I Would Have Paid Twice as Much for a Quality Splinter

Back in Freshman year of college, I took a trip from Ithaca to Austin in the middle of a school week.

Yes, just like in the movie Road Trip.

No, I've never met Tom Green.

This trip was purely academic, as I was in Austin with a fellow classmate for our Documentary Research class. We were there to interview an FBI crisis negotiator who worked on the infamous Branch Davidian debacle in Waco.

The interview went well, and I learned a lot. (Side note: There's a 99.9999999999999999 % chance that David Koresh was not the second coming of Christ. But if he was, we really screwed the pooch on that one.) Strangely, the thing I remember best from my trip to Austin had nothing to do with the Waco incident. It was a teenage mutant ninja turtle made of aluminum foil.

The streets of Austin were alive and well. The music scene was amazing, the people happy and outgoing, and the street vendors talented. This one kid could make almost anything out of aluminum foil. I told him to do Michelangelo (thus demonstrating my appreciation for art history, 1990's pop culture, and the bastardization of the former by the latter).

When the result was a fully functional ninja turtle, complete with nun chucks, I tipped him twenty dollars. Best money I ever spent.

Now, back in Austin for the second time, I decide to see what the area surrounding the city has to offer. Seeking a break from Walmart, I head to McKinney Falls State Park.

Will I find a foil version of Donatello there? Will McKinney Falls contain the key to the meaning of life? Will it at least have waterfalls?

Tune in soon for the (possibly) thrilling answers to these questions and more!

At Least the Guy Yelling Into His Cell Phone Stopped After a Few Minutes

As I type this, I am having trouble concentrating.

I am in a Starbucks in Houston, Texas, and current van trouble warrants me being in Starbucks in order to write this blog. It is one of the bigger Starbucks I've been in.

There are five customers here, spread throughout the store. I am in the corner typing this blog at a raised stool and counter. Twenty feet away from me, a relatively young couple are quietly reading/working. Between us, two strangers are holding the loudest conversation in the history of Starbucks, completely unaware of the people around them.

Look, I've had many a conversation at Starbucks, but I've at least made sure to keep my voice down. In this instance, the man and woman, 24 and 35 respectively (I feel like I know them now) have been carrying on a conversation for nearly half an hour DESPITE THE FACT THAT THEY ARE SITTING OVER FIFTEEN FEET AWAY FROM EACH OTHER!

Not to sound like a curmudgeon here, but if you're going to talk to a stranger in a public setting for an extended period of time, especially when people near you are clearly trying to read and write, how hard is it to move to one of the many open seats right next to each other and bring down the volume to a reasonable inside level?

The reason I bring this up is not because I can't deal with the noise (although I still hear every single word despite putting on Bose noise-canceling headphones) but because I think it represents a bigger issue that I think merits exploring.

The two in question are clearly educated, reasoned, thinking individuals. I know this because they have brought it up several times during the conversation and made a point to demonstrate their finer intellect. They have also have made a point to bring up how egocentric our society is, how uninformed and unaware we are, and various other issues they have with a perceived lack of common decency.

So essentially, they are acutely aware of widespread cultural and human character flaws and regard them with concern and dismay, but are seemingly incapable of recognizing similar flaws in themselves.

Basically, it is your everyday coffee shop conversation among proud intellectuals who profess many strong points, but undermine those points by displaying them in an overall manner that comes across as more pretentious and self-aggrandizing than an "Inside the Actor's Studio" episode featuring John Malkovich.

I am fully qualified to recognize this scenario because I am often guilty of participating in it.

But when we turn our eye to the bigger picture while ignoring our part in it, we do ourselves a disservice. Nobody respects the lumberjack bemoaning deforestation as he chops down a tree. It's infuriating to listen to a politician railing about the dangers of partisan politics and mudslinging by pointing out how often the other party does it. And it's really difficult to listen to these people rail about common decency while yelling their virtues across the room.

Which reminds me, how obnoxious are those blogs that rant about banal minutia and mild disturbances like the world is coming to an end? I mean, get a twitter account, for God's sake!

Anatomy of a Mechanical Bull Ride

As you might imagine, life on the road can get pretty lonely at times. So when I'm able to set up a date with a woman in Dallas, I am definitely excited. When she suggests going to Cowboys Red River, I am even more intrigued.

Cowboys Red River is an authentic Texan bar. A loud country band plays on stage while hundreds of couples two-step across a circular floor resembling a skating rink. I count somewhere between three and four hundred cowboy hats in the room at any given moment.

I am certainly out of my element, but fortunately for me, my date is not a fan of line dancing. She does, however, intimate that I should ride the mechanical bull located at the back of the bar. Knowing absolutely nothing about riding mechanical bulls, but looking to impress my date, I decide to sit back and watch a few others ride before partaking myself.

I discover most riders break down into one of three categories:

1) The City Slicker. This guy falls off of the bull within the first ten seconds, bringing shame and ridicule to his entire family.

2) The Overly Serious Cowboy. Like the bowler who brings his own ball and shoes to the lanes, this guy is always prepared with chaps, a cowboy hat, and various other bull riding accessories. To him, fake bull-riding is a life and death matter, and he's rather die than fall off that machine.

3) The Drunk Girl. This girl's only concern is that she looks sexy riding the bull. In this case, sexy generally involves dry humping the bull in a drunken stupor.

I am clearly a city slicker, but it's important that I stay on for a decent amount of time considering my date is watching. As I hop on the bull, I notice that my legs hang down all the way to the bull's horns. I'm instructed to grab a piece of rope near my crotch and lean back.

As the bull starts rocking, I start to gain confidence. I'm staying on far longer than I expected, and the only price to pay is the feeling that I'm being repeatedly punched by myself in the crotch. As the bull gets more violent, I start to slide off. My feet get caught in the horns, and I push off to get myself resituated. Apparently, this violates some sacred bull-riding rule, because a woman in the surrounding crowd starts to heckle me, telling me to "quit cheating."

Unfortunately, my long legs and the increasing movement of the bull make it impossible for me to position my feet from underneath the horns, and when the bull finally bucks me off, my foot gets tangled up in them. As the crowd looks on, I am stuck on my back with my size 16 sticking straight up in the air.

There is nothing more reassuring than being stuck on the ground with your foot caught in a mechanical bull while a crowd looks on. It is not an empowering position. After about thirty seconds, or what seems like a year, the bull operator moves the horn and sets my foot free.

With a bruised crotch, a battered shin, and a damaged ego, I stumble back to my date, who is now looking at me with an expression containing an odd mix of pity, disdain, and amusement.

There will be no second date.

Vans are Like Cubicles on Wheels

Against all odds, I've been hired for a full-time job in Houston. As much as I'd like to dedicate all of my time to this project, my bank account is dangerously close to empty.

Now, I'm not opposed to the whole "starving artist" thing, and I'm experienced in the whole "having no money" thing, but I've grown attached to the van and I can't keep traveling the country in it without earning some income first. So I'm going to be mixing this project with my new job for a little while and documenting a different approach to finding the meaning of life.

What this means for Project Meaning:

+ I will still be exploring adventures on my time off and am dedicated to continuing to focus on the bigger picture.

+ I will continue blogging here and (because I've been lazy with blogging the last couple months) you should not expect much of a drop-off in blogs. I intend to provide, on average, three to four blogs per week.

+ I will still be living out of the van, meeting and learning from as many interesting characters as possible, and attempting existential experiments.

Not much should change, but I wanted to keep everyone updated. Tune in for the next week to read about mechanical bull-riding injuries, hide and seek shortcomings, and my short stint as a viable political candidate.

For Whom the Booth Tolls

Dallas is a sprawling city with an abundance of intersecting highways. A disturbing number of these highways require tolls. I am vaguely familiar with toll roads from crossing the country, but Dallas is the first place I've experienced that requires a fee to travel within the city limits.


I could provide fair, balanced analysis and mention the arguments in favor of the tolls, but I won't. Instead, I'll summarize the Dallas toll system with a simple yet fundamentally sound point: It sucks.

I traveled ten miles...TEN MILES!...and was stopped not once, but twice by toll booths asking for one dollar a piece. As if gas prices weren't rough enough, paying two dollars to go ten miles is asinine.

Fortunately, I discovered that my GPS system contains a function that allows me to avoid tolls when going somewhere. I had to go out of my way, and probably split the difference in gas money used, but as long as my money isn't going to the city of Dallas for their insane toll system, I'm happy.

Dallas residents aren't slowed down by the tolls, because they pay for EZ Pass, which still requires a fee but allows unfettered access past the tolls. A local I talked to estimated that she spends roughly sixty dollars a month for EZ Pass. Sixty dollars a month!

I can not in good conscience support this madness, so I am hereby adding "toll booths" to my growing list of items that are definitively not the meaning of life.

The case against toll booths:

+ They provide jobs, but not jobs any sane person would want. Any monetary compensation for otherwised unemployed people is easily counteracted by the inevitable depression that comes from sitting in an enclosed space for hours on end, doing a mindless task for a large group of people united only in their disdain for you.

+ Nobody is happy to pay a toll. This makes for an increased number of pissed off drivers on the road, which is never a good thing.

+ If you don't know they're coming, you risk the possibility of not having the correct change and then choosing between a) slowing down traffic while you search your seats and glove compartment or b) breaking the law and risking a ridiculous fine.

+ They bring a negative association to your city for visiting tourists. I now resent Dallas for more than its football team.

+ They're tacky and I hate them. Just saying.

The case for toll booths:

+ They provided inspiration for a character on an Adam Sandler comedy cd.

Yeah. That's pretty much it.

Paint Envy

I've always thought of museums as a really depressing place for an avid art collector to go. I mean, sure, in theory, an avid art collector would have a fine appreciation for artwork and would therefore find the museum captivating, but in reality, aren't we all flawed, self-indulgent, and self-conscious? Or is that just me?

Anyone?

My point is, no matter how great your art collection is, no matter how devoted you are to it, no matter how much money you paid for that Picasso sketch, every personal art collection is going to pale in comparison to the Louvre.

While I was looking at all of the amazing 3300 year old artifacts from King Tut's tomb, all I could think about was how mad I would be if I had just spent two thousand bucks on an "antique" chair from the nineteenth century.

Likewise, when Greg suggests we visit another art museum after the Tut exhibit, I figure it might be a bad idea to citing that any collection, no matter how exquisite, would taste like a McDonald's milkshake after a lobster dinner.

I was right, but that doesn't mean the exhibit didn't have its strong points.


This piece is even cooler than it looks when you consider that it's like a billion feet tall (and I'm not using hyperbole...I hate hyperbole more than I hate the idea of a room filled with a million Nickelback cover bands) and it also has a motorized arm so the statue swings the hammer back and forth.

I'm about 6'5, and I had to stand on my toes in order to pose for this picture. I think the height of the statues was more disturbing than their conspicuous lack of heads.

You can see this statue from the streets of downtown Dallas. It reaches high into the air and incorporates diversity into its message of reaching towards the heavens, including pedestrians from all races, genders, and nations. Still, I bet PETA protests because there are no animals on the beam and, as Friedrich Nietsche once said, "all dogs go to heaven."


But pretty cool art, right?

Not compared to the Louvre.

Metaphorically Speaking

If life were a song
Would you sing along
Or sit back and complain
How the lyrics are wrong?

If life were a race
Would you keep up the pace
Or fall back with a look
Of disdain on your face?

If life were a contest
Would your life be the best
Or would you fit in
And just be one of the rest?

If life were an unfinished poem