Photograph by Carlton Reid, art by Peter Drew of Adelaide, Australia.

2) Walking

Matt Green walked across America in 152 days.

“But perhaps the thing I find most important about walking is how connected it makes me feel to the space I’m passing through. I think it’s because walking is the way we experience our homes. We walk to the fridge, we walk to bed, we walk around the yard. We walk to the copy machine, we walk to the coffee machine, we walk around the grocery store. So this is that same familiar stride, that most basic form of locomotion we know so well, but through vast, immense, unknown places. It’s a way to live a continuous line across the country as if it were my home.”

(from imjustwalking.com)

A few weeks ago there were a number of books in the slipstream genre here instead, presumably because their algorithms looked up other books by my publisher and fitted Couch into this genre. Now enough people have bought Couch that they’re able to do some direct correlating.

What does it say? It says that the people at Walker Tracker are completely awesome. Thank you so much.

But I love how it looks, too. It’s as if people were buying the book and a pedometer simultaneously in order to set out upon the quest in the book for themselves. I would know it true were it accompanied by a few other tell-tale items. Say, a mustache trimmer, wire cutters, some RAM and a Spanish phrase book.

I would love to find other items on Amazon that tell a sort of story – items bought together to perform a single esoteric task. Certainly there’s some mystery that could be gleaned.