Driving the Ryder moving truck while towing a car from Rochester, NY to Fort Lee, NJ wasn't so bad until the last two hours of the seven-hour drive. I could not go faster than 70 mph going downhill and I could only go 50 mph uphill. We left at eight in the evening. We got into Fort Lee at four the next morning.

I wrote a song called "Cross Country Driving" with Jeremy Couey. I felt I could write when I first read an English translation of Haruki Murakami. I felt I could play the guitar when I heard Jeremy Couey play the guitar. I like to think I can write, but I know I cannot play the guitar. The first lines of "Cross Country Driving" are:

Cross country driving
Fifteen miles -
Below -
The limit

Why are people
Going -
so fast?

START.
“Why don’t you pass that car in front of us?”
“It’s a double line. I’m not supposed to.”
“It’s three o’clock in the morning. No one’s going to come the other way.”
“How do you know?”
“No one is up this early.”
“This guy is.”
“Yeah, but nobody else is.”
“Here comes a passing lane. I’ll pass him now.”
END.

“Alfred?”
“Yes?”
“Could you sing Cross Country Driving for us?”
“No.”

Jeremy and I made up these sort of songs on the island of Rapu Rapu of the Philippines. We didn’t know anything about Rapu Rapu so we made things up like on Rapu Rapu, the mosquitoes are as big as small birds and their mouths are six-inch needles that suck the blood out of your arm. When we got there we found out that we should not step onto mounds of fire ants.

An excerpt from Everyone Wants to Go ٥ Alfred Lee:
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I never had a cockroach problem in my apartment until I saw two in my kitchen - one on the white kitchen counter and one on the tiled floor. Their antennae waved through the air, living and conscious. I found the day’s newspaper on the kitchen table, rolled it up, and repeatedly struck the cockroach on my floor. It panicked and scuttled along the floor looking for a corner to hide. With the paper edge of my newspaper club, I swept the cockroach away from the counter’s base then bludgeoned it until the life left its crunchy-firm red body. Only its antenna swayed unhinged in the air.
“Run, he’s going to get you! Good bye ...”
I looked for the second cockroach on the countertop, but it was not there. I checked behind the toaster, the potted plants, the stack of recipe books - nothing.
I bent over to clean up the first cockroach, but the ants stopped me. From a crack in the wall, a group of red ants came and surrounded the cockroach. All I could to was watch them take its limbs apart and carry them into the crack. A second group of ants carried the body. The dead cockroach turned under the cushion of ants along my kitchen floor.
“What have they done to you? There’s nothing I can do.”
The second cockroach returned to the edge of the kitchen counter. I crushed it with the rolled newspaper still in my hand, then swept the remains onto the floor for the ants to take away.
“Look there’s another.”
“This one’s bigger, we need more men.”
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