In Iowa City these deeds were done:  I shook hands with Barack Obama; I piled sandbags against a flooding river; I saw the house where Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse Five; I saw Kurt Vonnegut; I marched down the street at Michael Moore’s side; I loved a girl; I took care of a seven-foot-long boa constrictor; I ate Indian food and more Indian food; I kissed a girl for the first time (but I made love to one for the first time in the town where I was born, like a salmon); I saw Michael Chabon and thought ‘he dresses like me’; I talked to Art Spiegelman and he drew me something; I stepped out of the house one night onto a street destroyed by a tornado; I cheated on a woman I loved, if kissing someone all day counts as cheating; I saw Ralph Nader and Salman Rushdie and Al Gore; I went to mass, accidentally, at the church Flannery O’Connor used to attend, which I didn’t know until much later; I stopped being a vegetarian with a halibut I ordered; I got drunk one night on cheap gin and puked in a religious man’s toilet; I tried to buy an ascetic a chalupa at Taco Bell without thinking of whether or not he’d want one; I lost all my friends; I saw Drawing Restraint 9; I saw a Jackson Pollock painting that was larger than anything and I saw Jack Kerouac’s On the Road scroll unfurled completely; I had a class taught by Curtis Sittenfeld and she told me I needed counseling; I rode on the back of a woman’s scooter shortly after I had been heartbroken; I made a mousse out of Valrhona chocolate that cost $50; I was, I’d say, in the middle of nothing, and maybe in the middle of everything. 

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