Notes from the Underground Railroad of My Mind

The first time was a gunshot to the head.  I was confronting a man, a dad specifically who was trying to find his son, and he pulled a semi-automatic pistol that was tucked into the front of his pants.  I turned away, closed my eyes, and thought for sure it was over.  And it was.  I was thinking, “It doesn’t hurt at all.  I need to be ready to die.  Jesus, I love you, don’t let me go to hell.”

And then I woke up.

And fell back asleep.

The second time, I was in an office building, on the second floor.  Someone said a flood was coming.  The person who was supposed to go down the stairs to shut the door just stood at the top of the stairs and watched, acting surprised when the flood poured up the stairs.  Actually, everyone was surprised, and as the water poured onto the floor and started rising, amid everyone’s screams, I scrambled towards the windows, hoping I could get outside and float.  But I was too slow, and I was pushed up against the ceiling tiles, frantic to find air, just thinking that I didn’t want to die this way.

Let’s just say I might have had some stress in my mind prior to bedtime.  That’s my only explanation.

With that -  goodnight.  I hope mine is better than last night.

Last night was my Christmas present - a concert with my Goldberry in St. Paul.  For the second time I saw the Wailin’ Jennies live show, and it was quite wonderful.  But I think most of what made it quite wonderful was the audience, specifically the person next to me that I love and will marry in a few months, and the general audience of over-fifty short-haired women in sweaters who are very good at sitting still and not coughing or having their cell phones ring during the quiet moments of musical bliss.

It reminded me of the few concerts I’ve gone to in the last few years - Sara Watkins last fall, Kris Kristoferson last spring, and almost two years ago when I saw the Jennies play at the Aladdin in Portland.  I’m not much for concerts - the social experience isn’t something I search for in musical enjoyment.  But the best music can overcome my anxieties.  And last night was some of the best music I’ve been around in a long time.

But I broke the tenth commandment.  I wanted - the instruments on stage - an accordion, an open-back banjo, an upright bass, a bodhrin… everything they had I definitely want someday.  And the wonderful thing (not about breaking a commandment) was that my darling love wants some of those very same things, and she could do a better job with them than me anyways.

She did have a very nice night planned for us - we ate the best Chinese I’ve had for sure since college, maybe ever.  St. Paul isn’t a bad town, except the streets are in terrible shape.

I don’t know if I really had something other than this to tell you… I’m going to go read a Melville short story, eat a bagel and drink some “coffee”… and wait for the rest of the day to take its course.

Life sometimes presents you with truly philosophic issues that can only be used to awaken your awareness to the… the world that you haven’t seen before, and just maybe can’t explain.

I arrived at work with nothing particular out of order. I crossed down aisles between cubicle rows and tugged my lunch bag and shoulder bag (does that make it sound like a purse?) on their hooks below the hood of my black Firestone-emblemed winter coat. I turned my computer on and noticed an empty can of soda from the previous day’s lunch still patiently waiting to be recycled. So I snatched up that can and turned to leave my cubicle. Just two steps later, I took an unusual pause.

There was something on the carpet. Something out of place. And this is not a carpet known for cleanliness to begin with, but random paperclips and everyday dirt can be visible without being noticed like this new… thing.

And since I noticed it, so did my boss. She was alarmed from the start. She began the process that I can’t even finish here - she began to question what it was and where it came from.

I mean, the Big Bang or the Hand of the Almighty Creator 6,234 years ago, either way seems unhelpful in understanding what was sitting silently on the carpet between my cubicle and my boss’s.

But just to clarify, it was not along the line of where I had walked, and curiously enough, I hadn’t noticed it upon my entry. Curiously, because, there was no way to miss it without being blind or a ceiling tile aficionado.

So the girls in my department gather around to gawk. And so did the girls in the title department across the aisle. I was still the closest person, and I was still a few feet away. I really kept thinking, “It must be mud,” which was plausible for the fact of snowy days recently and boots that it could cling to all the way to this point. But it wasn’t formed like the bottom of a shoe. In fact, of all the things I can ascertain, I believe there’s no way someone could have stepped on it in order to leave it there.

And my boss tried hard to dispel her own fears. She said it could be a leaf crumpled into a strange little shape or something like that. But then she began to fret about rats. It makes me think that women must naturally be scared of rats and mice, since the girls were also telling stories just yesterday about screaming because of them. Spiders and snakes are scary as hell, but there would need to be a wall of hungry rats for me to be scared. I’m not Winston Smith, obviously. I’m getting distracted.

Maybe because I was the nearest person, or maybe because it was nearest to my cube, one cannot be certain, but it seemed that I was the only one interested in getting rid of this little dollop of chocolate-soft-serve (color and texture) mystery floating on the sea of shallow commercial carpet. I snagged two Kleenexes and tried to act fearless in walking right up to it. I bent down in the middle of the main ring of the morning circus, my hand protected by two pieces of fabric that fall apart when snot hits them… and I made my first detailed observation. Visual, this time. Definitely not a leaf (oh, that mustachioed German writer is writhing in his grave at my obvious lack of visionary experience). Definitely not something that could be easily explained in the middle of an office walkway unnoticed by all until I arrived (insert solipsism here). And I stopped with my hand (with Kleenexes) just inches from the unknown. I pulled back.

I stood up and walked past the crowd of onlookers. I found myself at the sink snagging first one, then two… thinking about three, but sticking with just two paper towels. Can’t blow my nose straight through those thick fibers…

I walked back to the marginalized material and crouched down to it. There was conversation all around but I couldn’t hear any of it. With my left hand I put the paper towels atop it, and paused for that moment, trying to think how best to keep it from making a mess that I would need to clean up further. Finally my fingers pulled the edges of the paper towel together, scraping the carpet and making my second detailed observation - textural. This was not a solid by any standard thought, neither was it liquid. It definitely changed shape with the pressure I exerted (or tried not to exert) carrying the little package.

I motioned to simply toss it in my garbage, but I stopped myself. I’ve had two distinct instances in the last month where I’ve put discarded lunch containers with simply the smell of food that has kept me nauseated through the afternoon, so I was instantly fearful for what might await me after lunch with this little surprise. I left my cube and walked back toward the hallway sink where I had found the paper towels. That’s when I made my third detailed observation, this time olfactory. Yes. This was excrement of some sort. I felt that if it was from a rat, we had nothing to worry about because that rat couldn’t be in the best of health. But thinking of it being human in origin was confounding. I threw it away underneath the sink by the coffee maker. I wonder if I ruined anybody’s coffee experience that morning. (I’m really cracking up right now thinking about it)

So when I returned and sat down amid the bustle of rational theories to find out where this uninvited guest came from. There were the standard giant (but invisible) rat theories and dog poop on the shoe theories, but they seemed insufficient for the circumstances and the observations (that I alone could make). Then one of the ladies from the title department began talking to me in a low voice, and it took me a while to understand her. She was pointing out that one woman, somewhat older, had colon cancer recently and was known to vociferously complain about her colostomy bag. The only deduction that is set against that thought is that the woman in question would normally not go past this part of the office. However, it is still, in my mind, the leading theory.

But it illustrates my original point, maybe better elaborated here: If someone had put a new file cabinet, or a box of paper, or quite a large number of other things out in the open, just as new, none of us would have ever noticed or questioned their origins. Instead, a tiny brown blob of matter that we see in some way daily in another setting ignites a flood of theories, but very little action except on my part to truly know, and also get rid, of this foreigner. I still don’t know where that little lump of poop came from, and I could spend the rest of my life trying to track down its origin without any success. Instead, I’m going to finish writing about it, and likely forget about it soon enough. There are a good many questions that pass beyond our horizon of perceptibility…but are any of them different from the question of where this shit came from?

When the heavy snows fell on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, they formed glacial continents on my car that were stubborn and imposing, but perfect examples of the visible effects of global warming.  Because, in one day for each mass, it took no time at all for the warmth of the sun to enliven the metallic car body to purge the stowaways on my hood and my roof.  I drove to work today (the first Saturday that I have worked since October of 2006) and had a snowy-white mass still stuck to the roof of my saggy-butt car (note on the car:  during the summer, driving from Waconia to Excelsior [usually at 55 mph], I averaged a little more than 300 miles per gas tank.  This winter, driving from my home to my workplace [4.5 miles, averagin 35 mph with a multitude of stoplights], I now see my full gas tank get me barely more than 200 miles.  That’s a great loss of possible transit, but nevermind), and when I emerged at noon, I found a pile of shattered snow-ice pieces beside my naked car.  That mass was riding with me everywhere for three weeks at least.  Will it be the same with the world, which has seen glaciers and ice caps for thousands of years, and in the timeline of earth, they will all disappear on the warm, sunny morning of our modern age?

Completely off topic, I finished my Solzhenitsyn book today.  In-tense.  My next book is Kafka’s The Trial.  I’m worried my psyche won’t be able to go from real despair to imaginary despair without noticeable effects.  Oh well.

I thought I had something to write about, but it has all melted away and crumbled on the asphalt lot of this quiet, imaginary place.  Until next time…

It’s been so long.  If anyone is left out there, I’m glad you’re still reading.  Why you are is an entirely different matter, but that you are is appreciated, in an anonymous, imaginary way.

The second or third day after I had moved into my present apartment, towards the end of September, I pulled on the stopper in my bathtub that forces the water to shoot out of the showerhead, and it came undone.  Immediately I thought it snapped off, meaning no showers, forever and ever.  Instead, I came to realize that it had simply come unscrewed, so I took the two metal pieces, the one plastic piece, and the one rubber washer, and put it all back together.  The water pressure was dismal, but I expected that from a shower that I have to turn on hot full blast for about five minutes before I’m guaranteed a warm shower.  As time went on, the shower showed less and less power with ever tug of that little faucet stopper.  I would press the piece further into the faucet in hopes of causing the pressure to increase.  It did, of course, until I pulled my hand out and resumed my shower.
In recent weeks, I found myself up against the deteriorating situation with renewed vigor.  Without my help, the shower head with drip a stream that would make a peeing hamster feel impotent, so I took action.  Not the most rational action, but the action of a man not very sure of his Mr. Fix-itness abilities in the least.  I started with sticky tack, or ticky tack, or whatever it is that you call the stuff that colleges require you to put on the walls to hang posters and other cool things when you can’t use nails.  I took a glob of baby-blue ticky-tack and jammed it into the faucet nozzle until I thought something might be fixed.  I stepped into the shower and didn’t notice for thirty seconds that the shower pressure was slowly decreasing.  But it was.  So I guess, I did notice, just not right away.
My showers, for a week, went something like this:  Turn on the water, all the way as warm as possible, and do other things for five minutes.  Check water temperature and then assist the ticky-tack by jamming my fingers into the nozzle until some water is coming out of the shower head.  Step in shower, and throughout shower, fix lessening water pressure with jamming fingers method.  The only addition to this routine was when it occurred to me that I needed something hard in the nozzle to keep the stopper from moving, thus I jammed approximately 8-12 cents into the ticky-tack fixture.  This was a stop-gap measure during last week.  And it stopped working on Friday.  No matter what I did, no matter how hard I pushed into that water-spraying faucet complete with pennies and blue goo, my 6:15 a.m. shower was not going to happen.  Water drizzled from the shower head, and that was when my strength was concentrated in holding the pennies and ticky-tack in place.  My fixing turned to wrecking, it seemed.
Depressed and smelly, that Friday morning, I thought how I needed a new plan.  That was after catastrophizing my brain full of bathroom renovating possibilities and the assumed anger of my landlord for this trouble.  I started removing all the stuff I had in that faucet nozzle.  Ten minutes later it was relatively clean.  Ready for some professional help, or at least, outside help.  But I wanted to try one last thing:  The rubber stopper in the plastic piece… I had always wondered if I put it back inside out.  It didn’t seem like the worst idea to try.  I was out of other ideas.  I wasn’t going to shower that morning.  So, I pulled it out, flipped it around, and put the pieces back together.  I’m sure you’re following the tone closely enough to know that the shower worked.
But let me warn you, it worked… too good.  The stopper worked so well, that I watched (no joking or exaggerating) the building water pressure begin to pull the metal faucet from the plastic shower wall, held on only by stretching glue of some sort.  And, the shower now makes a screaming sound, not unknown to showers, that makes me think it is  a premonition to the torpedo aspirations of the faucet piece, with my legs as valuable enemy targets.  The stretchy-glue has held, so far, but I am not without fear.  I have a bad leg already… and my good luck (if you can call one simple solution almost four simple months too late) cannot be all good luck, can it?

I wish I could tell you other stories, but that one is good enough for now.  Maybe I’ll have some time soon enough to tell you other ones.  And maybe not.  Hello 2010.  Thanks for the “normal” showers.  And my pending wedding.

I’ve been staring at the blank white here, slowly filling with that limited means of description we call the written word… and I’ve been trying to figure out why some countries and peoples and times see a horror and disruption, while others continue in their ways from generation to generation.

Of course, my present reading is influencing my thoughts.  I’ve finally cracked into the first hundred pages of The Gulag Archipelago, finally understanding my own ignorance against the vast scope of history and reality that I have not and in most ways cannot experience.  Let’s put it to the thoughts we have in this simple way:  In my life, I’ve known, directly and personally, probably less than a dozen people who have died.  In the Vietnam War, about 50,000 American soldiers died.  During the Civil War, something like 300,000, if I remember right.  Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.  During the Second World War, about 20 million Russians died as a result of enemy actions.  In contrast, it is estimated that in the Stalinist purges, including deportation, imprisonment, and exile which resulted in death, it is estimated that 15-30 million people were killed.  It would be somewhat like one out of every ten Americans right now being either shot right away or scooped out of sight, never to be heard of again as they died from malnutrition, exhaustion, cold, or sickness in a world of torture and hard labor.  And that action, across several decades in the middle of the last century, was a government action.  It is enough for me to be rapidly satisfied with our incumbent system.  And it is enough to make me furious at comparisons between either fascist or soviet system and our present presidential administration - more angry for the injustice to the history of the unknown dead that are treated as fear-mongering misrepresentation than about how inaccurate it is to compare an American president or government as a whole to other real political entities that have… done what we can’t even imagine.

That Gulag prisoner was right - good and evil pass through every human heart.

No more, for now.  I’ve spent my intellectual anguish with tense facial muscles, and less with tense finger muscles.  I want my Goldberry to come over so I can feel that the world isn’t and always has been teetering on the edge of mindless, unending horror.

I hope Sartre wasn’t right.

The night has just enough space in it for some old-fashioned blogging.  Before I scurry off to a laborless sleep, awaiting the frozen morning that I know can’t help but be out there…

My supervisor posed an interesting thought today, because she said she understood a certain amount of greed, to want nice things, but she said she didn’t understand what happens when that goes to the lengths of dozens of cars and small islands… what she spoke of as being excessive.  She doesn’t understand how the little greed could become any greater.  I told her it’s a lot less about greed as it is about insatiable desire - to be filled and fulfilled with things, specifically new things and more things.  Really, the only difference between the normal American (scary as that thought is) and the Bernie Madhoff or fiscal counterpart, is one chooses to live in multiple layers of priorities, philosophies, and allegiances while the other seems to choose one thing as the final word on all - self.  The nice thing about the modern world is that real priorities, philosophies, and allegiances are all coming to the surface, where for hundreds of years they had stayed hidden and secret.  Violence, not as reality but as fantasy, now invades our reality in shocking episodes (unlike the violence that has thrived in the world for the entirety of known existence, which, comparatively has decreased, at least in a per capita sense, in the modern world)… Sex is now separating act from person, mind from body, love from making love (not that it was impossible before, but society neither shrugs nor notices the indifference, the loss, the disconnect, except when troubling news reports about children and teens surface and our attitudes are noticeable)….

I really don’t know what to tell you about the world.  It’s like we polished clean the mirror that looks through the mirage of life.  The more clearly we see the waves rippling above the parched sand of time, the more clearly we know what we’re seeing is more imagination than reality.

I know I didn’t say anything very coherent, when I wanted to tell you that greed, that selfishness, that desire poured onto dead matter, all are the same philosophies that swirl around in us and most of us ignore or deny, when a few people let the incoherent negations of their lives be harmonized into a single, destructive impulse - we cannot be shocked at anyone but the rest of us with a foot in greedy hell and the other clawing for heaven.  We spend our lives with a hundred masters.  Zacchaeus repented quickly.  Material greed isn’t the worst barb in our heart.  Could I do as well?  Could you?

The amazing thing about the world is that contradiction can become unison in one self-devouring thought.

In case you won’t be able to tell, this blog might be a little random.  But since I categorize it as thus, hasn’t it already lost the very meaning which the label wishes to produce?

it’s not that I’m a bad planner, but some things in the real world don’t end up looking or being as I planned them.  Last night, I sought to surprise my Goldberry, my sweet love, with a foreign dessert that had astounded me earlier that afternoon per the chance of a self-proclaimed food-loving coworker.  So I arranged a series of brown and green Mochi on a giant stone serving platter, all as the end of a night of failed surprises that were only surprising in their quiet failures.  The Mochi was both chocolate and green tea, respectively.
And this is what got me, as it always does.  Hearing about something green tea, whether it be a frappacino or ice cream or anything really, I automatically assume I will like it.  The color alone fires neurons in the depths of my memory that say words like “mint” and “sweet” and “childhood toothpaste”… and then I fall face-first into the tombstone concrete of reality.  Those little green-tea, mint-green Mochi balls weren’t very tasty.  I’d call it green-tea deception.

I’m likely going to the movies this afternoon.  2012.  I need to see it on the big screen.  I had forgotten until this morning that I wanted to see it, so I don’t think it was influencing my thoughts last night, at least that I know of.  But I was pondering wars, the world-sized ones, and wondering if we were edging nearer to one than we knew.  I thought about how dark the future was, and how dim the past seems unless it seems different.
I’m reading Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, and it wraps around the Great War, and I remember how in the last hundred years, we’ve fallen into great wars sometimes with a sudden realization, sometimes in a slow and unnoticed roll.  I thought what would happen if Iran and Israel started the world’s first nuclear war, and the sort of quicksand it would be sucking the rest of the world into the future of war.  What changes would happen with about three-quarters less oil at our sticky fingertips?  Collapse is an exaggeration, but life with stutter and stumble and try to reorganize itself - I see cities “collapsing” back in on themselves as everyone scrambled back from the suburbs into cities, suddenly rebuilt with trains and streetcars and the ability to walk where someone actually needs to go.  How quickly could electric cars and nuclear power plants replace the standards of today, when we would be faced with their uselessness in the wake of the waiting war?  I know I’m not making much sense.  On the one side I don’t want to be the fear-mongering prophet with visions of the new Islamic Europe and an America filled with foreigners (as though we’ve ever not been that for the last 500 years)… but I also don’t want to be naive, thinking that I like green-tea Mochi when the q’s rub the p receptors on my tongue just the wrong way.  The fear of dying, from war or flu or a car wreck…  But everyone dies.
All because I want to be married to the woman I love and to maybe see children someday, and spoil grandchildren, and plan music and read books and make love and sleep in on Saturdays…  Amazing how those things can be interrupted, postponed, or obliterated by the choices of others, and the chances of nature, and the changes of time.

I was chatting with my supervisor at work, and she was expressing her building anxiety over the holiday season, culminating in a flurry of ridiculous gift-check-giving and reconciling with budgets and people’s expectations.  She admitted that she liked the fact that I saw straight through the situation and could question the foundational thought - the belief in required gift-giving.
She not only illustrated it with her family at Christmas, but also with her husband on her birthday.  He had given her the same card two years in a row, and when she asked him if he knew that he had, he only pointed out that the convenience store in his office building only had a few cards to choose from.
Freely give, freely receive.  I mean, take that seriously, and suddenly the requirements of decorum melt away.  How different would our celebrations be if we didn’t receive piles of things that were useless, ugly, contrived, or worthless?
Not to shoot myself in the foot or bite some feeding hand, but I really have no interest in people giving us gifts for the wedding.  I know nobody takes me seriously.  “Who wouldn’t want to just be given a bunch of stuff?”  But, that’s it - how many duplicated things would/will we get?  How much more do I want people to come and celebrate, to dance and smile and talk and eat and tell us we have no idea what’s coming.  Quit worrying about tuxes and bridesmaid dresses and sit-down meals and clinking glasses and people that tell me you have a wedding “for the presents”.  How much better I feel about our wedding since we are paying for it, and we are planning to enjoy it.  It is not an investment, it is not a production, it is not a ceremony - it is a party that is thrown to start a pair of lives becoming a life together.
Maybe my mind had more in it about this, but the other night at dinner (my second Thanksgiving-turkey dinner of the day), a dad of a daughter commented how he had already threatened, if the daughter got a tattoo, he would not pay for a wedding.  I’m sure there was serious and joking mixed together, but I realized how sad that sounded.  How much control was based on money, trying to keep someone from doing something that you didn’t agree with.  I know I’ll be a dad of some flavor, worried about hot stoves and driving in the snow and meningitis and diabetes, but I really hope I don’t teach my children that money should be used as coercion.  A family shouldn’t work like a tax bracket.

A wandering stream dies in the desert sand.  Is that better than disappearing in the muddy Mississippi of life?

Just one last thought:  What happens when you treat a sweet potato like a lumpy carrot rather than an orange russet?  I just wonder how many things we treat like sweet potatoes, only eating one day a year covered with browned marshmallows…  how much of life is a traditional dish instead of a misunderstood vegetable.

I’m listening to my towels and wash cloths dry, with an oscillating fan behind them to aid the unfinished job the dryer did after digesting three quarters without much to show for it.  How did people dry clothes before electricity?  Without any worry about blogs and power outages, I assume.

Of course, I can only seem to fear the worst.  Something pokey and painful pin-pricked my back in a place nearly inaccessible to my eyes or hands (thanks to my neck being still unhealed from its misalignment back in August after I shook my hair dry on my first day of work).  I pulled off my shirt and saw my hairy, lumpy torso that wouldn’t bother me except for the thought that, in classic countdown style, someone else will have to regularly look at it soon enough I can’t help but already feel inadequate to my own leering eyes.  But, I could only see a red mark from the area that I had already scratched with my hand.  And I knew it - right away.  I had been bitten by a brown recluse.  At least, that’s what I thought from the sharp little pain and the fact that I was wearing a brown shirt and I can only think of that story of the lady who was vacuuming and got bit and laid down and woke up from a coma without any arms or legs because of those damn little spiders getting her good.  See, instead I got bit by the run-on bad-writer-spiter.  That’s a close relative of the bury-your-literary-inadequacies-by-discussing-your-other-ones-tarantula-boxelder-bug-electric-gas-hybrid… spider.

And most of the red and itching is gone since I stopped itching.  I just might survive.

The hum of that oscillating fan behind me is a reminiscent buzz, like a humidifier at my great-grandma’s house, or the air conditioner that blew on the back of my head at Uncommon Grounds a few months ago.  It makes the world seem to run in bounding leaps right into a lake, and the pace just slows and slows the further you get in.  The world won’t ever end if it keeps slowing down like this.

But unlike the past, now it’s not just me that needs everything to slow down, and it takes so very little to emerge back onto dry land, at frightening speeds.

I’ve been wanting to blog for so log… or blong for so long…  And I’m so out of practice, that’s how I started.

Let’s start with a six or seven-month old connection to a past blog, only in reverse…  When I packed up my apartment, my old apartment in Portland, I talked about being like Santa Claus giving away everything I owned, pretty much.  Well, that was pretty much a lie now that I see all the stuff that my parents brought me.  And I told them, standing in my dining room with one folding chair, a foot locker, two expired Wyoming license plates - I told my parents it was like Christmas.  I was opening boxes and genuinely excited.    So maybe that’s what I’ll do for my kids - make them box up all kinds of stuff and just open it up on Christmas day.  It’s so much better finding all the stuff you had and then had to do without than getting brand new things.  Brand new things get boring or forgotten or normal.  But old things that were lost… like coins or sheep or sons… those are the best.

In the weeks since I last posted, in the nearly month gone by, my car broke down again.  If my car was a person, his pants would’ve fallen down so many times since the belt keeps slipping off.  That wasn’t a funny or interesting comparison at all.  I know.  I can read it, too.  But, more accurately, since I’ve had it fixed, now a hubcap fell off, and I was looking at it like a saggy uddered cow that is too old for the milking machine.  I told myself that my car looks like it has leprosy - it’s covered in splotches of rust and peeled paint, with its missing hubcap and its saggy rear, and inside it’s not much better with the faux-wood molding pulling away from the dashboard because I refuse to reglue it back in place.  I’m pretty sure that was a terrible run-on.

Since the last time I posted, we went to a wedding in Ohio.  The wedding was great.  Molly got married.  Her husband is a funny guy.  We like him.  It was like a mini-reunion of many folks from Annie’s wedding last year when my darling and I started up for the last-first time.  So, as my Goldberry pointed out, we were listening to everybody talk about next May, which is our wedding, and it was somewhat strange.  No weddings until OUR wedding.

But I was originally going to complain about toll roads (which will probably be the only kind of roads in the future, until money becomes obsolete [because everybody knows that even when the robots take over, they will force us to pay tolls to move their robot food, hauled on our backs, across the deserts of the future... I think I combined a zombie movie, a dystopian technological reflection, and Roots all at once]).  Where I grew up, there are about a million miles of interstate with nothing inbetween except prairie grass and antelope, but nowhere could you find a place that would make you drive on a road.  Either you can drive on it for free, or you could get run off somebody’s private property.  But the interstate that cuts through my hometown, that same road going through Chicago, Indiana, and Ohio is a toll road that cost us something like $50 to cross back and forth to go to this wedding.  And Ohio!  Only outdone in depressive unoriginality by the industrial wasteland meets the inner city slum without losing either trait called Gary, Indiana.  Finally we saw Friendly’s, and Fifth Third Bank.  And neither were any more interesting than they sound to people who have never heard of them.

And maybe Gary, Indiana seems like a robot-ruled zombieland because, in contrast to that dreary world, I am madly in love with an amazing woman that I will marry this spring.  Maybe that’s not a sufficient explanation, but I did want to add that in there, so you’re not worried about my overall mood since my car has leprosy and I drove through the hell of the future.

I did notice something that seemed odd to me just a few nights ago.  I was spending my dinner at a booth in a White Castle, eating four sliders with cheese and eating my very-much-too-hot fries without enough ketchup because somebody (a White Castle worker *surprised look*) put the ketchup dispenser in wrong and somebody (a White Castle manager aka a teenager) tried to clean it up and fix it, and left the rest of us without any ketchup.  I said I was eating, and my fellow patrons were a woman of Medicare age and a couple with a natural affinity for urban outerware and manners.  I kept wondering why the elderly woman was there - she seemed candidly out of place at 8 pm on Wednesday night at White Castle.  But the trashy couple did not.  I know, a long time to get to my social revelation.  I believed that, to use generic terms, the rich and the poor alike have little use for things like manners and etiquette, in this case, with their cell phones.  Not that phone-rudeness is limited to two demographics.  But I was amazed.  This kid… who knows if he was 18 or 25, but he looked like nobody told him he was both white and ridiculous with his misaligned hat and saggy pants, this kid walked up to the counter to get some help, and proceeded to dial a number on his cell phone and begin a conversation.  I couldn’t figure out what outside a 911 call or a tip to the local health inspector couldn’t wait until after he had spoken with the workers, as competent as they were.  I just ate my Turkish delight and betrayed my health for nothing more than a swiped credit card.

I think I’m just going to bed.  I’ll try for something more direct, concise, and artistically intelligent later.  Tonight, it’s sleeping in my new bed for the second night ever, and letting my body forget those weeks on the couch cushions on the floor, or the air mattress, or the hotel bed which was the best of those three.  Good night new Christmas.  What can tomorrow bring?