Momentum
Momentum. Momentum. Be aware of your momentum.
Whether you are busking or hitchhiking or just living day to day, you need to be aware of your momentum.
Momentum is not a scientific thing. It’s intuitive. It’s your gut feeling. Trust your first instinct, not some drawn out, rationalized, revisited second opinion. If you meet somebody and immediately dislike them, trust it. If you meet somebody and immediately like them, trust it. If you fall in love, trust it, but don’t trust the outlandish notion that love conquers all. Love might take precedence and priority, but it cannot steamroll over every potential outlying problem. Love can be hacked away at by the mundane just as easily as it is carved into by man-made catastrophe.
I never read John Updike, but I read that he once wrote “marriage is a million mundane moments shared.” That just about hits it right. Obviously don’t discount the deleterious effect of emergency and how quickly that can tire your significant other (and tire them of you) but the Mon to Fri, nine-to-five, hello-goodbye is usually what kills romance in the end. Loss of momentum. I admire couples who work at it, who strive to stay together rather than getting hitched, assuming they are Done, and then proceeding to grow independently for the next thirty years until one day, one of them turns to the other and realizes they either don’t recognize them anymore or don’t love them anymore or both.
If that’s bad marriage advice, what can I say? It came from a bad marriage.
I speak of hitchhiking with more authority because although, in one sense, you’re throwing yourself at the mercy of fate, destiny, and randomness, in another sense you are still the one in control. You stick your thumb out. You decide whether a ride feels safe or not. You cross that Rubicon when you enter that stranger’s vehicle.
*I speak ONLY from personal experience: I cannot imagine how nerve-wracking and frightening it must be to have to enter strange vehicles every night just to make a living.*
But with hitchhiking and busking, and I’m sure a few other areas, you have to be aware of your momentum. Withdraw and regroup if you feel you aren’t getting anywhere, because if you feel like you’re going nowhere, you’re probably right. (Trust your gut. First instincts.)
If you’re standing at a junction somewhere outside Nipigon, Ontario and you’ve had your thumb outstretched for six hours and the sky is the color of a burnt-out light bulb – the kind of daytime gray that looks like a drab coat that refuses to take itself off, or, in more sinister moments, like a death shroud. You need to take a break. Get off the road and try to sleep. Read. Do anything. But don’t fight momentum. And don’t try to hitchhike at night. You’re much more likely to get run over by a truck than picked up by one. Stick with the sun.
It’s the same with busking. Some days, you get a toonie tossed into your guitar case every few minutes. You play like that for four or five hours and make $50 or $60 or sometimes even more, much more.
But this is very important: NEVER start with an empty case. If you start busking with an empty case – no nickels, dimes, quarters, anything – it takes FOREVER to get that first coin. I don’t why, but it’s just the way it is. It’s momentum. Once you get your first coin, the flood gates open and you start making more.
Some days, you just won’t make anything. If you haven’t $5 in your first 90 minutes, it is going to be a very bad day for you.
Be aware of your momentum. Move places. Try again.
Don’t try to decipher or fuck with the forces of momentum. Momentum is too esoteric. We lack the language to negotiate with it on our own behalf. We are at the mercy of it, especially Out There. In the world.
I once stood in front of a motel somewhere on the Canadian Shield, certainly I was west of Thunder Bay but not by much, as one pickup truck after another passed me, and passed me, and passed me, each truck with a tantalizing empty shotgun seat and empty back seats, the drivers all young white men refusing to give me a ride (and, I can say from experience hitchhiking and busking that the only people harder to get a ride from, or some coins from, than young white men are young white women…but women certainly have a reason not to give that can override any charitable impulse…sometimes giving can be seen as “engaging” and there are many times when a poor woman who just wanted to give somebody a dollar is either cornered and talked at (not to, but at) for half an hour or else is followed down the street. I’ve seen this happen many times (one man followed a woman bellowing “I KNOW you have more! Give me more!” until myself and a few other ragged street hustlers intervened). It was a psychotic display of greed, but it also felt unsafe, so I can certainly understand why any woman would be unwilling to engage with ANY stranger on the street.
We have a greater karmic debt to the Universe anyhow, with Millenia of pillaging, ware, rape, murder, greed, pay gaps and all the other things women must defend against when a man blunders into her path.
I am more perplexed when men my age stare at me as if I’ve just dropped in from Saturn, as they did that day I was stuck on the Trans-Canada Highway somewhere west of Thunder Bay, all of them accelerating past me like I was a leper. Eyes ahead and focused solely on the road, rushing past me like salmon swimming upriver. Maybe that’s it. Maybe they were all headed fishing and were about to turn off the highway any minute therefore rendering moot the picking up of a passenger.
Anyway, I was standing in front of one of those cheap, flat, single-story motels you see on the highway everywhere outside of major cities and it was around 10AM. I’d been stuck in that particular spot overnight, trying to thumb a ride since a few hours before the sun had gone down the night before. (I never tried to hitch at night…I knew I wouldn’t be visible until the last moment, so I hunkered down behind a random-ass Credit Union that was stuck beside the motel in the middle of nowhere and tried to get a few hours sleep, sleep that never came, until the sun came up and I trudged back out to the highway.
So I was standing outside the motel at 10AM, having been there since at least 6AM, thumb out, head down, when an elderly woman came walking over to me from the motel reception office. She was fiddling her glasses and walking slowly. I knew, in my gut, that she was a Ride.
Sometimes people give you a little diatribe, a list of conditions before they let you into their vehicle (which is perfectly fine…I myself need that time to observe the person and make sure I feel comfortable with them. I’d been given a valuable piece of advice by a fellow traveller. He told me to “always ask the person first where they are going. If they don’t have a definite answer, think twice about getting in the car. Maybe say ‘that’s okay…I’ll get the next one.’ I’m not trying to make you paranoid., but some people really do ride around looking for transients to harm.’”
But the old woman seemed safe to me, so I bent forward expectantly to hear what she had to say.
“I saw you out here last night as I was going to bed,” she declared. “I saw you out here when I woke up. I saw you out here when I had breakfast. And I see you out here now.”
I nodded.
“I think I’d better give you a ride,” she said firmly, motioning for me to follow her to her car.
That was it. That was her speech. And she was right. If she didn’t give me a ride that day, who knows how long I would’ve been stuck in front of that godforsaken motel. I’d already been on the road for a few days with no sleep and no food and I was starting to look drawn and pale. Maybe me and my invisible army of fellow hitchhikers are what Sun Kil Moon had in mind when he named his debut album Ghosts of the Great Highway. You can feel that way sometimes. A wisp. No longer corporeal. A mere gust waiting for a hunk pure iron operated by a human to take you further down the line.
I fell asleep almost instantly as I hit the comfortable seat in the old woman’s car and she patiently drove over what I think now was four or five hours of hills, dales, and burned acres of birch, without a word, waiting for me to wake up so I could serve my purpose (the hitchhiker is an object f fascination for many drivers, and they want to ask you as many questions as they can, usually while chiding you for hitchhiking. “It’s a good thing I came along or you’d have been there forever!”
Everybody who picks you up will claim to be the only person in Canada trusting enough to have picked you up. Empirically you know this to be false but you don’t dare contradict them. They are your Ride. You do as they ask, to a degree.
Anyway, I finally woke up and the woman and I shared some basic facts about ourselves and then, pretty much half an hour after I grunted awake, she had to turn off the highway and leave me. She was headed to some folk festival. But she insisted we exchange email addresses and that I email her when I’d reached home (this I did do, and she sent one back saying thank goodness and also mentioning an upcoming folk festival in my area that she would be traveling to, and if I was going, make sure to say hello. “Maybe I’ll see you there.”)
That was it. A friendly woman who took a chance on me and gave me some much-needed space and time to sleep. And a shift in my momentum. Without that nap, I would have been absolutely crazed by that afternoon, when a frantic, hilarious Indigenous man named Isaak picked me up and drove me almost all the way home from maybe 150 km east of Thunder Bay where he picked me up to 400 and Steeles, a 16-hour drive.
Throwing my guitar and bag into the back of his van he asked me, “you ever heard of Scarborough?” I said I had and that I was going home to Brampton. “Well, you got a ride, man.”
Oh thank God, I thought.
I’d made it across the prairies (where it’s easy to be seen and easy to get a ride) and down through the pine-forested Canadian Shield (where it is difficult to get a ride and difficult to be seen) back down into the Golden Horseshoe, Brampton…the place where I was born…in 4 days.
I did Calgary to Toronto (technically Brampton) with nothing but my thumb, my bag, my guitar, 4 hours sleep in the old lady’s car, a bag of chips in Isaak’s van, and the final cab ride using my last $60.
I’ve done a lot of hitchhiking and I have to say: Calgary to Toronto in four days on foot is incredible. I would have done similar time if I’d been driving my own freakin car.
Momentum. Momentum. Out in the world. Out on the streets. Out on your own. Be aware of your momentum.
The following 16-hours were a blur…I recall Isaak laughingly yelling “it’s a DELUGE!” when it started raining and he started driving faster into the flooded two-lame blacktop but again…in my gut I knew I was safe and nothing was going to get in the way of my coming home, which I did, taking a taxi from Steeles and 400 where Isaak dropped me off with a sincere and fond goodbye…trekking to a gas station (while I’d been out west the price of a phone call had doubled, from 25 cents to 50 cents, and I remember being dumbfounded by this outrageous 100% increase…for years afterwards it felt like I was the last man on earth who still used payphones with any regularity….anyway the cab came but the cabbie would not negotiate a flat rate….he took me as far as my last remaining $60 would take me and I remember getting out when my money ran out (at Kennedy and Queen in Brampton)…struck dumb with sleeplessness and the brightness of another morning to walk the final half hour home…where I dropped my bag and guitar, slammed the door behind me without locking it (I’d just trusted the world not to kill me for 4 days while in a vulnerable position…it wasn’t going to sneak into my house and slit my throat as I slept) climbed into bed around 11 in the morning, a good 25 hours after the old lady had so generously picked me up, and fell dead asleep for 16 hours.
When I woke up my childhood was definitively over. I stumbled off into an adulthood I’m still stumbling through, sometimes carefully navigating flood regions, other times putting myself at the mercy of the wider waking world and hoping I end up back home again.
Most times I make it back home but, like the CAL-TOR trip, not always without losing something indefinable, unanswerable, along the way.
Momentum. Momentum. Be aware of your momentum. If you feel it flagging, change something. Don't fight it. Follow it. More times than not, it will take you where you need to go.