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Today, Suzie and I visited Banks, a friend of mine from Team Interrobang that has reached autonomy with me meaning our friendship doesn’t require the excuse of Team Interrobang. I didn’t expect this to happen as Banks and I have little in common on a superficial level except for maybe our common love of Napoleon Dynamite. Banks and I are on the same ethical page in most cases and follow a motto of action of “you do it because it’s right”. He and I have different epistemologies powering our decision engines but even from such a disparate base the synchrony of our conclusions is striking.

From 2012-02-17 Banks'

Banks’s second daughter very much took to Suzie and showed both Suzie and I her collection of Star Wars figurines and her talking Storm Trooper helmet but only Suzie received privy access to the contents of her Nintendo DS.  I think kids from the ages of 6-20 have a sense for when someone older than them is closer to their age than their parents and generally take to them.  I’ve experienced this a lot in Scouting and I regret that this will flip for me within the next five years.  For Banks’s daughter, Suzie is on the youth side of that divide but I’m fine with being some variant of “Uncle Arcanus” and simply being the bringer of cookies and cake balls.

From 2012-02-17 Banks'

As always, Banks provided me and mine a nice dinner and Suzie and I departed northward shortly after.  I had a large dinner, had sat most of the day, and was feeling somewhat loagy so when we arrived at Peter’s I used the gym.  I changed and Suzie commented that I tucked in my exercise shirt.  I do but mostly to prevent chaffing from the elastic band of the waist and to help restrain my gut but this sartorial choice was still chuckle-worthy.  I responded by hiking my shorts up to around nipples and lacing them behind my head.  Someone has a cell phone shot of this.

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From 2011-10-14 The Pachecos

Pacheco’s Meat Market is near mythic in the ersatz pantheon of Team Interrobang.  Gary (Church) and Derek (Caboose) Pacheco both work there in some capacity and it’s been spun off in a dozen directions some of which are nice (there’s a Pacheco’s Meat Market-level Donor class) to not so nice (“Come meet my aunt.  She’s a nice lady and all and her face is busted but her body’s slammin’.”)  The market itself is unremarkable but the magic happens in the back where the signature chorizo, a type of Portuguese sausage, is made.

From 2011-10-14 The Pachecos

The chorizo has its fans and gets shipped all over the United States.  A batch was being smoked while I was there and I was given some before I left.

Gary and Derek took me to a fine lunch and then gave me a tour of Fall River which consisted of pointing out perpetual construction, rust, and graffiti removal.  Any of the Pachecos are hesitant to move as most of their family lives within a few blocks of them, something that carried over from their origins in the Azores.  I asked Gary and Derek’s mother if she preferred the states or back home and received the reply of “I could go back home if I had to.  I wouldn’t want to, but I could.  But I would miss having floors.”  Of all the wonders of America that would inspire longing, floors tug strongest at the heart strings.

The Pachecos’ apartment building is small but tidy and is bathed in bits of family history.  Photos from across three generations, from major life events, and of life’s marginalia crammed available shelves.  Gary and Derek’s father has at times looked like Chuck Norris, The Most Interesting Man in the World, and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva making him the template for some future Portuguese Ãœbermensch.  Their dog, Chewy (named after the adjective, not the Wookiee) enjoys butting against bed frames, especially mine, and was unenthused to see me leave in the late afternoon.

From 2011-10-14 The Pachecos

I had drug my feet more than I wished and hit every possible type of traffic on my way north to Quebec.  Having blown my 10 PM arrival time, I stopped for a nap and a pound of pears at a farmer’s market connected to a McDonalds and crossed the border into Canada alone without incident for what I think is the first time ever.  The arterial roads all seemed to be under construction with frequent lane closures but the hour was late enough for this to not matter.  All the signs were in French and each section of road work ended with a sign saying “Fin” like I was driving out of a student film each time quality pavement returned.

Richard was again my host and his father, consummate competitor, challenged me to a game of backgammon.  Bianca was on her way out when I arrived and Richard, Adam, and I walked her home.  Bianca had made for me a painting of fireflies around a pear, I very much like it.

Reference Shots:

From 2011-10-14 The Pachecos
From 2011-10-14 The Pachecos

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During individual visits to Chicago I invariably have lunch with Peter at a fast food joint where we stay too long while on large group visits I invariably have lunch at a sit down place where we stay too short.  This time, we went to Mellow Yellow’s where I placed an overly complicated salad order and then left early to pick up mounting foam from Foamcore Heaven.

Foamcore Heaven is really just an overlay on a generic art supply store in Chicago that happens to have really cheap foamcore.  I illegally parked outside and stepped into a quiet store (all the batting and canvas absorbs sounds in the way only libraries do otherwise) where tattooed people were asking for overly specific items from the on-duty clerk.  At the head of the queue, I asked for my foamcore order, she almost winced when I rattled off the order but then sighed audibly when we she found that someone had already packaged the order and I had already paid for it.  She helped me put the order in my car, as a respite from the hipsters art-folk, I think.

Group Shadow

Summer Comes to an End

I met up with Peter, Suzie, Ty, Audrey, and Mike at the Chicago Botanical Gardens where my New York City Botanical Gardens membership got us free parking.  Peter was tired, Audrey was tired, Mike, Suzie and I were wasted, but Ty was excited.  The gardens proper are circumscribed by water and we spent much time watching the carp as we drifted into later afternoon.  There were myriad signs telling no one to feed the carp but based on their open-mouth greeting I think enough people ignored the sign to justify the carp’s efforts.  The sun hung in the sky and the afternoon stood still.

Ty was very excited to show me that there were squirrels and I took a picture of them.

Squirrel Alert

Here the group split and Suzie and I took pictures of the sun drifting beyond the water lily pond.  Normally I take photos with other people that have a technical eye and we swap settings and tricks.  Running around chasing the sun, angles, and perspective seemed puerile but was a welcome change.  The sun ran from from the commotion.

Placidity

Placidity

There is a relief in almost-boredom.  A simple enjoyment in watching a parade of nows march by at a tempo that is neither hurried nor dull and I felt swept in this current on the way out, while refilling a failing tire in the parking lot and then on the way back to Peter’s.  Ty wanted to see what the car was like in “Road trip mode” and we acquiesced.  I listened to a podcast, Mike took a nap, and Suzie watched a video on her laptop.  Four bubbles, four people that happened to be in the same car with the moment-to-moment unity of beach sand.

Back at Peter’s we diddled on our laptops, Mike went to bed early, and everyone else watched My Little Pony.  I tried the Jerde’s elliptical which was an exercise in muscular comedy.  The muscles at the top of my legs hurt but only sometimes and I felt my calves were underused.  My forearms got sore but I was able to use my laptop with some work.  The device lacked the forced tempo of a treadmill and when I got off I felt exhausted but couldn’t point to a muscle that had given out.  I showered and fell to the couch where slumping forward proved most comfortable.  The night petered out and I was ok with that.  I had successfully got my heart to 150 BPM for 50 minutes in another time zone.

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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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I am an advocate of the idea that the biggest criterion in road trip partner selection is tolerability.  This may not seem like an insight of any worth but please do not conflate friendship with amicability as, for instance, Kyle is a good friend of mine but after seeing each other two days in a row there is a good chance blood will be spilled on the 3rd.  In comparison, Joe Naylor and I have had weeks where we spent 120 or more hours within 50 feet of one another and only after weeks of this am I hit with shoes.  Chris, Suzie, Mike, and I don’t appear to get on one another’s nerves and in cases where there’s tension, it’s usually my fault, often coupled with some sesquipedalian failure where I’m too clever by half.

I think breaking sleep synchrony was a genius move on Mike’s behalf, in that the first driver for the next day would call it a day early, and this may be the only mechanism for recovering from entering a road trip pre-fatigued.  This time, he graciously chose to call early nights; next time I need to volunteer.  Having Chris as a 3rd driver proved to be a blessing and I look forward to Suzie eventually getting her license should road trips still occur then.

This trip also marked I-95 losing its magic for me.  My first trip to Florida where I drove gave the road a grandness as a unifying force of the east coast, it is not.  Spurs and bypasses go around and back to major cities and enough of life is on some other corridor that the road no longer has the mental dominance in my internal US map that it once did.  There were stretches where I knew without signage where I was despite being four or five hundred miles from home and caught myself going “oh, this again”.  The only other stretch of road as far and as familiar is probably the stretch of I-35 between Dallas and Austin.  Maybe there’s a region beyond Boston where I-95 has majesty, but now it, like the PA Turnpike is another road that is as freeing as a straight jacket.

I think we were more human this trip.

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We woke at around 10, I with the intent of going to Miami, Chris, Suzie, and Mike with the simple imperative of “home”.  Miami would require a 28-hour day so with man-tears I contacted Mitch and Alex to say that this wasn’t a good time for a reunion and we headed north.  I started driving and near the top of Georgia, lost focus on the road for a moment only to have it return with a stopped but growing in my vision.  I hit the brakes, hard and swerved into the right lane when I found my brakes weren’t properly engaging and fishtailed into the grassed area next to an off ramp.  Somewhere in there, my engine had cut out and I was relieved when the car started properly.

No one died, so I bought some peach rings while getting gas (hey, we were on an off ramp) and again, north.

Chris departed at Greensboro, NC and Mike, Suzie, and I again went north.  I was having trouble sleeping so started to listen to Solaris on audiobook.  It. Was. Amazing.  My love of some parts proved quite audible and were dubbed “bookgasms”.  If you have an audible account, get it.  I finished it as the sun rose over Philadelphia.

Good trip.

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I had the goal of reaching Greensboro, NC by noon to pick up Chris Dodds and then meet Aidan by lunch necessitating Suzie, Mike, and I leaving my house by 4 AM.  Part of why Mike and I get along well is a valuing of time. If we set a deadline or target point, we intend to keep it, and having previously done spot-on departures at 8 AM and 6 AM, we considered 4 AM a reasonable next step.  Suzie literally didn’t sleep but still nearly missed our 4 AM departure time and as the target minute approached and she hurriedly packed in not-quite terror as Mike and I simply began shoving her belonging into things, some of which were my car.  4 AM rolled around and we were beyond the boundary of my driveway meaning that, having reaching our target leave time, the road trip gods would shower favor upon us.

The drive to Greensboro, NC was uneventful but I slept fitfully.  Mike enjoys podcasts, as do I, but I have great trouble falling asleep in the presence of human speech (work meetings excluded) so when I woke to Gary Whitta and Will Smith on Tested, I smiled, having planned for this, and put in ear plugs… which succeeded in merely dampening the road noise making the voices come through clearly.  I then put on noise-cancelling headphones which also just made the voices still further clarion.  Mike politely switched to music until I was back to sleep and then switched back to podcasts until I was awake again when he switched it back to music but only after I talked to him for like 45 minutes during time I said I had to sleep.  I am still a terrible passenger.

We picked up Chris on time and strolled around Greensboro attributing quotes on statues to the wrong people as Aidan was running late.  I also got a nice picture of a very pretty rain spout/gutter track.
Tonemapped Rain Gutter

I enjoyed meeting Aidan, but on reflection it was somewhat odd. One could say I met a fellow member of Team Interrobang or one could say I abducted an under-aged student I met online, taking him from his French class, took him to a pub, surrounded him with beer, took dozens of pictures of him, and then trespassed on school property to return him. He didn’t seem to mind.

Technology, bringing people together
I don’t know if Chris’s tattoos would help or hurt him being charged with pederasty.

After our hurried late lunch, we arrived early for a hurried early dinner where we met Chris and Jody who gave us the fruit of her apiary. It’s a testament to the maturity of my group that no one made a “we tasted your girlfriend’s honey” joke but that may have been from us having been dead tired. Dinner passed nicely at Carrabba’s and I learned far more about barrel-racing and Mac repair than I thought I would today.

2326-toatlanta-20110825

Chris and Jody may be relocating in a bit. I look forward to their new home being possibly more on the way to other points I tend to more often traverse.

Our last stop for the day was outside of Atlanta to stay with Reuben. Reuben was glad to see us:
Reuben Derps

I had experienced a 36 hour day by the time I called it a night. I’m glad there was fruit salad.

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This weekend was dedicated to the craziest thing doable these days short of drinking from a microwaved Nalgene bottle: Meeting people in a strange town that you met on the Internet.  Team Interrobang is a little shy of 16 months old and we decided to have a meetup at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo with the plan that Friday evening would be spent staying over at Banks’ (Chad Bedwell).  I picked up Tardbagel (Jeremy Churchill) on or about 2:30 at the 5 1/2 hour to Ft Wayne began.

IMG_1076-20090612-Friday at Banks

Tard, stunned with joy.

I’ve never considered PA particularly exciting driving-wise except for some stretches over the Appalachians and around Pittsburg.  I learned a new type of boring driving through Ohio.  If you want to recreate the experience we had, I strongly recommend you stare at the following images in fullscreen while making snarky comments about people and feeding dollars into a papershredder to simulate the burning of gas.

IMG_1075-20090612-Friday at Banks

Boring #1

IMG_1081-20090612-Friday at Banks

Boring #2

IMG_1089-20090612-Friday at Banks

Boring #3

I wanted to get a quality shot in Ohio of us at an intersection showing both roads going into infinity but I didn’t want to agitate the case of deep vein thrombosis that was building up after sitting on my duff for roughly 10 hours.

The roads weren’t just boring, but an epic, periodic kind of boredom.  Even in the spartan areas of PA houses exist in clusters of 3-7 even in the boonies but Ohio went house with small backyard surrounded by hundreds of hectares of nothing followed by another house surrounded by hundreds of hectares of nothing.

There was a brief moment of farce when we asked the GPS for the nearest fuel and we were directed to a “Sunoco” that was actually an abandoned rail station surrounded by sorghum fields.  On the way we passed a sign for “Jim’s Custom Meats” which depicted a pig giving the “a-okay” sign.  This was preceded by a 30 mile stretch where the GPS was convinced Rt 30 was 50 yards to our right.  The half hour of “off route!  Take next right to route 30.  Make left on route 30. Off route!”  is slightly above “da da da” as things I hate to hear when driving.

IMG_1091-20090612-Friday at Banks

The highlight of the drive in was by far Tard’s slurpee in Ft. Wayne.   This is quickly followed by a close second by the collection of anti-abortion billboards of which my favorite is always “abortion stops a beating heart”.  One had a blank billboard below it on which I wanted to write “except in cases where the fetus has yet to develope to the point where it has cardiac cells or has some congenital developmental defect, but I doubt it would have lasted long.

We met Banks in Ft. Wayne after almost having to pull a General Lee to hit the McDonalds’ parking lot and he took us to “Flanagans” the stereotypical Scotch-Irish cultural island that every city of at least 100K people must have where I ordered the “Flan-jitas” which I pronounced as such with a hard j.  The server attempted to correct me that it was “fÉ™-hÄ“’tÉ™”.  I think a bit of her died inside when I showed her the butchering on the menu.  The Flan-jitas were expensive and I should have gone with the Flan-burger with some Flan-diments.

Back at Banks’ I wind-mill slammed my 70-200 lens into the pavement but that was balanced out by the splendor of seeing the Jimmy Johnson room which contained a lifesized cutout wearing a straw hat and the bumper of his car after a victorious race of some sort.  This abutted his fallout shelter/exercise room which contained enough soup for him and his family to walk to southern Ohio in case of zombie invasion.

_MG_3261-20090612-Friday at Banks

Banks gazing lustfully at Jimmy Stewart

_MG_3276-20090612-Friday at Banks

Just in case

IMG_1100-20090612-Friday at Banks Banks also has a dog, Tootsie Roll, which he rescued.  At some point after doing so, she ate a bag of Tootsie rolls without dying although after 5 years she acted like she was still on a sugar rush from that incident.  In addition to the “Oh, shit” stock Banks basement had a carpetted bathroom.  The room in which I stayed had a shelf of books which I was told were signed, which is interesting as the shelf has a paperback copy of the Iliad.  Even if Homer has been dead for two millenia and may not have existed, I have no doubt Banks could get his signature.

This was the end of day 1.  All photos available below:[flickr album=72157619668029842 num=5 size=Thumbnail]