The Chapter of My Life About Seinfeld

In the weeks before I left I intended on writing a good deal of the book’s conclusion on the two and a half day bus ride to Madison, Wisconsin, to have the urgency and movement of the story’s end be in conversation with the advance of the Greyhound, the progress of the American story reinforced by the story’s progress through America.  It seemed perfect: I was taking the trip of the project’s origin in reverse, and ending up where I was, only on the other side—one year later, the next summer, I was going again to visit Brendan in the Midwest, though a few states away from his hometown the location and moment of his completion of college, his last summer credit; and from there I was going to Chicago to fly to the Dominican Republic to the girl I had abandoned a year before; and then in the moment it all made sense, after I returned again, understood how all of my frustrated ambitions, fractured hopes and ironic endeavors could hold each other up, I would take the two and half day bus trip back to California and I would describe it in my notebook and the lessons would be learned, the epiphanies revealed, the chapter of my life about Seinfeld closed.

            As it turned out I wrote nothing.  I deferred, as I had in the initial conception of these hypothetical writings, to the future, the tranquility in which these emotions might be recollected—that is—to this present moment.  But nothing became clear, nothing was solved; all that occurred was the reassertion of every piece of the paradox, and the expenditure of every dollar I earned in the spring.  And that is why nothing was written on the Greyhound.  All I could do was stare out the window at the western half of the United States and wonder if the snacks I spent my last ten dollars on would last me until Salinas, California, and if I could ever move on to the next chapter of my life, or if this was it, already penned—my story to be forever reworked.