Howl

I’m here in Los Angeles, and we went to the beach today. For Memorial Day they had a thing at the pier where Veterans for Peace had put together a miniature Arlington Cemetery where they had a field of crosses, each one representing an American death in Iraq. There were 4300 of them, including four flag-covered casket-size boxes for the four killed this week. It was incredibly hard for me to look at all of it, and I didn’t stay there for long. Reading the message book visitors had signed also hurt quite a bit.

Other than that, things are perfect here so far. Jennie has two Australian girls visiting her now, and I wonder why so many Americans just don’t travel like people from other countries do. Maybe it’s lack of money, maybe lack of time, or maybe it’s cheap American ego, but it seems like young people from other countries travel a lot more than we do; I don’t really understand that. I don’t get how people can just spend their whole lives without seeing the world. The cultures, practices, and ideas found outside of this country, outside of our little personal American boxes, make life so much richer.

Lastly, this blew my mind today. Lebron’s last-second game winner the other night also blew my mind. I think it was a major turning point not just for the series, but for his whole career.

If anyone has ever told you anything about Vegas, no matter how outrageous, it was probably true. So I don’t need to describe it anymore. Casinos, blah blah blah, neon lights, whatever.

I did win 75 bucks playing 5- and 10-dollar blackjack though. Won 60 the first night, then lost 80 really quickly the second night but made 95 at one table in another casino. So 75 total to the plus side. It was kind of cool leaving the blackjack table and walking over to the cashier with a 100-dollar chip. I also made a couple really small NBA playoff bets, because what sports fan goes to Las Vegas without going to the sport book in the casino?

Now I’m in Los Angeles and will be here for about a month before making the drive back across the country to home. On the way into the city today I saw a place having a big sidewalk sale of wholesale Ed Hardy stuff. The douchebag level of the people checking out the sale nearly blew my car off the road.

(I just checked and the spellcheck on this thing recognizes “douchebag” as a valid word.)

I drove from Flagstaff to Las Vegas yesterday; the drive, just like every other drive I’ve made on this trip, was stunningly beautiful. It’s interesting to me to see these places in person and realize how much I didn’t know about the scenery out here. One example: I didn’t realize there were so many mountains out here. I guess I thought Las Vegas and the surrounding area was just out in the desert. These mountains are so gorgeous, and I’m excited about seeing the Rockies on the way back home in a month. I also saw Hoover Dam; it might be the most impressive man-made object I’ve ever seen. It’s so large and impressive.

And now I’m in Vegas, and it’s just like everything you’ve ever heard about it. Everybody is spending all their money and pretending, at least a little bit, to be someone else. But that’s not so bad, is it? Sometimes pretending to be someone else can be a lot of fun, and Vegas is as good a place for that as anywhere else. One thing I learned quickly though: if you’re a pretty girl, or with a pretty girl, you can get into the clubs fast and without a cover. If you’re a guy by yourself, like me, you’re paying the cover and waiting in line.

I walked around the casinos last night till about 4 am and made 60 bucks playing 5-dollar blackjack and different casinos. I’m going to go out and win some more tonight. And who cares if I lose all my money anyway, it’s only my kids’ college fund, right?

The more I listen to this mewithYou cd, the more in total love with it I am. It’s really a special musical work.

I went and saw Sedona today and I liked it a lot better than the Grand Canyon. I think the Canyon is just too big to get any sense of, especially if you just stay on the rim, so it’s hard to really feel strongly about it. But Sedona, man, you’re right down among the huge rocks and the scale is easier to comprehend. The drive in and out of Sedona is strangely a lot like the North Carolina mountains– lots of winding roads and evergreeen trees– but there’s a sense of something different about it, and then all of a sudden you come around one of the bends in the road and there are all the Red Rocks just looming in front of you. It’s incredibly majestic and the views are so special. I decided to go up to Cathedral Rock, the most famous big rock around Sedona, and the lady at the visitor’s center told me “it’s pretty strenuous, it’s a climb rather than a hike.” Man, she wasn’t kidding. The first half was easy and then all of a sudden it’s actually climbing up steep bare rocks. I didn’t make it all the way up because I ran out of water, but I made it pretty close. The views from up there are the kind you really can’t get anywhere else. It’s like when I wrote about driving through New Mexico yesterday–it just takes your breath away and substitutes total wonder, silence, and stillness in its place. It’s impossible not to feel at one with the universe in a very real way from up there.

Today was also the day that the new mewithoutYou album came out. I can tend to facetiously exaggerate when describing something, but I’m not exaggerating this time when I say I think it’s the ultimate realization of what guys like Larry Norman were trying to do when they started Christian rock music, before money and greed got ahold of it. This album is a totally new thing in Christian music. For one thing, it’s thematically different than probably any music that’s ever been released on a Christian label. If you know mewithoutYou at all, you know they’ve always been sort of on the fringes of the Christian industry, writing honestly about doubt and God and love. But this cd expands on all those ideas and opens it to parables involving animals and food; in fact, anthropomorphised animals and food populate most of the album’s songs. For the past few years the band has been touring in a bus run on cooking oil and dumpster-diving for food or having potlucks at their shows, and it comes through on this album. There’s a real sense of how these guys feel about the natural world.

Another thing that makes it so different from other Christian music is that this is surely the first album released on a Christian label that’s largely a Muslim work. The liner notes talk about how many of the songs were inspired by Islamic teaching (and the songwriter and his brother were raised in a house that followed Sufism, a type of mystic Islamic faith), and one of the songs was inspired by the Tao Te Ching. There are also songs taken pretty much straight from the Bible, but this is a cd full of conversation about other religions. The last song on the album is titled “Allah, Allah, Allah” and is written in Arabic script on the liner notes; this song is about how God can be seen in everything, from every person to every blade of grass, and uses the title Allah for God. It inspires the listener, at least it did in me, to think about Christian/Jewish/Muslim history and how all three faiths are borne out of a belief in the same God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (and Ishmael).

This album speaks about food, animals, God, love, forgiveness, and faith in a way deeper than any other Christian album out there, and the music is as brilliant and beautiful as anything else out today. This shouldn’t surprise people who have liked mewithoutYou for years, but for this kind of thing, no doubt the first Islamic Christian album, to be released on a specifically Christian label and be carried in Christian bookstores…I am being honest when I say I think it’s the best Christian album ever.

(I should say, for clarity, that the album is not really a Christian-themed album. It’s a pluralism-themed album if anything. I just mean it’s the best album ever released on a Christian label. Strange that a not-specifically-Christian album is the best ever.)

I saw the Grand Canyon today, and I don’t understand it. I don’t mean that I’m having trouble seeing what the big deal is; I definitely get why people travel to see it and why it’s one of the greatest natural wonders on the planet. What I mean is that I just don’t understand it. I can’t wrap my head around it. It’s too big and too peaceful and too beautiful, but in a way that’s not like the open expanses I wrote about yesterday. I just don’t understand how something like the Grand Canyon happens. Neither explanation I’ve always heard, that it’s caused by millions of years of water or caused by the Biblical flood, makes any sense at all to me. I just… I don’t know. I just don’t understand it. It’s too much of any adjective you can think of to describe it.

My driving today took me across the New Mexico/Arizona border, and I’ve gotta be honest… the part of New Mexico near the border is the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in this country. No question. It’s starkly, breathtakingly, achingly gorgeous. Driving through it sort of made me feel like nothing I’d ever done in my whole life was beautiful, because this kind of thing just blows the top off of any measuring scale. Does that make sense? I don’t know if it does or not.

Last night I saw a movie called Sin Nombre. It’s about a lot of things, including South American immigration and gang violence. I highly recommend it if you can find it in a theater.

My friend Christy Montoya, who believe it or not is from Arizona, told me that Ryan Adams was good music for driving my route today. She was totally right.

Hi Patrick Jenkins.

I’m in Albuquerque, New Mexico now and the trip is still going really well. I’m well over halfway there now, which is nice since I’m getting a little tired of being in the car so much. My joints feel like an old man’s joints from being in the same position for so many hours at a time.

The things I saw today were some of the most beautiful examples of nature I’ve ever seen. Near Amarillo is the second largest canyon in the U.S., Palo Duro Canyon. Five bucks got me in and let me explore as much as I wanted. Since I had to be to Albuquerque tonight I didn’t really have time to go hiking, but I drove the loop road at the bottom of the canyon and walked around for a while on the rim and down inside it. It was really pretty stunning; I don’t even know what to expect tomorrow when I go see the Grand Canyon since it’s nearly seven times as deep and twice as long.

After leaving Palo Duro I drove across the Texas/New Mexico border and into the most wide open space I’ve ever experienced. As I was driving along I knew the land I could see around me stretched for miles, but without any buildings or anything I didn’t understand the scale of it until I noticed the sky ahead of me was filled with these really amazing clouds. I just kind of mentally figured it was like when I see clouds at home: in a few minutes I’ll be under them and then past them. I focused back on the road and kept driving. After about half an hour I noticed the clouds looked like the same ones I had seen earlier. I looked in my rear view mirror and only saw clear sky. I’d been driving for that long and hadn’t gotten noticeably closer. After another 30 minutes I was finally driving under the clouds I had seen an hour before. And I wasn’t just creeping along, I was going 75 the whole way. When I finally understood how large the space I was in was, it completely blew me away. It’s like nothing I’d ever seen before. It’s just miles and miles and miles of grass, hills, scrub trees, and clouds.

I didn’t go to church this morning but I found God today anyway.

I’m now in Amarillo, Texas after driving through rain for almost the whole way from Dallas. I made it to where I’m staying about five minutes before the start of The Preakness, so I got to see a pretty exciting race and keep up my practice of watching all the Triple Crown races.

The drive from Dallas to Amarillo was really gorgeous. Lots of farms and huge open spaces covered in scrub trees and grass. I’ve seen hills and flatland before of course but the mix of topography and vegetation makes for something I’ve never seen before. In the next few days, as I drive across the desert and see the canyons, I’m expecting to be even more awed by the natural world than I already am on this trip.

This morning as I was leaving where I stayed last night, I was running out to my car because it was raining. My left foot hit a painted parking space stripe which I quickly found out was a lot more slippery than the blacktop around it; I went down fast and hard. I didn’t get hurt besides a couple bad scrapes, but I did tear a hole in my shoe that’s too big to sew shut like I did when my dog tore a hole in them earlier. Unfortunately that means I’m going to have to buy a new pair of shoes. Fortunately that means I can provide a new pair of shoes to a kid who needs them, thanks to TOMS shoes. I bought a pair last year and really loved them. Mine were still in good condition until this morning, so now I’ll have to get another pair. If you need new shoes I suggest you take a look at TOMS too.

On the road today I saw a billboard for something I’d never seen before: Budweiser mixed with clamato juice and sold in stores. I don’t know if it’s just in Texas or what, but I can’t imagine how awful beer, clam juice, and tomato juice would be mixed together.

I’m in Dallas now, and leaving for Amarillo in the morning. Dallas is a lot bigger than I thought it was, and the construction and roadwork being done is kind of out of hand. The roads here are confusing, and the lane closures from the roadwork doesn’t help. But downtown Dallas is pretty interesting.

I also went and saw the Nasher today and it was everything I thought it would be. I’ll have some pictures online once I get to California. But it just reinforced how brilliant I think Renzo Piano is. Everything about the building and the gardens is breathtaking, and there were a couple times I was happily shocked at how well the aluminum sun shades on the roof work even though I studied them for two months and knew they worked perfectly. Both the building itself and the gardens are incredibly peaceful and calming even though it’s right in the middle of huge downtown Dallas. You’d never know if someone didn’t tell you. It clearly reaches each one of its goals, which is a really hard thing to do in architecture. It’s a fully realized building at its full potential, and I hardly ever see a building like that; I’m never able to come up with anything that perfect yet. It was a completely worthwhile experience.

The drive from Texarkana to Dallas this morning was a short one. The scenery wasn’t as wide-open as I thought it might be, but I’m guessing I’ll see the kind of huge space Texas is famous for on my drive to Amarillo tomorrow since it’s another 7 hours through the northern middle of the state. The drive has been easy so far and the weather has been perfect. This trip is turning out so well already.

Right now I’m in Texarkana, Texas after leaving Nashville this morning. Every time I’m there I regret ever leaving my friends and moving back to Rock Hill. A lot of us hung out last night and it’s so special to me to be able to see  them becoming photographers and learning how to fix up a house and getting jobs and getting married and buying houses. A few of us were talking later about how we couldn’t believe it had been four years since we graduated college. The passage of time is sort of impossible to understand sometimes.

So then I left in the morning and drove to the Western edge of Tennessee and then all the way across Arkansas and to the eastern edge of The Lone Star State. The driving has been easy so far, and the radio just goes and goes with me. I knew the sort of scenery in Tennessee, but I’d never driven through Arkansas before and I was surprised to see it’s basically like a slightly more hilly Illinois. A lot of farms, a couple crop duster planes that skimmed the highway in front of me, and nice highways for driving long distances.

And now I’ve driven the furthest West I’ve ever driven and I’m in Texas for the first time. Next is Dallas and Renzo Piano’s Nasher Sculpture Center. Then New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and the golden West Coast.