SAVAGE STEW AND AMBROSE BIERCE FROM ACROSS CYBERSPACE: More Baseball, Yakking Cats, and How Communication Technologies Shape the World

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- She said she was just bored.

I'd wondered about the text message she'd sent, one of about five from the infamous 323 Area Code Thursday morning, a strange Happy Turkey Day!!! Gobble-Gobble, Jason! :P sent at exactly 4:48 a.m. Pacific Time - arriving here instantly, in Ohio, just after breakfast.

Bored outta my skull. If you're still alone today call me.

Bored in the City of fucking Angels, right smack dab in the middle of striking Hollywood and fire-riddled Malibu, a freeway away from Pasadena and an afternoon train from Santa Barbara.

Her boyfriend had flown back to his parents' house for the holiday, back to the rugged confines of the western Rockies. Her own family was on the road, somewhere, plans made long before an unavoidable work stoppage shut down Tinseltown.

A nice brunch in Beverly Hills would be her only holiday feast, with a girlfriend and an out-of-work set painter.

* * * *

It's funny how Americans like to pretend that the third Thursday in November somehow means something to the rest of the goddamn planet, how we pretend for a day that the Pilgrims and Native Americans really did get along in peace, liked watching football, and traded guns for corn until the advent of shopping malls 400 year later.

Chatting online earlier in the week, my texting actor managed to make Los Angeles sound like the loneliest ghost town in America on Thanksgiving, as if the city would shut down like some rural Wyoming village of a few dozen people.

Very melodramatic, but, well, she's in the drama business...

* * * *

I'd planned on spending the day by myself, reading and watching movies. I turned down several offers to dine with other people's families, in fact, to enjoy the solitude.

I even cooked myself a monstrous pot of turkey sausage stew, put some Calexico on the stereo and settled on a collection of Ambrose Bierce stories while the Limas and kidney beans melted into the meat, fresh sage, onion, and dill weed.

Calexico gave way to some documentary on public television as the stew reduced, public television beget dinner and a DVD, dinner beget dishes to the soothing sounds of Wendy O. Williams, NOFX, and Bad Religion. I cleaned up the stove and countertops to the tune of the Warren Zevon's "Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner"....

Just chillin'. Thursday, I was just thankful to be alive, alone, and without any sort of drama in my life. And I just chilled away an entire day, happy as a clam.

Just as I finished rereading the Bierce's anti-war classic, "Chickamauga," she sent yet another series of texts - again, bored in L.A. after brunch and already halfway through everything stored on her TiVo. Reading the last message, an apology for bothering me, I finally got around to at least beginning to make those follow-up holiday calls I'd been putting off all day.

Starting with the first text of the day, I called back a poor, not-so-starving actor trapped out in the 323, a thespian with nothing better to do on a Thanksgiving in Los Angeles than to subtly hint at the fact that she'd like to chat with a certain librarian/blogger/loner in Oxford Fucking Ohio...

* * * *

We spent the first two and a half hours talking mostly about baseball.

Yes, baseball. Off-season stuff.

Joe Torre, the new Dodgers skipper. Do the Chavez Ravine boys stand a chance, now that L.A. has once again stolen something from old Gotham, a Bronx manager to accessorize their former Brooklyn ballclub? And of another Joe, Cincinnati's Joe Nuxhall... did I get any feedback from the local Reds fans? Did anybody in Oxford Fucking Ohio say anything about it?

Besides being bored, she wanted to verify that, yep, the Zenformation Professional Jason was indeed the same Ohio Jason who'd finally sent his number - discreetly - through a mutual offline acquaintance. And to say she was shocked that we'd met once, at a Central Coast bistro a few years back, through that same acquaintance, would be an understatement.

"You know, dude, you go on these mini-rants where I have no clue what the hell you're talking about. You sound a lot like I imagined you to sound, like you write...

"...And I can tell you used to be in radio. You should try XM or something."

I tried to be entertaining, tried to be a good conversationalist. I've been slipping a bit, having spent a good portion of the last two months in serious dental agony, unable to even speak clearly without slurring or drooling for two weeks.

But, for the most part, I listened. When you're not accustomed to solitude, being alone on a silly holiday can make anybody feel as if they're the last human being on the planet - it's easy to forget things like telephones and the Internet when one is down on themselves.

And, yes, And she just wanted someone, anyone, to talk to her, like an real human being and not some - ugh! - girl from TV! One of her cats has been ill, hakking and yakking up scores of hairballs. Some creepy hippie at the organic market where she shops followed her to her car and almost got pepper-sprayed for insisting that the Burning Man must be followed, at all costs.

She needs a new stylist, one who doesn't yap like a chihuahua about customers behind their backs. And her new Hybrid car doesn't sound right...

And her sick cat ... he yakked up something... while she was driving the I-405 freeway ... in the passenger seat... Oh God, the smell...

* * * *

Only non-relative I talked to all Thanksgiving Day, not counting an interview, via Skype, for a very un-librarian job in Glasgow, Scotland, at just past 2:30 p.m. GMT and an unscheduled online chat with an ex living just outside of Paris.

Hell, my sister was in Southern California herself when I called, my parents six hours up the coast, and my grandmother, back in Virginia and once again able to drive after her near-fatal accident, was making her way through Downtown Richmond traffic to dine with her boyfriend's kinfolk.

Small world, really. Damned thing just keeps shrinking like a wet sweater in a hot dryer.

But at least through our ability to adapt to our situations, to adopt and explore new technologies, and to look inside of ourselves, into our own abilities to share our experiences and to listen to the experiences of others, we're never really that alone in this brave new world.

Thanks to all the changes in our global information infrastructure over the last hundred years, we've witnessed changes so dynamic that the very fabric of humanity has become intertwined with the crackling pulses of electrified airwaves and the miles of cable beneath our feet. Not for everyone yet, sure. But for hundreds of millions of people, the greatest experiment in information-sharing the world has ever seen has already become a way of life.

Rarely are we ever as alone as we feel. When we feel the walls closing in, when we feel abandoned, when a solitary holiday seems like a prison sentence, there's almost always a good book waiting to be read, a community park open, a mountain to climb, a film to watch, or -

- Or somebody to talk to when you're just bored, even if they're on the other side of the world.

We should all be thankful for that.

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CROSSING STATE LINES TO NOWHERE: Of Wonders of the World and Realities of Beauty, Chivas Regal and Beer in a Can

WEST COLLEGE CORNER, Ind. (ZP) -- The bartender shouted last call! just as we stepped out the back door, out into a steel cool October and into the divide that separates two U.S. states.

A town of a thousand residents, split like firewood by a line drawn on a map. College Corner, Ohio, lay less than 75 feet from the doorway of the tavern- disturbingly still, as menacing as a drowned kitten. But in West College Corner, Indiana, on the Hoosier side of town, there's still a packed bar, still life and country laughter and singing.

The Last Viking digs through his pockets for a tin full of mints. He's trying to quit smoking. The temptation offered by an evening's worth of secondhand smoke satisfies nothing, the mints mere placebo to keep the mouth from asking for a cigarette, for one just one more drag off of the ol' coffin nail.

He crunches mints and his eyes water. I puff away of my thirtieth cigarette, a pack and a half in just under 22 hours, trying to remember to turn my head on exhale. We're both three sheets to the wind, firewater eyes filled with bloated pupils, diluted blood forced from our faces faster by the cold.

Mr. Chops, the designated chauffeur, disappeared, lost to tables full of women and slow sips of Indiana-legal cans of Budweiser. Mr. Chops tends to be everyone's friend, even sober - especially if those everyones happen to be fellow musicians, own their own breasts, or can carry on an intelligent conversation.

Calling Chops a sociable guy would be an understatement. Trust me. It's like staring at a naked supermodel for hours and then saying, well, she's kinda cute in the face...

The Viking tells me that he has to let his dogs out, that he wants some company walking the two blocks back to his house. And he tells me, too, that this is his world, his life outside of the quaint brick-and-bullshit facade of Oxford Fucking Ohio.

He sounds almost embarrassed to admit that, yes, the town that feeds us both has become nothing more than a running academic joke, that our paychecks revolve around perpetuating the myth of 1950s ivy-covered youth, and that, yes, he feels more at home crossing the state line, home to a blue-collar nowhere.

As we stumble along crumbling sidewalks and orphaned railroad tracks, I can't help but be envious of a man who finds something meaningful in a place as real as West College Corner, Indiana.

Fuck the myth of Christopher Columbus and Spaniard conquistadors - history remembers their legends, their gilded discoveries of the New World, just as local alumni recall the glory of Oxford. Leif Ericson, and descended spirits, yearn to discover the very real world, to silently find meaning in America's lost nowheres.

Ain't no shame in being a real man in a real world. Hasn't been any shame in it, in North America, since the first settlers crossed over from Asia, since the first Scandinavian explorers came and lost the continent to Spanish, Portuguese, and English conquerors.

The Last Viking popped open a bottle of beer as his dogs ran free into the steel cool October. My jealousy boiled over and I lit another cigarette, my only weapon against a man so free.

My envy could, at least, help keep the mint makers rolling in the dough.

* * * *

The women, the Last Viking promised, wouldn't be much to look at, wouldn't be the sort of barroom eye candy Mr. Chops and I were used to back in Oxford. At least, he promised, we could catch the end of the Boston-Cleveland league championship free of chest-beating, bandwagon Indians fans.

Neither Chops or I were surprised when the Last Viking, in his deviousness, had forgotten to mention that the infamous Viking Tavern housed as many real women as real men on a Saturday night, women who smelled of workweeks and overtime, who spoke with twangs and who danced slow dances with farmer boyfriends and mechanic husbands and weathered strangers.

Jesus H. Christ! I thought, watching these women put in requests to the deejay. Beauty! Pure fucking Venus beauty, free of the bourgeois, the airs of Entitlement!

America the Beautiful, tangible tits and cowgirl ass! Dance Brad Paisley and Kenny Chesney and sing Karaoke into the Indiana night so loud the rich city girls burst into shallow, plastic pieces!

The eye candy be damned. Even Mr. Chops, the Red Sox fan, seemed too distracted to catch the final out of what proved to be a pivotal game in his team's march towards the World Series.

Watching real women dance can make men forget about almost anything, even an American League pennant.

* * * *

The Last Viking didn't need the company to walk his hellhounds. He didn't ask me to walk back to his house for my health, either.

Every human being, every second of every day, exists as nothing more than a motive with a pulse. Motives are the blood of consciousness and impulse, the fuel that feeds the fires of thought. Some motives are mysterious and potentially sinister, like the motives behind the tips of shoelaces, those plastic aglets that nobody seems to question. And some motives are innocent and fruitful.

Some motives, too, are esoteric, supernatural and inspired by God. And men can be motivated to play hands of fate just as surely as men can be motivated towards creation or destruction.

The Viking popped more mints as we walked towards an old shed behind his house, a bright-blue building scarred by sections of missing siding. A lone spotlight illuminated the east side of the garage, a simple incandescent bulb standing watch over a wall and an improvised workbench, cans of red paint and paintbrushes.

The Last Viking didn't say what motivated him to invite me deeper into nowhere. He didn't have to say a word, actually, because, like a mother knows love for a child, some monuments to hope speak more with silence.

The side of the barn contained one of the most beautiful testaments to humanity's enduring spirit, to the power of life and death, I've ever seen. And it's in the middle of a blue-collar nowhere, in West College Corner, Indiana.

* * * *

I've walked the Mall in Washington, touched the names of the Vietnam War casualties on the Wall and stood on the spot where a great man once set my country free, at last, in the shadow of Abraham Lincoln. I've heard lectures by Nobel Peace Prize laureates, listened to speeches delivered by some of the world's leading humanitarians and defenders of those who cannot defend themselves.

And beneath a watching heaven, in the heart of Middle America, across a simple state line and down paved arteries through cornfields and soybean patches, the working class of nowhere in particular created a masterpiece so divinely inspired that the great religious texts of the world seem like coloring books.

You see, there's a woman, a wife and mother next door, fighting cancer, who's endured several rounds of chemotherapy. She spends most of her time in this one lonely room, strength coming and going like a bullet train as she fights a battle that she may lose.

There was a time, not long ago, that the woman stared out of the room's one window and saw nothing but an old blue barn. And then the woman's family decided to paint We Love You, ____, in big billboard letters, on the side of that barn. Friends soon started painting their names and wishes beneath the banner, in bright red. And then strangers started stopping by, too, adding their names.

There are now so many names, so many people stopping by, that there's a can of paint and brushes always ready and waiting, night and day. The owner of the barn not only sanctioned the vandalism but embraced it. And people began cooking for the family, taking different nights a week.

The Last Viking had a real man's tears running down his face as he told the tale - he and his roommate were flipping the bill for the eternal light that allowed the woman to see the wall, any time she wanted to, even in the middle of the darkest night. He cooks on Mondays, when he can.

Not even the most damned demons of hell could laugh at such a monument.

In the cool steel night, beneath a star-filled sky, another man was motivated, by unknown forces, to pick up a paintbrush, pry open a can filled with stiff acrylic, and to add his name to the great organic work:

Jason
Green Bay, VA

The Last Viking wasn't the only one with tears in his eyes.

* * * *

The Last Viking put his dogs away, popped another handful of mints. I lit another cigarette as he talked about the sheer wonder of being able to look up at night, at any time on a clear night, and to see stars - he pointed out Orion, that great bowman in the sky, his belt marking not some silly border between Ohio and Indiana but an ethereal state line between Mankind and Eternity.

We were both still drunk, still lost in conversation and thoughts of the wonders of the world one finds in blue-collar nowheres as we headed back to the bar, back to find the elusive Mr. Chops. As we crossed the railroad tracks, one of those real women and one of those real men walked together, towards an old pick-up. Both said hello, as if the world was perfect.

The world, of course, is far from perfect. But sometimes, crossing state lines to nowhere, mere yards from an Ohio somewhere, can make even imperfection a thing of beauty.

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