest to the plains and then to the lake. And then… there! Off in the distance! That thing that looks like a tree? It's a giraffe! And what's that behind it? Is that an elephant? Wow!

We took copious pictures of animals very very far away in the distance, unsure whether we'd get any better pictures. I tried repeatedly to snap a photo of a brilliantly colored bird in an acacia tree near our table, but it was camera shy.

Lunch was good, a quarter of a (small) fried chicken, buttered roll, carrot salad sandwich, cucumber and carrots, peanut butter crackers and other assorted snacks, and for dessert a little wedge of soft cheese and Cadbury milk chocolates. Mmm-mm! I was happy, and we didn't even have to attack the chips.

We trundled on back down the hill from the picnic area and entered thick brush. Then, suddenly: an elephant!
He had clearly been in a fight or two in his day (we hope) and was missing a tusk, but there he was, right beside the road. Two or three other elephants were hiding back in the brush as well. That was certainly cool!

Bryson put the truck back into gear and we drove about seven feet, and then on the other side of the road: a dik-dik! I was a total animal nerd when I was little (I have no regrets whatsoever) so I sort of knew what all the animals were before Bryson said so… but I didn't want to say, usually. But dik-diks are very cool and I shouted "It's a dik-dik!" in the tone of voice you'd reserve for shouting "I won the lottery!" when I saw it. They are cute little creatures. This is one of the smallest of antelopes, and in recent years there has actually been discussion of raising them for meat in New Zealand. They certainly don't take up much space. Dik-diks are monogamous and mate for life, which could make them a little... odd for livestock raising.

Lake Manyara was turning into a better park than we'd anticipated. Just a moment later we drove by this brightly colored kingfisher sitting before a thicket. I was still afraid to use the digital zoom on my camera, or the kingfisher would be somewhat bigger in this image.


Very shortly we came up herds of impala. This is a reasonably fast antelope, namesake of a Chevrolet popular with police departments. It may or may not be the fastest of antelopes, depending on who you talk to; I'm disinclined to think it is but it has a cool name. I have many, many pictures of impala of varying quality, including some with numerous babies (this one only has one baby), but I like this picture because the doe in the foreground appears to be giving us the evil eye—which caught up with us the next day.

We were having a very good time now. We saw zebras and giraffes, and more elephants, and then we were tooling along the road through a thin forest of thorny acacias when I spied something in the road up ahead. "I think it's a tortoise," I said, proving that animal nerd or not I was not really that great at guessing wildlife from a distance. We rolled to a stop in front of two very busy little dung beetles. I don't wish to speculate on exactly what dung beetles do with dung, but this pair had a ball slightly larger than a softball. The black one just hung on to the ball, moving about on it to aid in steering. The brown one did all the pushing. Both were very actively involved in getting their prize across the road. We watched them go, and declined to speculate on what they were doing with the dung, and drove on.

We happened upon many, many impala throughout the day. Apart from the face on their rump, they look very similar to a standard white-tailed deer such as you'd see in the states. But they aren't deer. They're antelope, and more closely related to your standard dairy cow than to the deer they more closely resemble. A giraffe, on the other hand, is not anything at all apart from a giraffe. We rarely saw more than three or four giraffes at once, though I kept a steady (and fruitless) lookout for herds. At Lake Manyara, with an abundance of trees and seemingly few predators (sources disagree on the presence of lions; there are no hyenas, but there are leopards in the park. We didn't see any large predators though leopards are evidently quite numerous (leopards are very hard to spot); there are smaller cats and there may be jackals as well, but certainly nothing else big enough to bring down a healthy zebra or even an ill giraffe), the giraffes and impala and zebras just sort of hang out in clearings together and munch, and don't seem to worry much about anything. Here are all three of them together, though you may have a tough time spotting the zebra (ha ha! Of course you can't spot a zebra; they have stripes!). (Sorry about that.)

Later still we happened upon this happy troop of baboons. Rather than wandering into town, these guys were perfectly happy to remain in the park and forage. This particular troop had a baby, but it was hideously ugly and I didn't want to scare anyone by putting his picture up.

Tomorrow we'll continue with more of Lake Manyara. I know you're conditioned to assume you won't see another safari post for weeks, but in fact the next one is already written! See you tomorrow!

Safari Post I (Introduction)
Safari Post II (Nairobi)
Safari Post III (Arusha – The Safari Begins)
Safari Post IV - Lake Manyara A
Safari Post V - Lake Manyara B
Safari Post VI - Lake Manyara Lodge
Safari Post VII - Off to Serengeti!

*Wikipedia's article says the park has lions, as does the government of Tanzania's official website on the park, but Bryson said he'd never seen them and he's been driving safaris for a decade. They climb trees, like leopards. Maybe they're just light-colored leopards; in any event we didn't see any.

The Jump

Smitty's Back!

Hooray! I finally get to check my email and post to the blog again! I hate having to spend money to do that, but clearly other options were not open to me. Thanks to the good people at Bright House Networks I now have high-speed internet service as well as super-limited cable (networks and public access, basically), but it only costs me about forty dollars a month. If you still believe Smitty can be reached at an Earthlink email address, now would be a good time to update your records as Earthlink will be a thing of the past very shortly. Possibly later this afternoon.

And I only had to miss two nights of American Idol! Yaay!

The Jump

We seem to be experiencing technical difficulties...

... and, crap like I've never seen!

Anyway, for whatever reason I can no longer get a solid wireless connection from any of my preferred sites. Although the computer claims to be connected at thus-and-such a speed, Firefox can't find anything. So today I finally get a chance to get online and post a safari post etc and I can't get anything to work. I'm reduced to going to the library and putting in this cheap "sorry no updates my shit sucks" post to tide you over until I either figure out what's wrong or just bite the bullet and get my own network. Probably the latter although I do not want to do that.

I'll be back soon. I hope...

By the way, American Idol starts tonight and I still can't pick up the local fox affiliate on my television. Not sure what's going on there but I'm a smidge upset by that. If you have any suggestions for my Luddite technical difficulties... well, don't bother emailing. I guess you could call. My cell phone still works. I think.

The Jump

Just a Wee Bit Late

About five months ago, while I was deployed, Dell began a recall on their laptop batteries, which occasionally burst into flames in highly photogenic fashion. The office in which I worked contained dozens of Dell laptops, and one evening for want of anything better to do I examined all the laptops, typed all their battery serial numbers into Dell’s website, and discovered that eight of our laptops had batteries needing to be replaced. So I ordered them. Thinking, as I did, that they would arrive in about a month.

They never did arrive.

Then, yesterday, I received a package in the mail. You already know what it was—a single Dell battery, for a laptop in Djibouti. The package had in fact gone to Djibouti first, before being forwarded to me at home.

I’m certainly not going to pay to send the thing back to Djibouti. I don’t—and never again will—own a Dell laptop, so I have no need to keep it. I’ll probably sell it on eBay or something. As it is most of the computers that needed batteries were eventually replaced by the comm folks over there without waiting for new batteries to arrive.

Now I’m just wondering… will I be getting seven more of these?

The Jump

Plain Talk

Our new governor, Charlie Crist, has decided that state government needs to be easier to understand. This is a sneaky way of allowing the people who pay to operate the government to have a better idea of what it’s doing. It may lead to more citizen involvement, which means soon lobbyists and legislators will start complaining that the so-called “plain talk” order is a bad idea. But until they do, state agencies are required to start toning down the jargon.

I haven’t formed an opinion of Crist yet; I remain concerned about his notion that “growth will pay for itself,” which I consider absurd and provably false (look at the last 80 years of Florida history and tell me growth has paid for itself), but I don’t know whether he’ll do anything about that. So I’m going on what he does, instead of what he’s said; he’s a politician after all and nothing he says should be taken at face value anyway. Based on the “plain talk” initiative, I kinda like him.

But as the article linked here demonstrates (there’ve been a dozen such lately in papers across the state), Florida government agencies have a great deal of work to do in making themselves understood. The linked article demonstrates an “old version” and a “new version” of a letter, and I don’t really think the new version is all that great. Seems to me there’s ample opportunity here for state agencies to hire on staff solely to rewrite official documents.

I am offering myself for this position. I can work from home, and you can hire me as a temp. You can even hire me as an independent contractor, if you think it’s still important that your agency appear to be working with contractors instead of hiring new government employees. I work pretty cheap. And, frankly, you need me. So please respond with your agency’s name and a phone number where I can reach you.

Thank you.

The Jump

Taters

It's a cool, dreary day here in Tampa. I've been spending the day reading and working on Lauderdale, and taking periodic breaks to work on my culinary masterpiece of the day, lentil soup. The broth has been on since about noon. Around three I added the leeks, potatoes, and parsnips.

The potatoes interested me. I purchased a bag of yellow potatoes at the commissary and didn't think much of it, but when I pulled the bag from the fridge I happened to see written on it: "Same-size potatoes." It's in small print on the front. Same-size potatoes.

They are. It's weird. I mean, it's such a small thing. When I want to put in another potato, I don't have to dig for one the right size. They're all the same size.

I've never bought a bag of potatoes that were all the same size before. How convenient. I wonder how much more it costs in production terms, because I assume they either pay somebody or installed some machine to make sure every bag contains potatoes the same size. And I thought there'd been no real innovations in produce since the honeycrisp apple.

The Jump

Nature's Building Blocks

Nature's Building Blocks, by John Emsley (a Cambridge chemist), has been hanging around the periphery of my reading for almost two years. It has in its time been the reading material of choice in the guest bath, it accompanied me to the doctor's office to pass the time waiting for last year's annual physical, and it spent much of last autumn sitting by the porch door for me to take out and read any time I had just a few minutes to spare. Such a book could not possibly appear on my "Now Reading" list, but nor could a book as fascinating and enjoyable as this not warrant a full review.

This is a delightful little book of the sort that you can open to any page and find something interesting. It takes the form of a series of essays about each element on the periodic table (as well as one on the history of the table itself). These range in length from 9 pages for major elements like hydrogen or oxygen, to 3 pages for uncommon things like hafnium, or heavy radioactive elements like berkelium that mainly exist in laboratories. There are also separate essays covering the "Transfermium Elements," which are created in laboratories and only last a few seconds (if that), and the Lanthanides (also called "rare-earth elements," though they are hardly rare) as a group (each lanthanide has its own entry as well).

Each essay is divided under several subheadings: Cosmic Element, Human Element, Food Element, Medical Element, Element of History, Element of War, Economic Element, Environmental Element, Chemical Element, and Element of Surprises. Each element has at least one surprise, except one, which is only surprising because there is absolutely nothing surprising about it. I won't tell you which one it is. You probably haven't heard of it anyway; I hadn't.

The book is just plain fascinating, even if you have no interest in chemistry. It's written for a general audience and the prose is light and engaging. Pick an element, any element, and you will find something unique and interesting about it. Wondering why there's manganese in your daily multivitamin? You'll find out why here. Never heard of tantalum? Well, don't feel bad; who has? Amazingly, there's a form of tantalum carbide that grows a crystal harder than diamond. Pretty nifty, eh? It's probably not going to replace diamond rings any time soon, though.

Nothing in this book is earth-shattering. It won't change your life or make you more popular at parties. But it is an intriguing and often amusing read, and if you can find a copy at the bookstore (good luck), you'll certainly enjoy having it on your bookshelf for a few minutes' diversion or the settling of disputes.

The Jump

On the Road

I've had this on my bookshelf for so long I don't even remember when I got it or if it's even actually mine and not one I snagged from a friend. I've been meaning to read it forever but other things kept coming up. I brought it along on safari because it seemed like the right sort of book for that. It wasn't. That's not to say it was the wrong book, but Facing the Congo would have been much better for safari.

I have one important comment up front: reading this book is like taking a dose of Benzedrine. You don't need any uppers for at least the next half hour after you're done reading. They say Kerouac wrote the thing in three weeks (to which some eminence, Tom Wolfe I think, said, "That's not writing, that's typing.") and that manic energy flows off the page and directly into your brainstem as you read. I even talked faster after I'd read a few pages. People remarked on it. This may not happen to you but be forewarned.

The book is divided up into five parts. The fifth is just a few pages of summary. The fourth is about a trip to Mexico. The first three are… well, frankly, they're all the same. And that really bogged me down. Took me three weeks to get through part three (didn't finish the book until I was home for Christmas, and by then it felt like work).

I don't know why this bothered me so much. I really expected to like this book; people who've read it and who know me, said I'd really like it. And the truth is I absolutely loved part one. Loved it. I felt like I could read it three more times and it would be just as great… and then I did. The rest of the book was basically part one again, with minor changes in setting and tertiary characters.

For such a slim novel to seem so repetitive, so devoid of new material, seems odd, but the plot is as thin as an old dress sock: a couple guys get on the road and beat around the country bumming rides and money and working odd jobs. Towards the end I was starting to think Kerouac wrote it in three weeks because his memory was hazy and he just kept writing the same thing over and over.

But that's not fair, because it's not the same thing over and over. It's incredibly similar things, broken up by some really awesome description. And that's, ultimately, what has to carry you through the later chapters. In part one I was thrilled by the newness of the concept, awed by the vitality of Kerouac's words and sentences, and caught up in the excitement of the characters—the characters' own excitement about America, about going out and seeing it, really experiencing it, their absolute joy of and love for this country and its freedoms.

In part two I was still excited about reading the book, but I realized that the characters were not different than they had been in part one. Dean, I'm sorry to say, is a jackass. Sal comes across as a little dimwitted, although I don't think that's really the case. I think really he's just along for the ride, for whatever the ride may be. That's the point, after all, the point of the book—life is about the experience, about going out and seeing and doing and trying and learning and failing and living. This was a reaction to the notion that life is a certain specific thing, that you are supposed to live a certain way, do certain things. Nah. That's not life. This is life, hitchhiking across the country, working at different jobs, scrumming for your dinner, trying to figure out how to get by on wits alone and still have enough left over to go out, to experience what's out there.

I had a very strong connection to Sal Paradise throughout the book. Sal is the somewhat older, somewhat wiser guy (only somewhat), and he doesn't always initiate the travels so much as he has a yen to do them but needs someone to provide him with a destination or an excuse. Dean Moriarty does both, but as I said he's a jackass. Far be it from me to criticize someone else's lifestyle (except for all those times when I do), but you can't have three wives and five kids and not be able to support a one of them. There's a line somewhere between going out and experiencing all the weirdness life has to offer, and being an irresponsible shitheel. Both are equally fun but only one is remotely honorable.

The other characters apart from Sal and Dean are sketches. We spend some time with them, but what separates them? One has a wife he leaves. One lives in New Orleans and does a lot of drugs. One lives in San Francisco and Sal manages to piss him off but good. But really, what's different about them, one from the next? What do they matter? I'm not sure. They're pretty much the same people from one scene to the next, one voyage to the next, and at the end I'm not real sure they'd changed much. But they were real people, and Sal and Dean really went out there and really met them and hung with them and experienced them, really dug them, grooved with them, whatever sort of beat phrase you want to do. That's what it's all about, is getting out and really digging a guy, you know?

All well and good, but by book three I was just damn tired of the whole thing. There was no change, no real difference in the characters, nothing new. The point—get out and see what's out there, you know, hit the road--was already made, the beast was cooked, the horse was beat. Man, that was a beat horse…

At least in the fourth act we got to go to Mexico, and it felt sort of new again, but only sort of, and Dean was still a jackass. I was tired by then. I was beat. Beat, man. Beat.

But throughout the book there was description, the kind of description that wraps itself around your brain stem and beats itself into you and makes your eyes water and your hair burn and your teeth rattle around in your mouth from the sheer presence of it, the very nearness and certainty and clarity. Awesome stuff. Early on you notice the place descriptions, towns and cities and houses and farms and the road, just the road itself. Later on the descriptions are of people and what they're doing, of jazz music and jazz musicians. Even in the depths of part three when I was sick of the whole damn thing there would come along this amazing, fascinating description of these jazzmen and their tunes. I'd put in some passages but man it doesn't work unless you've already been reading for five minutes and you've got the cadences and the spirit and the feel, man, just the whole beat language and rhythm, rhythms like the jazz that so exulted Sal and Dean, and Jack and Neal in real life. It's amazing.

Sorta sounds like I really dug the book, you know? Only I didn't. Except when I did. It was like that.

But I gotta tell you this, man. I don't get it, you know what I mean? Here was this great piece of American literature, and it was cool, and it was beat, and I liked parts of it, and I just don't feel like I really got it. Why? Why was it so great? As a chronicle? As philosophy? As the new American writing par exemplance? I don't know. Was this supposed to change my life? Affirm it? Transport to a land of ecstasy? Or just, you know, was it just supposed to be a good read? I have to admit it came closer to some of the former than it did the latter.

Have you read On the Road? What did you think?

The Jump