She’s home. I’m astride the road alone. Indiana. Update soon.

The day began at that same three in the morning, and it began with an exhausted crash-out onto a motel bed. Jane and I slept like the dead.

This, by the way, is Jane, in transit mode …

… and Jane is the whole reason for this trip.

Toward noon, we got up, had some kibble and coffee, and then I took her the last few miles home to the Bahai Librarian, a friend from the days when I thought I was middle class.

Jane went and hid under a dresser straightaway. The librarian and I had a nice conversation and she gave me hot salmon and cold rice. Then I turned my face back west, just those few miles to Cloverdale, which is just another interstate town, but just a little bit holy even so, and again I slept.

I did a lot of thinking about Ocean Vuong from the On Being show. Ocean Vuong is a notable poet now, who started out living in a refugee camp, a Vietnamese on the run. It might sound a little anti-elitist sniffy, to say ‘notable poet’, and I do feel that, but Ocean Vuong transcends labels and I feel love too.

The point of my thinking was, Here’s a person whose identity shapes their whole life and art.

This was coming on top of another startling interview, on Fresh Air, with a very smart and talented black musician. He too had an ethnic and experiential identity that shaped his whole life and art.

It got me to mulling over whether I had one I could use for a base for shaping, and my initial answer was No. I felt jealous of theirs. Here I am–more or less male and white and atheistic and old and American. ThFuck kind of identity is that, if not boring and unsexy and practically not worth calling an identity?

But taking a few miles to think about it, there is one thing, so long as we bring socioeconomics into it.

I’m Working Class, and that has shaped absolutely everything about my life and my art.

My mother was working class going back generations, and since she had a burning desire to leave that all behind, she married the scion of a solidly upper middle-class family and started bearing him children.

However, neither she or her ambition had counted on the scion being one lazy-ass motherfucker, whose own anti-elitist tendencies drove his family into an economic wall, which it slowly slid down like impacted jello over a period of years. This period was my childhood.

So while I once possessed a literal silver spoon from Marshall Field’s, a present from the rich grandparents, it was never for one day in my mouth. I grew up knowing hunger. I grew up thinking that a Job was a vitally necessary evil, and that a Job was like welder, or plumber, or fry cook, and not programmer or astrophysicist. You had to go to college for those, and the working-class religion of my father literally said it was a sin to go to college. They still think so today. What’s the point of college when the world will end any day?

I didn’t want to be a plumber. I loved books.

The point of college, as it turned out, was firstly to drive stupid religious ideas like that one right out of your head. Which of course was exactly why they tried to forbid it.

So in the end, college became my religion. It would be my ticket out of the little town, out of the working class, on toward the grand ambitions that my mother had held dear for so very long, and imprinted on us wholesale.

Even though I was also an anti-elitist, being my father’s son as well as my mother’s, I did drink enough academic kool-aid to eventually believe that smart people automatically became successful people, and that success in worldly terms meant sliding more or less seamlessly up the socioeconomic ladder and into the promised land of the middle class.

Tenure, like the admiralty, was the comfortable pinnacle of all that was good.

In my thirties, I drove eighteen-wheelers, but by my forties, I was back in the bosom of the alma mater, and I briefly believed myself to have transcended my humble class roots.

I was wrong about that, but it’s a topic for another show.