and then boom.

flirting with double digits.. making up lost ground.

Daily Distance: 9.65 miles

Total Distance Crossed: 33.68

andwe'reback

Some 20something miles were lost to the Oregon Trail of life these last three days, but the pedometer is back on my belt and we're rolling again. So after working seven hours and walking until i fell asleep on the bart and almost ended up in Millbrae (whatever that means) i'm backbillyandiwantyou.....

Daily Distance: 0.95 miles

Total Distance Crossed: 24.03 miles

Batteries of Zues

neither Walgreens nor Rite Aid carries batteries for the pedometer. over fifteen miles have been pointlessly walked. if this were an episode of Legends of the Hidden Temple, i would be the blue barracudas, and though i would have crossed the steamy moat and kept my balance on the rope swing, i'm struggling to assemble the last pieces of the silver monkey. Doesnt the head go on bottom? Where the hell are the batteries in this town?

Daily Distance: chickensoupforthesouldoesntworkonme

Total Distance Crossed:
farmerbrownshenslaywhiteeggsfarmerwhiteshenslaybrowneggsiftheycombinedtheireffortshowmanyeggswouldbelayedbeforealgorerunsforpresidentagain

Setbacks and Backsets

Foiled on the streets of North Beach, the sidewalk has stolen my one and only battery. 1.6 miles in to the lazy day i knocked the damn thing off and lost it, just like that. just like that? just like that.

The miles i log at work this week need to count, and therefore radio shack must be found pronto. until then, i'm off the clock. sonofa

Daily Distance: 1.6 miles

Total Distance Crossed: 23.08

Mile 19 of 2570

Not only is San Francisco host today to some type of bondage parade where seventy year old men with dyed blue beards are towed behind flowery floats by leather whips, naked on rollerskates.. but it’s also the 57^th anniversary of some landmark in the history of Chinese independence, or so my attempts at reading mandarin billboards lead me to believe.

The streets of Chinatown spilling down into North Beach are staffed to the brink, as orchestras of mosquito-string instruments whine out of every alleyway, and kids release zip-lock bags of goldfish into the hot street. Hawaiian dancers shake it to Hawaii Five-O blasting out of a small P.A. system and everything smells like hair and feathers.

Despite my ipod-plugged ears and recently acquired Louis Vitton sunglasses from a five dollar knockoff stand at the festival, people are approaching me for directions. Which way to the wharf? I can point you there…

Daily Distance: 7.25 miles

Total Distance Crossed: 21.48

East of Oakland, California

Arson At The Petting Factory!

The way i see it, day two was made for kinks.

A recent search of sanfrancisco/brooklyn yielded the myspace page of "power struggle," a severely unimpressive experimental rap group who may or may not be a huge deal in the mission. The music could use some extra fine-tuning, admittedly, but the name of their debut record is "arson at the petting factory" which is probably the greatest title i've ever read with my eyeballs. If you have to now, check them out at:

www.myspace.com/powerstruggle

While not all material posted on this page is promised to be of power struggle caliber, i do hope to cultivate a habit of posting interesting material, links to talented authors, facts about dynamic landscapes and destiny, those sorts of things. If this is going to be a true year-worthy campaign, we must make it our own living room.

Today i realized the errors in the programming of the pedometer for day one. We must have walked in excess of ten miles yesterday, my stride is far closer to 30 inches than 22 per step, and I intend to perfect the measurements over the weekend. This dawned on me today as i logged three miles before noon, entirely on the hardwood floor of my less-pillowed, cedar-scented, home away from home away from home awayfromhomeawayfromhome

Regardless of my error, i will stick by the numbers i earn on the device. You can safely assume that various thousands of miles will be lost to absent-mindedness and riding escalators and dancing quickly, let alone my inability to program things.

And let alone breaking the device four and a half miles into the second day, as i was fetching something for a customer. Picking the round battery up off the floor, i realized that making the pedometer an unobtrusive body part might be trickier than i thought. Only time can fix such things. i was rolling again soon after, but doing foggy addition in my head and disheartened to see the firing squad of zeroes all lined up, following the six hour morning.

Kinks i say. Knots in the proverbial rope. Regardless, i walked over six miles today at work, and intend to duck tape the shit out of the little guy in the near future.

I want to elaborate further on the purpose of this journey. It is meant to be somewhat of a statement about direction, the choices and judgments of a human being, leading at some point into a "real life." At our young age, a number of us are entirely mystified by what purpose we might serve, and what form of “destiny” might manifest itself along the way. Whether you are an “everything is meant for a reason” person or an L. Ron Hubbard person or the person in the Betty Boop costume dancing on Powell Street every day, you are currently making choices that lead you into who you will be. In my own directional insecurity, i have started this log to give myself a goal, a reason to count footsteps, and a concept of physical distance to accompany my emotional.

I want every one of us to be sure that we are going somewhere in our lives, and have at least basic reason to put one foot ahead of the other, even in times of doubt or true love or South America or jail. I want to know and share where i might be, had i veered from my current direction straight across the fruited plain. I want to know where all of you are and what you are looking at when you are walking. I want insight into your lives, an expanding community of people going every possible direction, united by this likeness.

Alright, enough talk. There are hundreds of nights for such things. Stay tuned.

Daily Distance: 6.88 miles

Total Distance Crossed: 14.23 miles

Berkeley, California

First Steps...

On September 21st, 2006, at approximately 11:30 in the morning, a friend gave me a pedometer.

Ever since my arrival to San Francisco a month ago, i have been curious as to the distance i end up traveling in this massive yet accessible city every day. Being the eccentric capital that it is, San Francisco has malformed my entire “walking experience” as i know it, as i have become newly and more acutely aware of the tilted pavement, carnivals of lost-yet-elated tourists, and random motorcycle drag parades.

But what distances are really crossed in our day to day lives, when we commute for what feels like forever to our jobs and classes, to our AA meetings and cello lessons? Every single day, whether it is across the same crosswalks or pacing the same sales floor, we are adding to an invisible count. Shouldn't someone be keeping track? As reluctant as i am to start a new project amidst my overflowing schedule and existential indecision, what better time than a Thursday night in the middle of September to add to the heap?

Here is how this is going to work. i will not only wear the pedometer from now on, and keep tallies of my daily numbers and progress, but i will chart it out slowly but surely across the map of the United States, as if i were to walk from the Golden Gate to Brooklyn Bridge.

A walk across America, that could take anywhere from 12 to 26 months, the range depending on an average daily distance i can’t possibly approximate tonight. There are a number of mathematical issues to be ironed out, and i won’t pretend to know how to deal with half of them. But here are some basic stats:

The distance between the Golden Gate and Brooklyn Bridge is 2,570 miles.

The average human step is measured to be somewhere around 30 inches.

That’s 63,360 inches in a mile, and roughly 163 million inches from bridge to bridge!

Today we programmed my pedometer incorrectly and threw the instructions away. We shorted me thousands of valuable inches and therefore miles by calculating my step at roughly 22 inches. Interestingly enough, height has little to do with step length according to more accomplished minds. Regardless, i took 20,300 steps and walked 7.35 miles across the Golden Gate Bridge and at work today.

This is a fantastic start, and judging by my sore knees, a pace i can’t possibly hope to match on a day to day basis. However, i will finally make my trips up and down the stairs at work worthwhile as i gradually journey through the nation’s heartland, across God’s country, all the way to the island of Manhattan. While it may seem like a virtual treadmill, perhaps i will be somehow reconnected to the landscapes that i once crossed so recklessly by automobile in the days of my undergraduate impulses.

Also, i think it might be great to learn some history about the progression across the United States along the way. Ocean to ocean, end to end, i will be crossing abandoned railroad tracks, seemingly useless deserts, ski towns, cornfields, and i won’t even begin to mention the South. This website will be a record of my progress, and a place to learn some “westoned” facts about the home of the brave. It is a much needed outlet to do some form of writing every single day, or to further neglect my poetry during self-inflicted dry spells.

So let’s go, one step at a time across the United States of America. I’m starting in San Francisco, California, in September 2006. It could take a few months to get out of the state alone, but perhaps this project will just begin to exist in our lives, like our hair. You update it every once in a while, dye it, snip it. It has something to do with who you are, even if it’s falling out. Just give it a little attention every once in a while, live with it, and try to get to a point where you can actually see it getting longer. Even when this metaphor doesn’t make any sense, even when we feel as though we’re running circles around the proverbial gerbil wheel, I want to get the message out there that we are going somewhere. Every single one of us is walking around the world. I’m just going to make it official.

Daily Progress: 7.35 miles.

Total Distance Crossed: 7.35 miles.

San Francisco, CA