Independence Avenue, Washington DC

Monica and I left the Mall but we didn't find a bar. Instead, one block from the Mall we found Curtis and his SUV.

Curtis must have parked up at least two days before the inauguration: the streets were completely cleared and the only vehicles this close to the action were a cop car and a TV truck. He was sitting in his SUV with the windows open and he has LCD televisions in front and back. He turned up the volume and began watching the show.

Monica and I were out of the crush and looking for a party. We looked at each other as we saw the small crowd gathering around the SUV.I lit a cigarette, she took off her hat, and we pressed in. After ten minutes a larger crowd was collecting around the vehicle:















We squeezed in on the nearside and watched the screen between the sun visors.











































The TV truck roared into life at eleven. The news team saw the crowd and came to get a better look:















By half past eleven a hundred people had gathered round - most were refugees from the crush, probably the hundred most shy citizens in Washington, united by a mutual fear of too much humanity. Most shy of all was Curtis: one person in three tapped on the window to thank him and not once did he respond. He silently, grimly watched his television.

Delivery No. 2

Address: Park Slope, Brooklyn

Addressee: Dinah Foer

Sender: Charlotte Salasky

Package: bouquet of carnations, roses, and sprays

[I've impounded this entry for a short while until I find a way to make it accessible by invitation. If you'd like to read it please email me and I'll send it to you - deliverybyhand@gmail.com]

Bar of L'Enfant Plaza Hotel, Washington DC

All I have to offer is proximity. A few sketches of what I got close to on inauguration day:

A man treading on his wife's face. He was trying to climb a tree two feet to my right and slipped as he climbed. His wife, who had been shoving him up by his belt, laughed with pride and his boot slipped and hit her in the grin. He almost fell on me but she recovered well and caught him up, still grinning, with grass on her lip.

Beware the human chain: six or seven people travelling through a crowd holding hands. We lost Ned and Charlotte due to one of these monstrosities. By this point - ten-thirty perhaps, with the oath due at noon - the crowd was so fat that it moved in tides. If you didn't have a tree to anchor yourself to, you would move five yards here, five yards there, just in keeping still.

Some brave fellows climbed Portapotties to escape the deluge, looking like cows on a farm shed when the levees broke. (We subsequently found out that Ned and Charlotte managed this feat, and spent some time directing the flow of human traffic from their exalted position. There is something both right-wing and left-wing about this activity.) We were more or less freaking out, Monica and I, so we left the Mall and contemplated in our naivety finding a bar (note to the uninitiated: finding a bar by the National Mall is like finding a bear by the National Mall).

Some travel writing: nobody I spoke to was from Washington. Georgia, the Carolinas, Minnesota; Kentucky, Alabama, Idaho. People travelled to get here, often a long way, and how the landscape changed as they travelled...It's exactly the journey I want to make, in reverse.

At one point in my breathlessness I whispered 'What a day!' I don't normally do this - five years at a boarding school teaches you even to orgasm silently, so it was a surprise. Bigger though the surprise when Sister Perkins, the spherical lady in front of me, who had already yelled her name at Aretha Franklin, cried out 'What a day! What a day!' Another man joined her: 'What a day! What a day!'
What a day.

National Mall, Washington DC

'And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity...' - from Barack Obama's Inaugural Address, January 20th 2009

It's been a week since the inauguration and I've been struggling to find a theme for an entry. The day was so big, so American, so terribly important that it's almost impossible not to be trite. Many hundreds of articles have been written from better vantage points and with more information, if not enthusiasm,about the significance of the day.

I had hoped the inauguration to be the starting point for the project, thematically speaking: I'm travelling through a newly optimistic America that wants to be explored, and I start with taking its pulse from the heart beat. Europe is beginning to forgive America, a process that started on election day and which continues through the sentence quoted above.

But last Tuesday was not a friendly day. Ned described it later as 'subdued, almost like the people weren't celebrating but bearing witness'. It's taken me a week to agree with him. What I expected, what I hoped to write about, was a huge and raving throng, all human life on the National Mall with their separate stories coming together for one amazing day - there was a throng, but it was quiet. It rustled, rather than roared. The noise was like the sea hitting a barrier reef as heard from inside the lagoon. And when it was finished, when everyone had borne witness, everyone left. The streets were desolate by six.

It's a question of attention - everyone had their whole minds fixed on one specific moment, the taking of the most sacred oath. The focus of the whole day was compressed into a couple of minutes. We walked for almost three hours to get from NW K Street down past the Capitol and onto the Mall; we passed within ten feet of perhaps a hundred thousand people; person blurred into person and I'm sure we were other people's blurs. Nobody was there, everybody was looking forward to the Mall and the oath. The speech, partly, but the oath mainly: one hand raised and a nation delivered. Though I'm probably biased given the title of this blog.

Delaware House rest stop, Interstate 95

Bill walks with a stick. I walk with a stick, but not as slowly as Bill. Bill took the whole ten minute relief stop to walk slowly to the bathroom and back again, struggling with every step. It was below freezing outside and beneath his portliness he looked a brittle man and smoking a cigarette I worried about him.

He returned to the bus last of all the passengers. Sheila, the driver, blonde, African-American and with a bad cough that she excused herself for, saw him contemplate with exhaustion the step down into the parking lot. She hollered out 'Don't move! I'm coming to get you!'

Hiss of escaping air as the door closed. One frail voice - it must have been Bill's wife - wafted up the coach: 'wait!' I can only imagine her anguish, as I didn't turn round. I was looking at Bill, who stood motionless on the sidewalk.

It takes a few seconds to ease a Greyhound into Drive. The expectant hush was mottled: only half the passengers were paying any attention. Sheila made the engine judder and the bus moved forward four feet and stopped. Its door was now over the sidewalk.

One more hiss: Bill had a broad smile on his yellowing face. He grabbed the banister and began, oh so slowly, to haul himself up. I made no move to help him and don't know whether I would have had I been strong. He hid his exertion as he asked Sheila her name - enormous dignity flowed up the stairs; I knew without turning round that his wife was out of her seat. It is the shortest trip I've ever made.

Hand Delivery No. 1

Delivery Address: 2--- Ellicott Street, District of Columbia

Addressee: Josh Foer

Package: Human - Ed Cooke

[I've impounded this entry for a short while until I find a way to make it accessible by invitation. If you'd like to read it please email me and I'll send it to you - deliverybyhand@gmail.com]

Holland Tunnel under the mighty Hudson River

The road trip began with a kidnapping. Text messages ran as follows:

Charlotte:
hey Monica we're going to DC and you're coming. Pick you up at 2?

Monica:
no

Charlotte:
okay have hire car on our way to brooklyn there in twenty

Monica:
no I'm not coming. Really I'm fine you don't have to worry about me

Charlotte:
crossing brooklyn bridge now get your coat

Monica:
wait absolutely not I'm not coming. Please leave me alone

[a short while later]

Monica:
Give me twenty minutes


Many things happened during the short while.

Ned, myself and Charlotte had rented a Dodge Caliber in powder blue to get us through the blizzards and three states to Washington DC. In place of a detailed cast description (one will come, as both Ned and Charlotte are special people and fun and together they are unstoppable), a brief summary, full enough only to inform their criminal activities:

Ned - 27 years old, London-based motivational speaker and memory guru, blocky and not handsome though ludicrously and generously charismatic. Notably able to play human sensibility as though it is a musical instrument and thus a very persuasive man

Charlotte - 24 years old, Virginia belle moved to New York where she delivers great wisdom beyond her years with a sardonic drawl. Ned's cousin but one imagines they would be great friends anyway. Seems to act as a rallying point for the lives of a number of fascinating and to-be-mentioned Americans. Unwilling to be set up with firemen when passing a crime scene

We three decided to include Monica on our trip as she had recently lost her job on a sandiwch blog. On hearing the news she got drunk and tried to cut her wrists with a gummi bear: from that moment we were all on suicide watch. We approached Brooklyn Heights with some optimism that she might relent and the certainty that a jaunt would be good for her.

Springsteen, loud, melted the snowflakes before they could land on the car. We slid rather than rolled onto Hicks Street, a sleepy boulevard populated mainly by the retired. Charlotte honked the Dodge's horn and we all yelled 'Monica!' to leave in no doubt whom we were embarrassing.

No instant reply. Ned braved the slush and went inside. He was buzzed in, to excited whoops from Charlotte and I. Some minutes later a glum face above a red coat came out into the snow. 'I'm not coming, you guys! I'm fine here! I've made ravioli!'

'Monica, we've come all this way out here to get you. Everything's set, all you have to do is get in the car and go.' Charlotte, in her no-nonsense tones reserved in my experience for the sexually predatory

'I hate crowds! There'll be like two million people and no bathrooms. I'm fine, you go.'

'Mon, we won't go without you.'

'Not my problem.'

Ned - 'just get in the car, out of the cold, and we'll talk about it.'

'You think I'm stupid? I'm not getting in that car.'

Charlotte - 'You really sure you won't come?'

'Really sure.'

'Okay then, let's go to Farley's house, we'll take him instead. Hop in, it's just a block away.'

As Monica bent backwards into the front seat we three criminals exchanged glances. We couldn't really believe our luck.

The Dodge sped off through the snow with rising wails from Monica as she acknowledged her tactical error. Charlotte sped through a red light, one hand only on the wheel, taking right turns to avoid intersections and to keep the speed above twenty as Monica threatened to hurl herself out of the car.

Then we hit a stop sign on Orange Street. Nothing to be done, not in this snow, so we ground to a wary halt. Moments before the car stopped Monica bravely hopped out – and the Dodge, continuing, ran over her foot.

We all caught our breath – Monica yelled 'Reverse!' and we didn't quite believe her – Monica yelled 'Fucking Reverse!' and we did believe her – as the Dodge slid back she pulled out her foot and slammed the side of the car. The foot was an inch from being completely flattened. No more words: Monica limp-ran for home, a block away.

The complexity of look I got from Charlotte won't go away fast: she grew up with Monica and so both the near-tragedy and the comedy of the situation were much richer for her. Mirth and mercy fought, under her blonde curls. 'Ed, you'd better go after her,' she whispered, and as he got out she slide the Dodge into drive and edged forwards. 'Where are we going?', I asked stupidly. 'Back to her apartment! We're not done yet...'

It's hard to hide behind a car when you can't bend your leg properly, so we caught up with Monica quite fast. She would not speak to us as we inched along Hicks right behind her, a support vehicle giving support she did not want. A humourous old man with a wizened dog looked on. With what purchase she could muster, Monica slammed the door behind her. Ned got back in and we slowly turned to face each other: triplets in mischief we grinned as Charlotte reached for the horn.

What happened next is unspectacular: we drove back over Brooklyn bridge bombarding Monica with messages and calls (including a thirty-second pep talk from Ned given through a dialling error to Charlotte's mother, who asked 'Ed? Are you trying to tell me you're too drunk to go to the inauguration?'). Within a half hour we had sealed the deal.

Who can say at what point we broke Monica's spirit? Whose rhetorical brilliance or sheer volume jolted her into action? It is said that the physician Franz Mesmer would end his healings with a session on the glass armonica. Human impulses are unclear. With a solemn oath not to talk to anyone, and a half-full bag of Pirate's Booty, Monica climbed in and we drove into the sunset over Brooklyn Bridge.

More to come...

Taxicab on FDR Expressway under UN Plaza

America seems to inspire generalisations, perhaps because the sense of American identity is so strong and vivid. A number of American stereotypes has crossed the Atlantic. I know of very few Luxembourgeois stereotypes despite the shorter distance that separates Luxembourg from the UK.

It strikes me that any attempt to write about the 'national character' assumes there is one, and that this might not be helpful to an explorer. Every American I have met so far has been massively warm and open, but can their relative warmths be compared? Can I compare the inspirations for a free cocktail hastily slipped by, for a party invitation on two minutes' notice, for an embrace that was bittersweet because our tongues touching prevented our talking?

On reflection, I am off the hook. Interpretation is your job: all I have to do is the legwork.

---
From John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, Viking Penguin, 1962:

A trip, a safari, an explanation, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself: no two are alike....In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. I feel better for having said this, although only those who have experienced it will understand it.

Uptown Local platform, Spring Street subway (4,5,6)

From Michel de Montaigne's On Friendship, 1580, trans. Screech, Penguin, 1991:

There seems to be nothing for which Nature has better prepared us than for fellowship

There have been philosophers who held [bonds of friendship between father and son] in contempt - witness Aristippus: when he was being pressed about the affection which he owed to his children since they had sprung from him, he began to spit, saying that too sprung from him, and that we also engender lice and worms.

Flames of passion...are fickle, fluctuating and variable; it is a feverish fire, subject to attacks and relapses, whidch only gets a hold of a corner of us. The love of friends is a general universal warmth, temperate moreover and smooth, a warmth which is constant and at rest, all gentleness and evenness, having nothing sharp nor keen. What is more, sexual love is but a mad craving for something that escapes us. compare with Unger's phrase 'their sense that something is missing from their national and personal lives' for an interesting insight into American sexuality

Skits and Tits, Bowery Poetry Club and Cafe

This entry is about sex and a Southern Gentleman.

Pinkie Special was playing air guitar - at first, literally, then she found a prop: from between her legs slowly she pulled her tampon string and plucked it with all five fingers.

The crowd was forty strong. Most of the punters knew a member of the cast and there was an easy air - new friends were being made amongst old. It seemed Ned and I were the only newcomers to 'Skits and Tits', a night of standup comedy and burlesque on Bowery.

The picking of the string pulled the tampon out inch by inch until out it fell and quivered. Then she jerked it aloft, a cat with a mouse as a trophy. The crowd as one hushed for a split second, the squeezing of a pod which then exploded into yells of delight at the descent of the tampon into Pinkie Special's mouth. (I have this detail only from Ned). Then a red slingshot into the fourth row: a bespectacled man, the younger brother of young parents, caught it and crowed as if he'd snaffled a home run.

She turned; she bowed; she got a smack on the ass from the female compere as she ran off the stage. It was generally found difficult to calm down.

America is a sexy place: the internal is externalised over here, private parts become public. Porn is bigger than non-sexual cinema (if such a thing exists). Senators take a cocktail at the Playboy Mansion. The symbol of this city is a woman standing with a flaming torch representing Liberty. America is Pinkie Special holding up her femininity to be admired, devoured and used as a weapon.

As I try to make friends in America this sexiness isn't often far from my mind. Farley, a cartoonist with a magnificent moustache, bursts into the apartment where we are finishing a Chinese and yells 'Juniors! Juniors upstairs!' Juniors at NYU have just moved into the apartment above us and are having a house party (in Soho? Many bars around, then I realise they are not yet 21). Farley explains that the sound of Coolio dragged him and his friends up beyond us to ggtecrash. He has been testing out a new temporary public persona: gay film critic ('so I said 'want to see Milk? save yourself a ticket, it's a disaster movie.') He has a southern drawl and extraordinary charm, either as a gay film critic or a professor of dinosaurs or a friend of a friend.


Fasrley made a lot of friends in this guise. Watching him talk to the juniors' female cohort - they wore exquisite dresses, one of them held a beer funnel, and their names allegedly all began with R - I was struck by the freedom he had to approach without the threat of sexual conquest. All he spoke to were enthralled without fear.

Does such a threat always exist between those, hetero or homo, for whom sex might be a possibility? Does acquaintance have a narrative to it - either sex or deeper friendship - to be pursued or frustrated? Or can you make an acquaintance with no tense except the present? I don't yet know. I do know that the American tendency to embrace the future tense, strong these days, makes the present a wider space more thrilling to explore.

Pinkie Special

'I write this with my feet in the kitchen sink' - Charlotte's flat, Sullivan Street

Roberto Mangabeira Unger,political philosopher, in What Should the Left Propose?, Verso, 2005:

The characteristic qualities of the American people are their energy, their ingenuity, their generosity, their practical good faith, their readiness to cooperate, and their sense that something is missing from their national and personal lives. This sense inspires their restless striving and their heart-sick longing.

LOGISTICS UPDATE 18th January 2009

Logistics update - thus far I have potential deliveries in the following cities (in no particular order):

Cincinnati Ohio
New York New York
Montreal Quebec
Fort Lauderdale Florida
Austin Texas
San Antonio Texas
Washington DC
Richmond Virginia
Atlanta Georgia
Los Angeles California
Kalamazoo Michigan
Chicago Illinois
Indianapolis Indiana
Birmingham Alabama
Flagstaff Arizona
Tucson Arizona
New Orleans Louisiana
Boston Massachusetts
Lexington Kentucky

Twenty-three initial connections in nineteen cities. Possibly half a dozen of these connections were gathered before I arrived in the States so since Tuesday I have got to know seventeen people who have a delivery to make. The response to this project has been beyond my wildest expectations, and this is because I have, like many foreigners, resenting the unholy rampages of Bush Republicanism, blamed a ship for the errors of its captain and underestimated the warmth, the generosity and above all the prospector spirit of the American people. The Republican administration has taken off its muzzle abroad for eight years, and for the same time has muzzled its own citizens. It has scoffed at public discourse, it has brutalized its own citizens. Worst of all for the travel writer, it seemed to have created through cultural gerrymandering a divided geography of red and blue typified by the bullying rhetoric of 'real America'. Too many internal borders: it would be no fun to explore a country that will not explore itself.

Tomorrow I go to Washington to deliver my first package (one good friend delivered to another good friend) and to take part in a hullabaloo of five million optimists. I am hoping to meet the vanguard of the new society, not the politicians and diplomats but the young, the enthusiastic, unpaid ambassadors for a mending America that wants to be explored.

I accept that, even accounting for every potential deliveree being available, there will be a certain degree of shedding: I don't expect actually to deliver to all of the connections above. The Persians have a rule of agreeing to things drunk and again sober: I have been drunk, gorgeously drunk, the drunk of an immigrant, for a good percentage of the last few days. I have made many pacts. These have been made in earnest on my part. On the part of my fellow drinkers a change of heart once the snow has licked the hangover away from the eyeballs is perfectly understandable. But the deliveries that have been confirmed by the sober have been confirmed with indiscriminate gusto and this bodes so well for the future of the project.

Plans for the days after my return from Washington are varied and sketchy. I have a few deliveries to make in New York and there is a number of connections in neighbouring cities. From there the options are a slow creep westwards, or a giant stride to the Pacific coast then a return through the heartland.

A girl who seems after two meetings to be a genius (and who will remain nameless so that she can change her mind) would like to be delivered to Los Angeles. So far she is willing to drive herself and me and all I have to do is buy a car. This would be a magnificent second delivery: she has charisma in buckets and we could deliver packages together on the way to California; I also met the deliveree who is a kind, stunningly talented and potentially kleptomaniac Hollywood screenwriter.

If the above falls through, no matter: I am self-sufficient, I am young and in a new world and just the opportunity to write the paragraph above makes me smile.

Strand Bookstore, 828 Broadway

Every American is an autobiographer. The American character has no constant qualities except for its vividness: American cops are more coppish than British cops (as illustration I once saw a street cop in Brooklyn chewing Bazooka chewing gum and blowing a huge bubble at an intersection); the retired, a huge meek forgotten family in the UK, refuse to stand aside for the young in the US and are prouder, noisier, more publicly steeped in their own story. Street interviews with sports fans over here tend to be full sentences.

Every character in America is open to the elements and thus to public perusal. In Britain it rains and we can't leave our characters exposed to get wet. Umbrellas that say 'awkward citizen' are freely distributed.

An example and a consequence of this:

I see a man across a book table and the Strand Bookstore. (The autobiography section here is, by the way, one of the smallest in the store). The man is maybe seventy and extremely doughy. He wears a naval cap, worn shiny, which I can tell by the piping is a submariner's cap. Specifically it recognises USS #%$&@ as the vessel name has been scratched away, leaving violent scars.

This man of massive dignity has already greeted five people by name as I watch him. He knows everyone, not just the staff but at least a good one in six of the customers traipsing by. This is remarkable, but what's better is the way in which he greets his friends: volume, gesticulation, almost always rooted to the spot.

Rather than take his friends aside to greet them he sends out his tendrils so that they weave through and past the people he doesn't yet know. What he is doing is sharing his friends, and with great courage: greetings are uniformly interesting, they have a backstory, properly handled they're a good crib for the screenwriter. Other shoppers might back away and listen surreptitiously but the submariner won't let them back away: he looks round at everyone as he whoops at his friends, his eyes wide in wonder at the luck of meeting someone he knows (a wideness of the eye that doesn't diminish as he meets his fourteenth friend of the evening).

He took my arm, as he noticed a spindly nonagenarian, saying 'Only in a bookstore, eh?' Only in America.

A consequence of this, for the vaguely neurotic international boulevardier, is a keen sense of the noisiness of social opportunity. Since Americans are so comfortable in the public sphere they are more likely to respond to strangers without awkwardness. In America the vicous circle of mass transit discourse so poisonous in the UK -

only crazy people talk to strangers so people don't talk to strangers lest they be considered crazy, so only crazy people talk to strangers

- doesn't exist but what does is a noise, a sort of social hubbub in which possible conversations come into your brain and might drown you, like Mel Gibson in What Women Want.

Everyone is approachable and so one goes through the options in approaching everyone. Specific consequences? Ever been on a sweet factory tour? The two main sentiments are glee and guilt, glee at all the candy and guilt at all the candy left uneaten. Here in the Strand Bookstore, Studs Terkel in my arms, I am Augustus Gloop.

Cab from 43rd and 3rd to Bleecker and Bowery

Honouring the tradition of immigration to New York, and honouring Studs Terkel again:

Hector of Troy somehow survived the wreck of his city and moved to New York City to drive a cab. Now his name is Hakan but he has Hector's little nimbleness from within a huge frame and also the air of having done Things.

Between his 1970s supply teacher sideburns and his Viennese goatee an inch of cheek is sparsely unshaved and looks as if it still has the sand of Troy sprinkled in it. He came originally from a small fishing village in Turkey, and what he told us about his childhood came out in the following order: there was no TV, there was no electricity, he went to bed at six pm, he never needed an alarm clock for this reason, and his father had a fishing boat.

Hakan as a young man spent some years on cargo ships, earning his bosses' trust and becoming in his words a 'Company man', a phrase he illustrated by flipping his middle finger at the cab radio. His work on board ship consisted of working from bow to stern scraping off rust: as so often happens, by the time he reached the poop the bow was rusty again.

In 1989 his ship docked just south of Hoboken, New Jersey, and from his position on deck he looked up to see the underside of a great bridge (I didn't ask which bridge but will let you know). That night he slipped away up across the bridge and into New York City. 'What did you tell the captain?' I asked, at which he bounced a hard stare off the rear-view mirror. 'I told nobody - I just left.'

Desertion from these vessels was apparently common. One ship lost its entire crew one night and a replacement team had to be flown out from Turkey to crew the ship back to Istanbul. Somewhere between JFK airport and the docks the replacement team itself disappeared.

Hakan crossed the bridge with no English and no real Turkish community in New York. (I haven't done research but find this hard to believe in such a many-pocketed city as New York. Whether there genuinely isn't a Turkish pocket, or he hasn't found it yet, or has a reason not to tell me about it, is interesting however you look at it.) He bribed a man in a bar to offer him a job as a 'farmer' in the cold upstate for the sake of Social Security, a practice also common among immigrants at the time. For some reason farmers were seen as beyond investigation.

He married in time - 'How did you meet your wife?' 'In a gas station.' - and stayed married eleven years - 'she used to yell at me that I only married her for the Green Card. I told her that if I'd married her for the Green Card I'd only have stayed with her for six months.' He implied the disapproval of his wife's family was part of the attraction for him.

He drives a minivan cab now rather than the classic sedan, a fact which disappointed the aestheticists in the back, but his conversation keeps us entertained beyond our stop. We hesitatingly leave him a block too far downtown.

Bowery Poetry Club, corner of Bowery and Bleecker

A short post this, just to acknowledge as soon as possible my debt to Louis 'Studs' Terkel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studs_terkel). What little I know about him so far - and I'm diving into his books as rapidly as I can - is incredibly inspiring, and will be the subject of many future posts. For now just a couple of gems from his autobiography, Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times (Pantheon, 1973):

I am, despite what appears to be a passion for life, attached to a mechanical device. Perhaps, as Jacques Ellul maintains, the machine has a life of its own. That isn't the point. I am the point.

I find in the silent film comedian Raymond Griffith my alter ego. As a jewel thief, he fled to Mexico with his accomplice. When she felt the need to return to the United States and become respectable, he solicitously drove her back. When his two fiancees insisted on marrying him, he agreed and drove to Salt Lake City. Of course.

Air France Flight 3666 London-New York, 35,000 feet above Nova Scotia

Eleven people got me on this flight: one amateur and ten professionals helped me limp to Heathrow Airport and up into the sky. Five of them, namely the taxi driver and airline employees, are directly paid to be friendly; five are paid to be stern. One, though I whisper this as he's in the seat next to me, is possibly my closest friend.

My bags are packed for a research project: I have a magnetic and a digital dictaphone; empty notebooks I've rendered less intimidating by wrapping them in duct tape; the best of Martha Gellhorn (to be given to a friend - more on Gellhorn later) and initials written on my hand that stand for nothing other than Studs Terkel, first and only name on my travelling book list.

I am travelling to America to interview friends, probably friends of friends and hopefully friends of friends of friends and what I am researching is simply them: one by one I'm going to ask them why, how and when they are friends of their friends and also ask them what they think friendship means, now and in America.

I'm interested in the economics of things that look like friendship and might or might not be, and in the mechanics, digital, vegetable and animal, with which Americans make and stay friends.

Economics: when the taxi driver told us his daughter works in the Empire State building he gave us something for free, something such as the security screener took from me when, as an exasperated father to petulant child, he barked 'You just can't leave that tray where it is! You just can't!'

Mechanics: read this blog and send me an email. I'll reply to it, I'll advertise your blog or your website here and if, as I hope, you know of someone who might like to be interviewed for this book, I will visit them and deliver to them something by hand. I'm going to be travelling from one coast to another, on the great highways of the twentieth century, and at the same time along what promise to be the great highways of the twenty-first: the social networks of the Internet that have at once collided the American coasts and made every corner of the States part of the heartland.

In more precise terms - and if these entries reek too strongly of Hemingway, I hope it is merely in avoiding the abstract when the precise will do - this means I will be knocking on doors, usually announced but always unsure of what the welcome will be. I will be handing over parcels and asking, in return, questions that I myself would struggle to answer (my sleeping schoolfriend kicks out as I write). The project relies on the openness and hospitality of strangers, and it's my faith in American warmth and enthusiasm that makes me worry less about the chances of success. All I have to offer is my own enthusiasm and a present or a message from a loved one.

In two hours the project begins: two weeks in and around New York, two weeks back in the UK to

1. deliver items by hand picked up in the USA
2. learn to drive
3. shake off the aftereffects of a broken leg

then back to the USA to continue the travels for as long as the networks of friends or the US Government allow. This first post has focussed on me, more than I would like, but I hope now just to pull aside the curtain and introduce the players themselves: the interesting people I'm lucky enough to know already and those I'm looking forward to meeting. This is a travel blog and a mass biography, the story from one particular viewpoint of America in 2009.

Recirculating blood in the aisle, on descent into New York JFK

A word or two of context to this expedition:

I was until recently engaged to be married - a destination of sorts and also the start of what I think felt too daunting a journey. I travelled asleep for almost six years and recently woke up not recognising where I was. The house I own is not a home any more and for a month I have been making little journeys between friends, some of the hardest and sweetest trips of my life.

I can't and wouldn't want to be able to describe my wanderings to this point. I would, though, like to get those who read these entries to a position from which they can see me clearly at this initial point of my journey, and for this I'll have to get them - you - to travel from a position of ignorance to...somewhere else.

It's important that you know what I'm running away from, a broken heart, and what I'm aiming for: only what the Christians get to call 'communion' and what atheists have to name for themselves - further definitions to come from the people I talk to in America.

Whatever I'm looking for I think it is vital to me and hitherto missing and it begins to confirm a suspicion I have that all writing is travel writing - a phrase which, for now at least or until I come down on exactly what it means, you can consider a second tagline to this blog.

This post is a one-off: the entries from this point will have adventure at their heart. I am going on a course of adventure therapy and will try to keep constitutional updates to a minimum. If, though, some entries are shot through with either lunatic empathy or a selfish malaise it's a broken heart leaking through the cracks and to be ignored. You are forewarned.

Welcome to Hand Delivery.