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Again I slept a good bit and rose for an early lunch.  I offered to drop off Ty and at his house had a back-and-forth with Amelia.  She is going to school for photography and mocked me for my usage of autofocus.  I stared at her stating “I use autofocus so I can do this”, and without lifting my gaze put my camera near the floor pointing away from me in the vague direction of Ty’s cat and got this shot:

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A Cat and a Point

I’ll take it.

With Ty dropped off, Suzie, Brooke, and I said our goodbyes to Ryan, Peter, Audrey, and Amelia and we set about unwinding the journey.  Suzie and I talked for most of the ride to Cincinnati while Brooke slept and I was glad for this time.  With Suzie dropped off, Brooke and I made the 600 mile trip back to her place and she took over about 400 miles out from home.  She drove the rest of the way admirably but was a bit on edge as she neared home.  The way we drive changes in interesting ways when we’ve not slept and Brooke veered towards jackrabbit starts and sudden breaking.  She had beaten her previous record for continuous driving by a factor of four but I was glad to make it back to home.

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Today I will drive from home, to Philly, to Cincinnati, to Decatur, to Chicago with possible help from someone with no real distance driving experience.  I agreed to the Decatur stop without much thinking and had forgotten that Decatur is only the way to Chicago, but from Missouri, not Ohio.  Not one to break a promise, we scheduled our dinner stop there.

The first four or five hours of driving were uneventful and I was glad Brooke took over long enough to let me nap.  I was roused a few times by the rumble AKA “good morning!” strips on either side of the road but these klaxons of driver education sounded less often as time passed.  I took the wheel again after about 100 miles and drove the rest of the way to Cincinnati.  We picked up Suzie and her tiny hat and continued to Decatur.

After sitting down to dinner, an old man came over to our table and asked me when the rest of my pants would arrive and walked away.

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Troll Man

Midway through the meal, I started feeling ill and wonder if it was the chicken salad from lunch fighting with the chicken salad from dinner.  I was sweating heavily and cringed slightly at the request to get ice cream.  We went to a Dairy Queen that was either on its way to demolition or renovation but was not open regardless.  I queried the GPS for ice cream locations and it spat out “Cow Depot”.  We went to this stop which was now a laundromat.  We found The Dairy Maid on the way back to drop off Aaron and ice cream was had.  I drove for a bit more and Brooke took over a few hours outside of Chicago.

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Softserve Quest

I woke up a few times on the ride to Chicago and shook and rolled my head violently and the rest of the car probably thought me posessed.  Once we landed, I made my way to Peter’s apartment, then his bathroom, then the guest bedroom, then the bathroom, then the living room, then the bathroom and took a nap which proved to last the whole evening.  At this point, whatever had lodged itself in the walls of my constitution was fully developed and I learned that projectile vomiting is a lot like riding a bicycle, you never really forget how to do it.

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Manhattan, like ancient Jericho, is a city with a perimeter that one rises into.  One climbs into midtown regardless of entry method with the possible exception of helicopter.  Some routes into DC do this in contrast with say Baltimore or Chicago or Philadelphia where one often descends into the city square like Dante’s Pilgrim entering Dis.  Not to compare Philadelphia with a literal hell but I do think there’s something to be said for perspective.  The rest of New York City can act like an abattoir as it grinds you down.  I experienced both the first and second type of entrance as I headed towards the wrong 112th street and then had to enter Manhattan from a low-slung eastern bridge.  We circled Whit’s restaurant, he jumped in and we sped towards Target, the suburban outpost, where Wanda would stay for the next two days.

It was good seeing Whit again, and it took us a bit to remember how to talk to one another.  In his eyes, I’ve achieved some sort of success and in my eyes he’s achieved some sort of timelessness.  I an envious of his ability to live in a seeming perpetual now that he fills with his attention in a way my constant state of semi-distraction seems never to do except during argument or intimacy.  Suzie had found a ramen place she wanted to go to that was almost textbook hole-in-the-wall and we all benefited from her investigations.

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Defferent Kind of Restaurant

Ramen is an example of “anything becomes deep on inspection”.  While the dish is notionally “Chinese noodles + broth” the variants are ridiculous.  Wars have been fought over Minca Ramen’s non-canon tea-boiled eggs vs. Hide-Chan’s broth and in this war no one loses.

Here is what I was served:

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Ramen Porn

I got what I can only describe as an obscene amount of it on me.  I slurp in a way that Asian lips, or any civilized person for that matter, don’t seem to and smiled at being able to hide my graceless among the rain drops on my shirt.  The broth was rich, the pork represented the Platonic ideal of tender, and the noodles themselves were devilishly hard to eat.  This bowl showed to me that every culture has its soul food.

Back out in the rain we walked around the new-community-a-block areas of SoHo, past The Big Gay Ice Cream Parlor, a store dedicated the Golden Girls and misrepresentation and a statue of the Predator made entirely of recycled motorcycle parts.  It’s like the city is so dense that ideas buckle under their own weight and the springs of the mind’s machinations bear our own insanity unto us.  We walked, and walked some more and stopped for frozen yogurt.  They had egg nog yogurt, which I sometimes like, and I placed a drop in my bowl.  I had it, was unimpressed, and filled the bowl with other flavors.  Ever damn spoonful after held the taint of that cursed egg nog like the trichloroanisole that causes the cork taint that can destroy the finest wines.  Ugh.

We kept walking and on the way back I got a nice picture of Suzie.

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Suzie Surrounded by City

In white balanced light her hair against her jacket brought watermelon to mind.  Another example of how she’s a harbinger of kaddosh somehow made flesh.

Back at Whit’s we played board games and Whit and I caught up.  Very few nouns, a lot of verbs, and midway through this turned into me railing about how long it had been since happiness was the dominant force of joy in my life and it was nice to have Whit there.  Our good friends make us strong, our great friends allow us to be weak.  Thank you, Whit and Suzie.  I inflated my mattress which took up most of the living room and Suzie slept on the futon.  We were in the city, it was raining, and I was tired.

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Peter and I slept in and caught a late lunch at Jimmy John’s where we talked for about 3.5 hours.

Every day of this trip was wonderful.  Thank you, Chris, Christine, Suzie, Chad, Peter, and Audrey for supporting my nomadic notion of Thanksgiving.

Chicago to Philadelphia is a little under 800 miles and I made the trip home with no more than 10 minute gas/food stops and while listening to The Bonfire of the Vanities with a brief “OH GOD GIVE ME MUSIC NOT WORDS” break across Ohio.  I arrived home tired but neither aggravated nor worn down and I am glad I can still be old iron butt and pound out 800 miles in a day.

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Thanksgiving has become my traveling holiday.  Everyone else in the family has something to do and it’s easy to make it a six day weekend.  This year, I am planning on making a three stopper in West Viriginia, Ohio, and Indiana before a return late Monday.

I left a little after from work for Cross Lanes with a listening queue consisting of the books Blood Meridian, Atlas Shrugged, Bonfire of the Vanities, and back issues of Intelligence Squared: US.  I started listening to the IQ2 episodes which meshed poorly with traffic on the PA Turnpike.  Worse than dealing with rubberneckers going by a car wreck is dealing with rubberneckers going by a car wreck while some toolbag from the the CATO Institute makes non-points about Keynesian economics who can’t hear me yelling at him.  The traffic and by podcast backlog cleared and I started listening to Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy’s magnus opus of violence in the Southwest around 1850.  By the time I had arrived at Chris’s house near 12:30 AM, about 200 people had died from fires, gunshots, broken bottles, knives, fist fights, and scalpings.  Foreshadowing?

The reception by Chris and Christine was warm but their apartment smelled faintly of cigarette smoke and beer.  They were hosting Christine’s brother who is active duty in the Navy.  Maybe I would be reminded of home this Thanksgiving after all.  We stayed up too late talking and I braced for Turkey Day in a strange land.

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I’m going to Montreal this weekend and my target this evening was the home of Gary and Derek Pacheco in Fall River, MA.  The drive allowed me to knock a state off my To Visit list, Rhode Island.  Near Providence, I saw an amazing sign, a ship whose body was a stock pot being captained by a large plastic lobster with the text of “Become the Captain of the USS Chowder Pot III”.  I smiled until I realized something: What happened to the USS Chowder Pot I & II?  Lesson: Don’t let lobsters captain ships.

 

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We left Chicago with the fluid grace of someone throwing a beanbag chair.  Mike woke early, I next, then Suzie, and we left a standard deviation after I hoped as I vacillated between “stay” and “go”.  The day was bright but the roads were unkind and we missed a visit to someone due to delays from road construction.  Mike will never meet Banks.  We had lunch at a McDonalds where two middle-aged men were arguing over Christian rock.  We received no ticket on the way through Indiana.

Before dropping off Suzie, I asked my standard question of “how do we make this better next time?” to which I already knew the answer: don’t drive to Chicago after spending two days in New York City.  Suzie left our company and Mike and I puttered home taking turns being sleepy and being the driver.  Mike and I parted company in his driveway with a hug and wave and we turned our backs to each other and walked our separate ways to go become adults.

NYC+ was the last trip in the extraordinary run of good trips I had that spanned a six month arc and I set myself the 12th as the first day where I’d need to parlay my job into a career, switch industries, or go back to Act Sci.  Mike and Suzie had the first days of their next semesters to attend to so we all took a small lurch towards being our future selves.  I think I lingered too long in each place not for fear but for loathing of having to face that Monday.  Let’s see where it goes.

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There were a few points on the drive home where I think the entire car, possibly including the driver, were asleep.  The ride from New York City to Mike’s house was only about two hours but it felt may three or four times longer than my one hour commute.  Driving by Newark seems to fatigue me in a way that only the PA Turnpike does otherwise.

We said our good byes to Kacey, Mike cleaned his bathroom, I had a Fastbreak Bar, a relationship was ended, and we headed off to Chicago.  My car had again started to take on water due to a disconnected AC drainage pipe that my father was too far away to help me fix and the hydrological phenomenon christened “Lake Wanda” by Mike began to return.

Lake Wanda

Lake Wanda with Ear Plugs

The drive out to Chicago was rainy and somewhere in central Pennsylvania I was lucky enough to find the only Lil’ Ol’ Gas Station that both took American Express and had corn nuts, the closest I get to methamphetamines when I drive.  The route we took was the one I thought we always took but it felt new.  We weren’t digressing to Pittsburgh, or Cross Lanes, or Cincinnati, or Allentown and I think I found renewed novelty in the simplicity of “west”.  This novelty wore off quickly and as we drove through miles of night more and more brain cells were dedicated to holding onto the thought of “get there”.  Oh the rain.

Somewhere in Ohio we passed by a truck that was on fire.  Not just a little on fire but a lot of on fire.  The vehicle politely immolated itself well onto the shoulder and traffic was not impeded.  Sparks were coming from the drive train which indicated to me that it was a very hot fire.  The metals of the frame were starting to burn.  Mike and I felt the heat of the conflagration as we passed .  We tried waking Suzie but she slept through our attempts.  I wonder if our calls were translated into dreams or python code.

Somewhere in Indiana we were pulled over for speeding.  I was going 79 in a 70 zone and I was admonished by the officer for lying when I said we were going 76.  He told me not to lie and that if I did, he’d give me a ticket.  I received no ticket so I suppose he lied.  Irony.

When we arrived in Peter and Audrey’s welkin heaven I melted into the couch.  I was so tired of sitting I had to sit down.  Conversation was short and quickly descending into theory of self and the mind-body problem indicating it was time to call it a night.  Tomorrow, we had a/another garden to see.

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Wanda, my 2006 Toyota Matrix, was in need of some cosmetic attention so today I set out to wash, vacuum, and Armor-all her for the first time in, if not her life, at least a pretty long stretch.  As I set to cleaning, the flavor text of “Tromp the Domains” came to mind:

  • White stain on door (May 2010) – When driving from Austin, TX to Tucson, AZ I tried to save time by brushing my teeth while driving.  Too late did I learn that the viscosity of toothpaste spittle prevented me from reasonably spitting it out my window while driving and much dribbled down my door.  The residue didn’t come off with normal wiping but Armor-All took care of it.
  • Green splotch under paint on bumper guard (Sept 2010) – I drove through what may have been a cloud of locusts going through Kansas.  The front of my car looked washed in green hamster blood, but some had gotten under the paint and was only visible once the paint came off.
  • Pine needles in hatchback recess (Nov 2010) – The Everglades had their beauty which I paid for with blood, almost literally, as I think the slash pine needles in the seal of my rear door came from me trying to escape bugs after taking pictures.  I had parked under a copse of slash pines and didn’t bother to brush the branches away before closing the door.

Were I industrious, I could probably trace where the salt crust on the inside of my wheel well came from.

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The length of my commute has increased by about 5 minutes over the years.  Stop signs, traffic lights, and other control devices have slowly lengthened it.  The most recent addition was a traffic light near a farm.  There are no visibility problems; the area is flat and the nearby trees are well trimmed.  I don’t know why it was added, but regardless, it’s there.  So far, I’ve not actually been stopped by the light yet so I’ve not complained, although it’s been close.  I’m fine as long as it stays that way.

Today, the light was red as I approached it at 4 AM.  There were no other headlights, no signs of cars, no joggers, and no cyclists near the intersection as I blew through it.  There were no lights as I checked my rear-view mirrors.  The lengths I go to preserve tradition.  Also, that’s a tradition I probably shouldn’t try to keep.