According to an article in today's Olympian, soldiers at an Army base in Iraq have 50,000 golf balls but only two clubs. Readers are asked to donate clubs, in the spirit of holiday giving, so that our boys can drive balls off the roof into the vacant fields outside the base. Now maybe they're paying some unemployed Iraqi youths to retrieve the balls, but I suspect that isn't part of the plan.

I stuck my thumb out in cyberspace and got a ride from Berkeley to Olympia with someone driving from L.A. to Seattle. We knew nothing about each other beforehand. He turned out to be a 19-year-old vagabond from Westport, Wash., whose passion is snowboarding. He has about a hundred close friends and family members, all of whom he spoke to or texted while exceeding the speed limit by 5 to 15 mph.

I had been eager to drive his 5-speed Hyundai, because I don't want to completely lose one of the few skills I have. I was especially eager when I learned that he'd only slept two hours the night before (he'd driven two guys from L.A. to Mountain View, where they'd stayed up drinking all night). He did finally let me drive after five hours on the road. While I was at the wheel, he didn't say anything (or make a single phone call), but after about 20 minutes he asked me to pull over. He said it was because I wasn't driving fast enough, but I was well over the speed limit, on some pretty twisty terrain. So for the rest of the trip I felt like a fifth wheel (actually a seventh, as he was carrying two extra tires with him) while he continued making phone calls to keep himself awake.

The MP3 CDs he'd brought along had a few interesting tracks on them (including a rap song that rhymed "seductive" with "fucked with"), but after hearing "Crazy Bitch" for the third time I was starting to question my judgment and sanity.

There was one other passenger, a sustainable-agriculture student from UC Davis. He stayed in the backseat and slept most of the time. He seemed like a very nice young man.

Another reason I'd accepted this particular ride (besides the chance to exercise my clutch foot), was that I thought it was a round-trip deal. On the way up, however, the driver managed to get an offer, by phone, to go crab fishing out of Oregon in five days. He was also considering staying in Washington, or flying back to California to get his motorcycle. It's just as well: I wouldn't want to repeat the experience of feeling superfluous and superannuated for 13 hours.

So now it's back to craigslist, hoping to find a way home before next year.

Despite my reputation as a troublemaker, I've generally led a very passive existence. One day when I was in high school I found that someone had taped my locker door shut, so I carefully untaped it to get it open and then retaped it when I was done. I don't know why I have this aversion to disturbing the universe, this compulsion to leave things the way I found them. It's probably because I prefer to observe life rather than participate in it. That's why I used to take a camera everywhere. Now I have no camera, and I don't go anywhere (except that today I'm going to the dentist and to a presentation called "Roth IRA 2010: Changes You Should Know"). I also used to diagram group conversations instead of taking part in them. I tried that again recently, but the conversation topics didn't meander enough to make for an interesting diagram.

I checked out five DVDs from the library today. All of them feature people who are deliciously worse off than I am: heroin addicts, severely mentally ill people, a teenage murderer and her victim, a poor Irish family in the 1930s, and Bernie Madoff and his clients.

It wouldn't surprise me if while I'm enjoying one of these films the overdue earthquake strikes, causing the 9-story building I live in to collapse on top of me. That will give my neighbors in the 2-story building across the street something to feel good about.