Thu, 19 May 2005

Austin
When you spend long enough driving you go to another country, another place overlaid atop the actual geographic area you’re driving across. Christian stations breed new forms of last year’s big musical faves: Christian jungle, Christian kid-pop, Christian synthcore. Little kids wave and you wave back. Roadside museums which keep entire towns afloat financially display the shrunken errata of anyone somewhat famous and somewhat local. You start to think you’ll ever really get off the highway, just hit the end and 180 back north, washing in five-dollar truck stop showers and living on a&w burgers. This, of course, cannot last. Part of being in the place called on the road is shaping an image of how you imagine your entrance once you reach your mythic destination. When you’ve been planning a trip as long as I have, you get grand and ludicrous notions of how the new homecoming will be. In hindsight, of course, these dreams seem as silly as most other roadbound visions (I once had an extended inner dialogue between cows and clouds off on the side of I-35, just as I once lost the state of Nebraska on a snowy night off I-80w), and putting them out of your mind as soon as you hit city limits is always a smart move. The weather here is ideal, which makes me wonder; if it’s this nice in February, how will it be in August? one of the things I realized in the hermiting years is that fretting over the weather is silly. Even if I am not a weather prophet (of which I am not yet convinced), I certainly have the ability to adapt. It’s easy to focus on trivial things such as this when larger issues loom ahead. Something hiding beneath the ice.

My brain is still out on the road, or perhaps even still in Iowa; it’s definitely somewhere far away, which worries me, as this does not seem the time for the zombi-space-astral boy to be here.

Drinking abandoned tea is a good thing. Sunlight is a good thing. The company I’m keeping is most definitely a good thing. I fear nothing on this earth so long as I am patient and attentive.

Because this is Scrytch, I should tell a story.

Nene’s mom said it was okay if she tagged along with me as far as Des Moines, as that’s where Nene’s great-grandmother lives, and with Nene’s mom going to the hospital soon and all of Nene’s sisters all pissed at her it seemed the most logical place to lay low for a while. Before contacting me, she tried to get the florescent werewolf to lend her the Chevy, but that’s another story; ask me and I’ll tell you. Nene brings along more shit for a week-long vacation than Hannibal crossing the Alps, which fortunately works out as I’m a minimalist, or perhaps a post-minimalist, depending on how things go. We were packed in with clothes and blankets and spectre-dolls and herbs that there was barely enough room to move; I had to get a cardboard box rigged from my skull to the windshield to use as a periscope while Nene’s mother had wrapped her in a quilt and stuck her somewhere in the back seat. I couldn’t turn my head to look but could hear her yapping out foolhardy directions (“Through the field! It’s half an hour as the crow flies, and that’s how the crow flies!”) and reading from a box of stories with a penlight I had on the floor behind the passenger seat.

“‘ay!”

“Yes, Nene?”

“Why aren’t you like this in real life?”

“Like what?”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

“Because this way it’s like I get to be two different people. Or more. It’s my superpower.”

“You don’t think that’s dishonest?”

“I went on a long jag a couple years back where I thought it was. But that was ridiculous.”

“Perhaps. Possibly. Drive in that barn! There’s a whiskey bar in there!”

Finally I got Nene to her grandmother’s, who lived out in west Des Moines by the airport, after lulling her into contemplative meditation through use of modified Harry Potter tapes (courtesy of Yara). She asked me if I was coming back and I said I didn’t know. She went in the house to eat lunch, and I got on I-35S, and that was that.
(12:06.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #