As for that, it occurred to me that in the last 29 years, I have cried 17 times. It was in 1975 that I turned eighteen and began marking down each good cry as a tally mark in the front page of a journal. Between 1982 and 1985 was a total hiatus: I was working my first real job, I was loving the music (Go-Gos, yes!), there was no opportunity to cry. One memorable weep was early in 1990 when Jamie Lee Curtis hosted Saturday Night Live and her first words on stage were these: "Ladies and Gentlemen, as of one hour ago, Nelson Mandela is a free man!" The cheering that came after was as long and as strong as any ever given by that audience, and it took me over. I had met Nelson Mandela once—I grew up in a village in the Transkei near the one where he was born; he attended a Little League game in which I pitched. He must have known one of the players on the other team. After the game he said to me, "That was a fine pitch." Today I remember the tone of his vowels, which sound like a foreign accent to me now because I have adopted the voice of my new home, America.

Some cries went unmarked, undoubtedly, and there may have been more than one time I made a mark, only because I wanted to believe I'd been affected. When I lost my first girlfriend, in 1979, to a woman with a thicker beard, I went straight home and made three violent tallies, then scratched two of them out, had ice cream, and felt fine.

Some went unmarked because of the austerity of the road. When I travel light I bring only a toothbrush, a change of underwear, and a set of brass knuckles. When I travel heavy I bring two suitcases: one full of clothes and the journal, and one packed with fist-sized rocks which I leave along the route, as my way of undoing the damage I did to the Earth by topping my kitchen counters with marble.

I have a tendency to sob deeply and meaninglessly when deep in my cups. I had three glasses of red wine in a dark tavern in Sioux City once, driving from Seattle to Chicago for a convention of spinsters, and at the bottom of the third glass I looked up and saw the clock, which was painted like a 78 rpm record, and where the numbers should've been, I realized, were 12 disco Apostles. I couldn't stop bawling for a minute and a half. I was watching the second hand. This was a "heavy" journey; I made a mark inside the front cover and left a rock on the front door of the tavern.