On the glass front door of Denny's, only seen in reverse from the inside: "God Bless America" beneath an American flag. America Bless God, I think. Can one big abstraction really bless another?
Driving around Phoenix today after dusk when suddenly everything got misty. "Strange," I thought, since it's not supposed to rain until monsoon season in August. The palm trees were swaying wildly. Pulled into Kmart parking lot where unreal praying mantis yellow street lamps glowered through the haze, as shopping carts wheeled themselves around of their own accord. I went up to a dude who was collecting them and found out that it was a dust storm. "They start out in the desert," he tells me, and last only for a few hours. Even worse he tells me are "microbursts," mini-hurricanes that come out of nowhere and vanish into nowhere, sometimes doing serious damage.
Whew this Memorial day was anything but a holiday. Woke up at 5:30 am to go hike Camelback mountain, a pretty steep little ordeal that's actually situated inside the city limits, with 5 other interns. Despite our attempt to beat the heat (which is really something down here, should get up to 108 tomorrow) there were a lot of other people with the same idea so we waited about a half hour for a parking spot. Afterwards went swimming back at the 'tel, then off for an hour bike ride down to a place by a lake where I could try my hand at the new pastels I bought (part of master plan to restore my faculty of vision). Went swimming again later once it cooled off and then played some bee at sunset, so it was quite a day in terms of physical activity.
Scottsdale for all its sickening affluence has got one thing right: there's a greenway that stretches for several miles with really nice bike trails. The trails are threaded through tunnels beneath all the major roads, so you can ride quite a ways without worrying about traffic of the four-legged variety. Whenever you pass lakes though you are besieged by clouds of interstellar gnat dust. The feeling of all these tiny bodies slamming into you is a strange one; you definitely do not want to bare your teeth, as they will "get up in your grill" so to speak.
America you become to me more incomprehensible and more disgusting every day. Is there anything, anything authentic about you, or has it all been gobbled up by the Whore of Babylon, turned into national historic sites, mini-malls, empty restaurant parking lots? I look at the people running around in you and I confess I do not understand them. Does anyone want authenticity anymore? Or does everyone desire a thin plastic coating over their world?
"On the Road" for all its vacuousness deals with this, the search for "American authenticity which was forever somewhere else" (Robert Stone). Nothing is achieved and there seems to be no point to all their crazy excited criss-crossings of the country. But that is exactly what a search for authenticity in America is destined to be like.
I am living in a hotel right now and will be living here for the next 3 months. Yes this is weird. It is a chain hotel, that is to say there is nothing authentic about it, it came from a big distant cookie cutter like everything else around here and serves its upscale cookie cutter clientele well I imagine. I bring this up though only to give you an emblem of inauthenticity: a kokopelli on the wall.
Of course this is a pretty common one--you see it everywhere. My question is: what in the blazes is a nation-wide prefab hotel chain doing appropriating an image from Anasazi rock art? Is this right? Do you think this is right? Do you find this quaint, charming, or does it make you want to empty the contents of your stomach on the spot?
America's answer is that it doesn't care. It sees nothing wrong with this. And that is what is wrong with America.
Adrenaline: your body rewarding you for facing your fears.
You know there is really nothing to fear in the known. 's why horror movies that show you everything, including what you're supposed to be afraid of, fail. The good ones are those that never reveal the object of your fear. (I guess then maybe they would be suspense? Well whatever.)
But it's funny how sitting down rationally and naming your fear will make it just go away. Kind of like what Rand's getting at in "Atlas" when she talks about the people whose thoughts are formless, who leave their thoughts and fears and desires unnamed.
Friday and Saturday consisted of a long two-day trip from Rolla, Missouri to Scottsdale, Arizona by myself in a 1984 Ford Econoline van. 1400 miles in all. The first 400 miles down through southeastern Missouri and Oklahoma were non-stop fun in tornado conditions. Of course the van is just this big box with wheels so a brutal crosswind like the one that dogged me through western OK made my already terrible gas mileage even worse.
The second day of travel, through the rest of Texas, across the ratlands of New Mexico, and into Arizona, was really hot. In fact in the middle of nowhere western NM I started having problems with the van bucking and losing power on gear transitions. At this point there were still 300 miles to go. I stopped it and poked around under the hood, changed the oil etc., but the problem persisted so I just took things real easy and didn't try to push 70. I took to patting the dashboard and talking to the van as if she was the worn-out but trusty horse and I the crapuccino cowboy on some long cattle drive across half the continent. Or at least it felt that way--maybe my steady diet of crapuccino and crackers had something to do with this. Anyway just to make things interesting there were terrible hill climbs around Flagstaff. Somehow though we made it all the way to Phoenix where I konked out immediately in the room.
Was home for a week after crazy move-out/wedding events. Bummed around mostly, hung out a lot with B and the family. Noticed that I slipped back into the Missouri vernacular: "Sumpthin fer nuthin, mondee tuesdee fridee." Went to see my little sister in the fourth grade Missouri play, an annual event that has barely changed since I took part in it a good 12 years ago. On another night Dad and the two girls and I went out one night and had some batting practice. It's been at least 5 years since I hit a baseball. I was whiffing up a storm at first. Then I started connecting, and man oh man, did that feel good. I probably put a dozen over the fence--this on the field that seemed impossibly large back in the early days of kid ball.
Dream in which China has purchased a 50 mile-wide strip of land along the U.S.-Canada border. Crossing into Canada now involves walking through an industrial zone with lots of puddles. I meet a cute freaky alternative chick who watches Uranium on MMUSA and looks like the show's host.
Got drug tested the other day. As Fate would arrange it, I come walking back through the waiting room proudly bearing my "specimen" (this is their word for it) past three cute girls who weren't there before. This is one of those situations you just don't foresee. I mean, how do you walk through a room with a cup of your own pee in your hand and maintain some sense of dignity, much less an air of coolness? I guess I should just be glad I didn't trip and spill it on one of them--that would have been about par for the course for a guy like me.
The fact of the matter is, you can't elope with a cantaloupe.
Mark's bachelor party was last night. Since I was the best man I was in charge of the evening's shenanigans, some of which went off better than others.
The first thing we did was paint Mark's hair blue and put him in the day-glo orange and yellow jumpsuit. Then we walked over to Ryan's place, where we took a two-handled axe to a computer monitor. Geez you should have seen the geeks go at it! Way more pent up rage than I had imagined. In the spirit of Office Space, Mark started jumping up and down on the thing once it was totally gutted. I had this bad premonition something was going to happen right before it did, when he slipped on the glass and fell. Needless to say things went from 0 to serious in like 2 seconds when we saw that his hand was cut open. He ended up at the ER and got 4 stitches. (Sidenote: last time Mark did something wild, it was waterskiing our freshman year, and he met a similar fate at the hands of one of the water skis. The dude's being conditioned against wild behavior even though in reality he's the last guy who needs to be.)
Well that put a damper on things for a while, but luckily it happened early on in the evening (about half an hour into the bachelor party!). When Mark finally got back from the ER we headed over to a hotel where I'd rented the Medieval theme room for the night. It came complete with whirlpool and corny spray-painted medieval scenery, and we busted out the keg, which we soon discovered we couldn't tap correctly. Of course we all felt like idiots. Mark's older brother called and woke up a friend to ask him how to tap a pony keg but we still couldn't figure it out. In the end we came to the conclusion that the tap was a bad one, and sure enough it turned out to be. We made a mad dash for a replacement tap and finally had the Fat Tire flowing at 1 am.
At this point in my story I reach certain seedy unmentionables. If you think about it for half a second you'll realize the nature of these seedy unmentionables, so I do not really need to talk about them.
Anyway I have no idea what time it was that we finally crashed. In the end only three of us spent the night in the room. Luckily for my pocketbook, Matt woke me up at 10:30--half an hour before we had to vacate the place. It was a medium-grade mess. We dumped the keg bucket with a lot of wasted beer into the whirlpool. Drew had thrown the freakin phone book into the whirlpool at some point during the night, and when we peeled it off the nightstand most of it stuck, so we had to clean that up. And we had to steal the remaining tassels off the curtains to make things look symmetric in the hopes that they would not notice and charge me. Some of the people took a liking to the tassels during the night and wouldn't persuaded to leave them be.
So that brings us up to the present, which is a lazy sunny Saturday afternoon with absolutely nothing going on. There is going to be another raging party tonight which Drew is going to bartend for. After that I'm gonna need a break from all this dissipation like Kerouac does at the end of The Dharma Bums.
Dream in which I am going deaf in one ear, am riding my bike around in the grass shifting, am accused of favoritism, have my car blown up by a hitman with a rocket launcher, see an orange sun glinting off an oil-painted gray sky.