I thought I had posted the thing below, I guess not. So I’ll tack it on at the bottom. Every decade of my life I have crossed this country at least twice by road and I can’t rightfully recall how many times by air. Ok, zero to ten I didn’t cross this country at all, but I did take two trans atlantic round trips and crossed Europe a couple of times. I didn’t get to drive. Ten to twenty I crossed this continent a whole bunch of times. Um, shit, I’m getting to something practical here, not puffing out my chest. I’ve made a lot of traveling tapes, discs, playlists. Usually somewhere on the third day I hate every song I know and/or cry at the opening chords. Any suggestions y’all might have would be appreciated. Specifically stuff that wouldn’t be going on there anyhow and driving stuff, stuff that makes you wanna go, that makes you glance at the speedometer and say “oh shit” but also stuff that doesn’t need Excedrin.
I guess most of the orphaned bit below kind of tells the tale so a brief tangent — have y’all noticed how embarrassed the two political parties of the US seem to be about their candidates? I understand that it’s much easier for trump supporters to denigrate Clinton than it is for them to laud their own guy. Hillary is low hanging fruit. But Trump is inorganic. Huh. That wasn’t as clever as I was hoping for. I just mean he doesn’t have things like a voting record the standard type of ‘Not-a-smear-campaign-just the facts” sort of thing, e.g. senator so and so says he likes dogs but has consistently voted for screw the pooch legislation every time it’s introduced on the floor. On social media the tactic seems to be to insult liberals, I guess to make liberals feel too embarrassed to vote? I don’t know. I know old school conservatives aren’t Trump fans either. A person is smart, people are stupid. This is the age of social media, actually, it’s already past it’s expiration date, but, still …
In a couple of weeks I’m going to drive to Oregon for my daughter’s wedding. No I’m not afraid to fly. If I had to explain it under a thousand words; I want to travel the way I like best, mile for mile. Despite how ugly Americans are acting this election year, I sure do love this country, I mean the land that lays betweens its borders. I don’t love it above all other parcels of land, but my daughter isn’t getting married in New Zealand, Canada, Switzerland or, say, the Artic Circle. If she were getting married in the Artic circle I’d probably fly, at least part way.
I had something like a moment of doubt this morning, but, no, I really want to drive. It was more like a moment of fluidity which probably has an expiration date. It’s not too late to fly and therre’s one reason why that would sense. Wait, no, there’s hundreds of reasons why that’d make sense, there’s one that’s strong enough to change my plans.
There’s a couple of new old sayings, or, maybe regifted old saying; Man plans and god laughs and life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. Those of you who live by Wikipedia probably have at least one answer for the relative age and source of those sayings. Whoever came up with those has never been on a road trip with me. In the old days when I traveled by boot and the grace of others my plan was to see shit, especially shit I didn’t know was where I didn’t know where I was going. Oh, that’s another saying that didn’t apply; not all who wander are lost. First off I didn’t wander, I went nowhere in particular with strong purpose and secondly Christ I wanted to get lost, badly and irrevocably.
So, comparatively this is just a late summer drive through the country. I’m even being conservative and not heading to the atlantic first to pick up a stone to throw in the pacific. God knows there’s a lot of stones freezing their asses off in the pacific wondering why the fuck I did that to them. Yeah, sorry guys. It was just a thing. It’s easier to find a stone on a beach in the north pacific. Huh. I guess I don’t know the Atlantic as well, I’m sure there are some rocky beachs there.
I want to collect days of road dust on me, I want to smell the air change from the plains to the mountains to the high sierras. I want to stop in a Little America and buy an overly processed fruit pie and cup of burnt coffee.
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