IM Fun: Reading comprehension is very important.

Me: It might be noted that my deep-seated need to amuse people is the root of a number of my problems.

Stephen: See, I read amuse as “abuse.”

Me: …

Me: And now I am sad.

Stephen: And I am amused.

Stephen: Blam!

Me: I’m going to take a shower and think about where my life went wrong.

Me: It will be a long shower.

Kitchen Misadventures: “Homer, I have to go out to pick up something for dinner.”

I am not, in the head, a well person.

Okay, let me walk that back a little. I’m not going to start, like, recreationally murdering prostitutes or anything. But speaking as someone who, for example, has to sit in the aisle seat at a crowded movie theatre or run the risk of a complete psychological freakout  – surely the stupidest presentation of claustrophobia in the history of mental health – I worry that the parts of my brain I can’t control are starting to outpace the parts that I can. I have found, though, that keeping busy is a pretty reliable way of making sure that that things stay reasonably in line. It’s tough for the crazy bits to get out of hand if they’re always pressed into service doing stuff.

But – my life is a neverending series of ominous conjunctions – I was recently set on something of an enforced vacation, and this has presented a new sort of problem. My job ate up a lot of available resources, and that was a good thing. I’m not saying that the 40 hours a week I was there I was necessarily pushing 100% CPU towards work-related stuff (I mean, let’s be honest, here), but it was a solid 45-50% at the very least. Even more important was that when I wasn’t there, resenting the very fact that I had to go to work at all still managed to take up maybe 20% in the background. This went a long way towards keeping things in check.

The problem arose when I found myself without a job to go to or resent the existence of, and the bad parts of my brain had much more space in which to stretch their legs and really get comfortable.

Something had to be done, clearly. And something was done. Well, something was thought about being done. Thought about being doing? Thought about having been done? Thoughten-on been doing-ton? Stupid verb tenses. I will consult Dr. Streetmentioner’s book later, but the point is: at some point on a continuum I will not attempt to distinguish with any more specificity, I had a thought about what to do with the problem of all my unused brainpower.

The original plan was to spend my entire prolonged period of not-working-ness just reading books, watching movies, and playing video games. This strategy lasted almost two days before I realized that there was a limit to even how much time -I- could spend in front of a television and, prior to my back surgery a couple weeks ago, sitting in a position required for long stretches of reading was incredibly painful. So that plan wasn’t going to fly in any long-term sort of way.

Around about 10PM on the third day I had this mental conversation with myself:

“I could take this time to learn how to play the piano.”

You already know how to play the piano.

“I knew how to play the piano when I was a kid.”

You still know.

“I haven’t touched a piano in almost 20 years. It’s not like riding a bicycle.”

Sure it is.

“Remember what happened the last time I tried to ride a bicycle? I almost put myself through the windshield of Kenny’s dad’s ‘68 Bel Air, and that car was still in the garage.”

Come on, that was ages ago.

“It was September.”

Come on. I bet you can still play the Sonata Pathetique.

“I assure you I cannot.”

Sure you can, slugger! Go try it now. I bet it comes right back.

I went to our piano and proceeded to remember exactly 2/3s of the first chord of the adagio and not one other note from the entire 17-minute piece, after which I took that specific part of my brain and bludgeoned it to death with a metronome.

How, then, was I going to fill all this time I now found myself with? If my brain sat unused much longer it was going to start doing things on its own, and when you consider that one of the few projects I completed my first time through college was a semester-long seminar paper on the production of chemical and biological weapons, my brain’s version of idle noodling could result in a number of major treaty violations.

Then it hit me: I had just started watching Good Eats on the Food Network. Why didn’t I take all this copious free time (and far more dangerous free brainpower) and spend it learning to cook? Like, REALLY cook?

I started cooking for myself in high school and the things I have made since have met the barest conditions of edibility, I suppose – no one ever died from anything I made, no one that I am aware of at least – but I couldn’t really COOK per se. I could follow a recipe and not set a kitchen on fire (the latter is no longer true), but that’s not the same thing. We’re talking about COOKING with a capital C (and, apparently, capital everything else as well).

It also helps that Alton Brown’s cooking philosophy hits a deep groove in my brain. Most cooking shows are just food porn, but Good Eats is basically a science show that happens to be about food. “Cooking magic?” Fuck that noise. Maillard Reaction? Now you’re speaking my language.

(Good Eats is, in fact, on in the background while I’m writing this.)

So I started devouring watching Good Eats with reckless abandon (great gods what a terrible pun that would have been had it escaped). Unfortunately this wasn’t really helping. For killing time just watching Good Eats for hours at a stretch is fantastic, but in terms of actual practicable learning it’s far too scattershot a method to be useful. Change of plans, then: try learning one thing at a time.

My original thought had been that I would quite literally only cook one thing repeatedly until completely mastered. This plan went by the wayside when I made the I think not-unreasonable decision to start learning with the first episode of Good Eats, which happens to be about steak. I wanted to learn, yes, but I wasn’t about to just keep buying and cooking steaks over and over again until I got them perfect. Aside from the fact that steak isn’t exactly the cheapest food in the world, I am fairly certain that much red meat in succession would be fatal. Deliciously fatal, yes, but I’m not sure any modifier really makes “fatal” any better.

I still decided to start field testing with steak, though, which brings us to the crux of the matter at hand:

Being, as I am, a person who gets a little weird about some things makes cooking much more of an adventure than it needs to be sometimes.

Take, then, my first attempt at actual cookery: steaks. I had all the equipment required for this particular application; in this case that meant a cast-iron skillet, which has a dreadful cure and should really be replaced, and an oven, whose controls are so extraordinarily fucked-up that it should not be replaced so much as I am seriously considering inventing time travel so that I might go back and murder the person at the Kenmore plant who assembled it to prevent me from ever having to attempt to cook food in it. It’s one thing for an oven dial to be off by 50 degrees, that’s fine, but for anything past “on” my oven dial is a schizophrenic crapshoot – making anything in it requires adding an extra half hour or so to cooking times while I swing the dial back and forth every 5 minutes trying to figure out what position on said dial will make the oven stay at 350.

(It has not, to date, ever been the same thing twice.)

I had, as Alton Brown would say, the hardware, but I needed the software: the actual steak. This, I determined, would be obtained at my friendly neighborhood Pathmark.

When I walked up to the meat cooler I immediately regretted not just going to the butcher up the street and saying “give me a 3/4″ ribeye,” because once I saw the approximately 4,000 different steaks available I was paralyzed by choice. Latent perfectionists in the audience will recognize this feeling instantly, that depressing notion that when presented with an array of options too vast to count you must pick the ONE PERFECT ITEM amongst the innumerable hordes.

I stood there in front of the cooler, looking at something like 300 square feet of steak, and quietly said, “fuck.”

I started looking at the steaks. This took longer than you might think. Because in addition to the things I had learned about how to buy a steak – color, evenness of cut, marbling, etc etc – all the steaks available had those handy little price tags on them that listed things like price per pound and sell by dates, so in addition to the soft scores of color and cut I had quantifiable data about freshness and price which needed to be maximized. This required looking at as many different options as possible so as to build up the largest possible data set. This is how I buy food. Normal people walk up and buy the first piece of meat that looks good. I perform a statistical regression in my head.

Eventually I found a New York strip that I deemed to be the perfect combination of good steak and available mathematical data and took it home for my first attempt at serious cooking. This attempt lasted almost 45 seconds before I had a complete freakout. I was all set to go. I had finally gotten the oven to settle at 350 degrees. The skillet was in there heating up. My ingredients – kosher salt, black pepper, canola oil – and my tools – spatula, meat thermometer, pot holders, plates – were neatly placed on the counter and ready to go. I took the steak out of the fridge, placed the package on the counter, stared at it for 45 seconds, and then thought I was going to faint.

Cooking the steak would involve TOUCHING the steak.

This was problematic.

The bad part of my brain, perhaps angry that it was being shoved aside for something so trifling as “learning to prepare sustenance,” had lashed out and convinced the entire place that “touching raw steak” was one of those things that, surprisingly enough, would kill me.

I stood there and realized that if I ever wanted to really cook I was going to have to learn how to make myself do things like touch raw meat, but that first time it flares up trying to beat a compulsion is like trying to stop the Juggernaut. No, I had to get around it. Trick it. I had learned with the Christmas shopping it could be done; it was just a matter of figuring out the right way around.

This led to the following little internal monologue:

“Okay, okay, how do I rub the oil onto the raw steak… hmm… put my hands in ziploc bags? No, too clumsy… latex gloves? I don’t have any, and that’s just stupid… put the steak on a grill fork, pick it up with that, and brush the oil on? That’s even dumber than the latex gloves… oh, okay, I’ll cook the steak first, then touch it… wait, that’s the problem in the first place… I wonder if there’s anything in the cabinets that will help…”

I turned my head to look at the corner cabinet at my 4 o’clock.

I thought, wait a minute.

I looked down at the steak.

I twisted my head back to look at the cabinet.

I looked down at the steak again.

I thought, that couldn’t work, could it?

I took out a knife and carefully – oh god so very, very carefully so as not to touch anything  – cut the plastic wrap off the steak and threw it out. I upended the now open package and deposited the steak on a waiting plate. I poured a little bit of canola oil onto the center of the steak.

I twisted my head back around to look at the corner cabinet and started rubbing the oil over the surface of the steak.

I said out loud, “this is really fucking stupid.”

When I thought I had gotten decent coverage over that entire side, I took my hands away and turned back to look at it. Not too bad, actually. A nice, thin coat of oil over the surface of the steak – just like I had learned.

As I sprinkled the salt and pepper on it and prepared to avert my eyes so that I could flip the steak to its other side, I thought of the Army saying my friend Larry once told me: “if it’s stupid and it works, it isn’t stupid.”

I turned to look at the cabinet again, flipped over the steak, fumbled around with my hands trying to grab the bottle of oil, and said, “no, this is still really fucking stupid.”

JLK

IM Fun: Make it so.

David: So surgery tomorrow morning?

Me: 800 hours.

David: Good luck, sir.

Me: Thanks.

David: What’s the objective?

Me: Removing part of my spine.

David: Will the surgery resemble anything like that episode of TNG where Crusher replaced Worf’s spine?

Me: Ah, no.

Me: It will not.

David: That would have been cool.

Me: Yeah.

I think it’s ridiculous, impossible and insane! I wish I’d thought of it first.

Folks may recall that a number of years ago I attempted to move to Southern California and failed miserably at it.

My time in Los Angeles was made even worse by virtue of the fact that I was trying to spend my first Christmas alone there a very short time after I arrived. Now, don’t misunderstand me: for a number of reasons, most of which stem from an absolute refusal to even momentarily consider how my own actions might affect me, the entire endeavor was doomed to failure before it began. Looking back on it almost ten years after the fact it is obvious that moving to Los Angeles was one of my All-Time Bad Decisions, right up there with taking up smoking, taking up drinking, and asking Cindy Hennessy if she wanted to go to a movie. I knew the second I arrived there – literally the very instant I stepped out of my car – that I hated the place and I had to get out. The impending arrival of Christmas only made my burning need to escape from LA burn that much hotter, but it did afford me a single interesting experience: for one year and one year only I did my shopping somewhere other than Willow Grove Mall.

For this one year I did my Christmas shopping at Fashion Square Mall in Sherman Oaks, CA. I am someone who has a strange affinity for shopping malls, and as such a person let me tell you that Fashion Square is unmitigated crap.

Fashion Square is a total lack of imagination given form and then crammed with crappy, little stores. To wit: Fashion Square is smaller, square-footage wise, than Neshaminy Mall, but has twice as many stores. It’s design makes “boring” look like the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark: it is simply two department stores with a bunch of stuff between them in a straight line. When I first got there I couldn’t believe it. The entire mall is just a giant rectangle. It is, like the city surrounding it, designed to chip away your soul a little piece at a time until you are nothing but a shambling husk that once was a human being.

It was bad enough that I was in Los Angeles and wanted to leave more than I ever have wanted or ever will want anything, but having to do my shopping in this godforsaken retail hellhole instead of Willow Grove was actually something of a watershed day for me. Standing there in the center of that horrible place I resigned myself for the first time to the fact that there were parts of my brain I simply couldn’t control. Once you get past this fail-safe point, once you let yourself be okay with the fact that a part of your psyche is always going to say ridiculous things like “if you don’t keep your keys in your front right pocket you are going to die” and you agree to accept these statements as reasonably factual they actually become much easier to cope with.

I also decided standing in the center of Fashion Square that a dream that made you miserable and unhappy was no dream at all, and I resolved to get myself the fuck back home.

That, however, was going to be something of a problem.

I had driven out to Los Angeles and I couldn’t afford to drive back home – problematic since I had driven out there with quite literally everything I owned in a U-Haul trailer. The compromise I ended up going with, eating up every last cent I had, was that I would fly home, have a moving company carry my possessions, and have my car hauled back by a company that specialized in such things. This was actually cheaper than driving back cross-country (a feat I wouldn’t learn how to do cheaply until recently). I learned a little later that it was that cheap because the moving company I hired was the sort that would go through your boxes and steal crap from them – all of my Playstation games and, bizarrely, nothing else in my case – but that’s another story.

My car, though, is this story.

I got the call that my car would be delivered to a parking lot on Broad Street across the street from the Sports Complex. Why there? I have no idea. But I went down there to get my car anyway.

It is important to note that my car at the time was a 1988 Caprice Classic that I had bought from a friend, who himself had bought it secondhand from the Bristol Police Department. This meant that it was, essentially, the Bluesmobile. The car was fantastically large, fantastically heavy, and supercharged under the hood to an extent that would make the Millenium Falcon blush (the actual Falcon, not my ill-fated first car). The fact that the car was heavier than it was supposed to be ended up being a serious hassle for the driver who brought it back to me.

I have since been reliably informed that getting a car down from the stern-most position on the upper deck of a car carrier should take 10-15 minutes. Getting my car down took an hour and a half.

The driver of the car carrier was a guy named Booker, and he was… he was an odd duck. He had an awful lot of trouble getting my car down from the second deck of the carrier, and every time he ran into a snag – which was every 45 seconds or so – he would walk in semicircles around the back of the truck and say, as near as I could tell to no one, “this is gonna cause me problems.” At one point only three wheels of my car were actually touching the ramps of the carrier, a situation I am still unsure as to how it is even POSSIBLE, a mere few inches away from falling 10 feet off the back of the carrier and smashing into the street trunk-first, and Booker just looked at it and said, “this is gonna cause me problems.”

If my car had actually plunged to its death off the carrier I was fairly certain that it was going to cause ME more problems than anyone else, but over the 90 minutes Booker spent attempting to get my car onto the ground in once piece, he simply kept saying “this is gonna cause me problems” as though it would, Zatanna-like, magically levitate my car onto the blacktop. He kept on saying this over and over again as he worked various levers and jerked my car up and down and back and forth as he tried to get it onto the ground. After 90 minutes of my car barely clinging onto the deck of the car carrier and Booker muttering “this is gonna cause me problems” it somehow miraculously got down onto the street – I have no recollection of exactly how other than that after 90 minutes of near-death it was just suddenly on the street – and I drove home and proceeded to be absolutely, inconsolably miserable for the next two and a half years.

At this point let us fast forward to December 20, 2009.

After last year’s realization that I could do all my Christmas shopping online so long as I did it at the traditional location of Willow Grove Mall on the traditional Sunday before Christmas Eve, on Sunday I braved the aftermath of the worst December snowstorm in Philadelphia history to go to Willow Grove Park and get my Christmas shop on.

I arrived at the mall to find that the lot which contains the traditional parking space hadn’t been plowed.

I sat in my car and said to myself, “all right, deep breaths… deep breaths… this is okay. It’s okay. Come on, buddy, we can do this.”

(I don’t know why I’ve started addressing myself as “buddy” when I talk to myself, but I’m as mortified by it as anyone. This, though, is another one of those brain things that I don’t seem to have any control over.)

I parked as close as I could to the traditional parking space, grabbed my laptop, and headed up to the food court to do my Christmas shopping. For the Sunday before Christmas the place was remarkably uncrowded – I would estimate it wasn’t much worse than an average strong Saturday. I got a good table in the food court very easily, off in that corner that overlooks the entire center of the mall.

At that point I was pretty much set on what I was getting everyone, with one exception: I hadn’t pinned down what I was going to get my parents yet. The HDTV from last year was going to be tough to top. I toyed with some ideas, but they were all pretty crap – I couldn’t afford to get them plane tickets to Florida, I had long since given up on things like books or movies for my father since he never touched them, and my mother already had the complete set of Magnum PI seasons on DVD.

While poking around on Amazon I looked at the clock in the bottom right corner and realized that if I wanted to make it home in time for the Eagles game I wouldn’t have to hurry, necessarily, but that I couldn’t really dawdle.

It was that thought that set off one of the bizarre chain-reaction series of associations that are an annoying hallmark of my thinking (annoying because it’s hard to stop them before they inexorably get to things that are horrible). It went something like this:

“Eagles game – game on TV – Joe Buck is such a fucking douchebag – had to listen to that twat Al Michaels at the bar last week – at least at home we have Merrill – do we use the home theater for anything other than listening to Merrill any more? – no, it’s too old, it doesn’t have any digital inputs – can’t hook up the receiver to the DVD player or the TV – damn thing IS almost ten years old – at least at home we have Merrill – I wonder how favored the Eagles are – “

Whoa, whoa, WHOA, back that shit up. What was that bit about the home theater?

It was then I realized: I didn’t have to try and top the HDTV (and probably couldn’t anyway), but I could COMPLEMENT it by upgrading our old home theater system, which has now been reduced to an oversized radio, to a slick-ass new receiver with a Blu-Ray player.

I am a Christmas gift finding GOD.

So I bopped around Amazon and found a Blu-Ray home theater that fit the requirements I had come up with and then some: multiple digital inputs so that the TV and… you know…. other peripherals could be plugged into it (COUGH Xbox COUGH), enough power to level a small city, an iPod interface, built-in access to Pandora and Netflix, and bookshelf-size speakers so that I could just quickly swap them out with the ones we currently have strewn around the perimeter of the living room. I went over the specs once more, decided that it was perfect, and tacked it on to the rest of my Christmas gift order. The entire process, from firing up the laptop to order placed, took less than thirty minutes.

I may not be able to shut out my insane compulsions, but I can at least trick them sometimes.

Flash forward once again to Wednesday afternoon. Everything else I ordered has already arrived, but the home theater isn’t here yet. I’m not that worried – unlike everything else I’ve ever ordered from Amazon it has for some reason been shipped by FedEx. But, around 3 o’clock on Wednesday afternoon, there was a knock at the door. FedEx was here with my home theater and I was all set. I’d cleared a little space behind my bed where I could hide the box until Christmas Eve and I had been sneaking covert glances behind the TV to see what I’d have to do to rewire everything.

I opened the front door and all I saw was a giant box.

The box said, “are you John?”

I thought, what the fuck?

I said, “what the fuck?”

A head appeared just over the top of the box. It was wearing a FedEx hat. The delivery man.

He said, “you ordered the home theater?”

I said, “I… yeah… I… what the fuck?”

The delivery guy said, “is it okay?”

I said, “yeah, it’s just… it’s a lot bigger than I expected.”

“Well, here you go.” The delivery guy pushed the box into the sunporch with a grunt and then headed out the door. “Merry Christmas!”

“Yeah, uh…” I said, still staring at the box. “Merry Christmas to you too.”

I stood there transfixed by this giant box – its dimensions are almost exactly those of a coffin – standing upright in my sunporch.

The only thought in my head was WHAT WENT WRONG?!

I pulled out my iPhone and booted up the Amazon app while I circled the box in a vain attempt to figure out exactly what the fuck has happened here. I ordered a Blu-Ray receiver with a center, a sub, and 4 bookshelf speakers. Even with padding and everything, I made a rough estimate that this box was about 400% bigger than it should have been. There was no way it would fit in the space I had cleared behind the bed. The goddamn thing wasn’t much smaller than the bed.

When I got around to the far side I realized the problem – this home theater system has TOWER speakers. Not bookshelf speakers. Well, what the crap, of course the box is fucking enormous, the speakers are 4 feet longer than they’re supposed to be. They must have sent me the wrong home theater.

Just about when I realize why the box is so big my phone has finished pulling up my order on Amazon and tells me that this is, in fact, the home theater I ordered. I didn’t order the model with bookshelf speakers. I ordered this one, the giant coffin full of consumer electronics on my sunporch. Amazon also informed me that the package weighs 79 pounds. I poked at the box to see if it was that heavy and almost jammed my finger for my trouble: she didn’t budge.

I started trying to break down the issue as rationally as I could.

My first thought was: how am I going to get this thing upstairs? My back is so fucked up I can barely pick up my boxers off the bathroom floor. This thing weighs 80 pounds and is the size of a person.

My second thought was: even if I can get it upstairs without dying, where am I going to put it so they don’t see it until Christmas? It’s the size of a goddamn PERSON.

My third thought was: okay, so, if I killed someone, where on the second floor of this house could I hide their body?

I looked at the box, looked at the stairs, looked at the box again, and said out loud to the empty house, “this is gonna cause me problems.”

Merry Christmas, all.

JLK

Gone Walkabout, Day Seven: In Which Things Finally Go Catastrophically Wrong

I do not, as a rule, have recurring dreams.

I do, however, have one recurring nightmare of a sort. It’s not the same exact nightmare every time, but it’s always variations on the same theme: I am aimlessly driving my car around either Philadelphia or Los Angeles (the Valley, specifically, up and down Sepulveda and Laurel Canyon from Vanowen to Ventura) until I get on a very convoluted highway system. The dream culminates with me driving up onto a very high and inexplicably very thin on-ramp which I inevitably drive off of, waking up as the car plummets to the ground.

In a classic case of not seeing the forest for the trees, the fact that my only recurring nightmare involves driving is something I should have considered before deciding to go on a week-long road trip.

So come Tuesday morning, even though I had been on the road for six days, my leg was killing me, auxiliary power was gone, shields were down, there were hull breaches all through engineering and Reliant was coming about to fire again, despite all that I woke up in my hotel in Cleveland and got showered and dress with alarming speed (for me, at least) because I only had one thought in my head:

Home.

I knew that once I got into the car, in about 6 hours plus stops for food and gas I would finally be home. From when the phone rang with my wake-up call to me turning the key in my ignition was 21 minutes. I was not fucking around; I got showered and dressed, packed up everything I had, checked out, and got out of there.

Of course, even for the smartest of us, working at that sort of speed you are bound to make mistakes. And to my credit I only made one, which in a purely quantitative sense is pretty good.

I was so obsessed with getting on the road and finally getting home that at no point in the morning did I bother to look at my gas gauge.

Okay, excuse making time:

- Every other car I’ve owned has had a big nasty red light on the dashboard to warn you when you are low on gas. My current car, for all its nice features, does not; in the little status window that shows you your mileage and the temperature and whatnot it will occasionally say “low fuel” and make a slight pinging noise one cannot possibly hear over the sound of a very loud car stereo.

- It was dark out when I left and I have poor night vision.

- It was dark out AND raining a little bit, and Cleveland’s interstate system is only slightly less complex than Chicago’s, and for that matter navigating any sort of highway interchange is tough in the dark and in the rain.

- I have pre-existing issues about driving at night in the rain that cause my brain to short-circuit.

- Once out of Cleveland I was listening to “Live in New York City” and kept constantly checking between my iPod and the GPS to see if “Youngstown” would be playing when I was actually driving through Youngstown.

- The song “Youngstown” DID come up while I was driving through the actual city, and that was a really cool coincidence that occupied my mind for the better part of 20 minutes.

However, all that was chased out of my brain at a miracle moment when the iPod was quiet between tracks and my car chose that instant to make the “low fuel” noise.

I looked down and saw the little notice on the dashboard and thought, “well, okay, I’m getting something like 31 miles per here, the noise means I’ve got just under two gallons, I’ll make it to the next exit just fine. Hell, I could make it to the next exit in the middle of nowhere just fine.”

Perhaps six minutes later, as I gunned the pedal up an incline to pass a truck, I heard that telltale pop in my engine, and watched as my tachometer and speedometer both started to drop precipitously.

I started shouting in my car. “No! NO! FUCKING NO! Come on, don’t… NO! Oh, for fucking… NO! NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

In desperation I muttered the last invocation I thought might still have some power: “come on, baby, hold together.”

As I tried to wrestle my car onto the shoulder I flashed back to my freshman year of high school and my English class with Mr. Lane when we read Antigone: the first time in my life I ever heard the word “hubris.”

It was at this point that the only remaining sliver of luck I had came through and the last sputters of juice my car had managed to actually get me into the driveway of a highway maintenance depot. My car finally stopped moving on its own power just as I had completed the hard right turn into the depot. There was a truck sitting there waiting to leave, and the driver rolled down his window.

“You okay?” he shouted.

“Yeah, looks like I ran out of gas,” I shouted back.

“The guys inside can call Triple-A, you’ll be all right!” he shouted before driving away.

I pushed my car a little further into the depot when one of the guys who worked there came out and walked over to my car. “You ran out of gas?” he asked. The guy in the truck must have radioed inside.

“Yeah,” I said. I got out of the car. “I guess I just wasn’t paying attention to the gauge. I was so obsessed with getting home.”

He gave me a sympathetic look. “How long you been on the road?”

It took me a couple seconds to actually remember. “A week.”

“Well, we called the wrecker, he’s on his way.” He jerked his thumb back at the huge garage. “Why don’t you come and wait inside?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Let me just get my phone.”

He went back inside, and maybe four seconds after I fished my phone off the front seat of my car and closed the door the light drizzle that had been going all morning switched to a full-on downpour. I was instantly soaked.

I looked up at the sky, looked down at the ground, and muttered, “fucking Sophocles.”

Before heading inside I reached back into my car and grabbed the other object on the front seat – my towel.

As I walked into the depot garage I was trying to dry my hair, and the guy said, “do you always drive around with a towel?”

Now ordinarily this would be a moment where I would explode with mock fury at someone who did not understand the importance of knowing where your towel is. But I was cold and wet and bone tired from a week on the road and, most importantly, not on my way home.

I stopped drying my hair for the briefest of moments and simply said, “absolutely.”

He seemed to accept that.

At one point I asked him, “how far is it to the next exit where I can get gas?”

He said, “there’s a Pilot at the next exit, four miles from here.”

“FOUR miles?” I said. I did some quick calculations in my head. “Christ, the low fuel thing must have gone off right when I left the hotel.”

“You said you were coming from Cleveland?” the guy asked. “That car, yeah, that seems about right.”

I thought, “I REALLY need to get home.”

Eventually the wrecker showed up – real nice guy, I’m going to send him and the depot boys Christmas cards – and I was back underway after only about a 40 minute layover. I pulled off at the next exit and followed the signs for the Pilot Center. Pilot Centers are a lot of fun. In addition to gas and food (a McDonald’s, in this case) they have the always-wacky Pilot Shop, which is a weird combination of a 7-11, a Pep Boys, and a Nordstrom Returns Center. There’s the usual soda fountain and coffee stuff, snack food and whatnot, and then there is a rudimentary collection of clothing like gloves and hats and jackets that are absurdly overpriced, and then there are racks and racks of auto parts.

This Pilot Center, though, had one distinct problem. It was apparently right on the boundary of a different township or city or whatever the crap they have in Ohio, and just before the driveway was one of those “you are entering” signs that read:

“WELCOME TO LIVERPOOL.”

I was being forced to gas up my car in a town called Liverpool.

I thought, “is there no end to the indignities I am forced to suffer?”

After getting the filthy Scouse gas I was finally back on the road, only an hour behind schedule. This wasn’t too bad. I would still be home at about 4 o’clock. I’d also been doing so much highway driving that my car was up to a whopping 31.4MPG: I wouldn’t have to get gas again, this tank would take me all the way home.

But something was wrong.

Once I got out of the western Pennsylvania hill country I was finding that I was having trouble staying focused on the road. It couldn’t have been sleepiness, I thought, I’d had ten hours sleep the night previous, and an unscheduled hourlong break that very morning. No, I suspected that the horrific stretch I drove on Sunday in Iowa and northern Illinois had permanently disabled some critical system needed to keep me fully alert while on the road (any of the biological persuasion are welcome to speculate). I was maybe 300 miles from home at this point. I couldn’t bear the thought of stopping for another, longer break. Even if I were going to break the “never drive cross-country at night” rule – which I probably could have done for the last 50 miles or so of the trip, I certainly knew how to get myself home from Downingtown – I could not bring myself to rest for more than a few minutes. I was so close. I couldn’t stop.

Problem was, in my current state it was more likely I was going to stop by driving into something. Drastic measures needed to be taken. I saw a sign that a rest stop was three miles away, and with a sinking, sickening feeling, I knew what I had to do.

I pulled into the rest stop, walked into the convenience store, and bought a Sugar-Free Red Bull.

Now, understand something: Sugar-Free Red Bull is the most disgusting thing you can drink. It is, by any reasonable measure, the single-worst-tasting substance in the known universe. Red Bull on its own is pretty gross, but when you take the sugar out of it the level of foulness transcends anything most human beings can imagine. It’s not just that it doesn’t taste good – it is one of the few things you can legally consume that actively tastes BAD, that attacks your taste buds and violently makes you regret ingesting it.

If you are wondering, you take the sugar out because once you do so the stimulant high you get from the caffeine and other nasty shit in it is not later mediated by a sugar crash. Sugar-Free Red Bull is for when you absolutely cannot fuck around with staying awake and don’t care how bad it tastes to do it.

And you really can’t care about how bad it tastes because, trust me, you’ll never taste anything worse in your life. The first time I took it was when I was driving home from Somers Point in the wee hours of the morning and it was recommended to me, “just open it and pound the whole thing at once. If you don’t finish off the can the first swig you won’t be able to go back and finish the rest.” This is absolutely true. The four previous times I have had to consume Sugar-Free Red Bull I have downed the entire can in one gulp, which does not mediate the violent unpleasantness of drinking it any, but does at least mean that you only have to endure it once.

I sat there in my car, staring at the can, desperately trying to think of some other way to solve my problem, but I was too far out and had too many hours to go. Another cup of Starbucks swill wouldn’t do it.

This was the only way.

I opened the can, took a deep breath and pounded the whole thing. Once it was empty I crushed the can in my left hand like a drunken frat boy and started pounding the dashboard of my car with my right, screaming, “AAAAAGGGGGHHHHH FUCKING FUCK FUCK AAAAAAGGGGHHHHH!’

You really cannot comprehend how bad this shit tastes. It is an assault on your sense of taste, and taste loses badly. Once it was down I had to wash my mouth out with a bottle of water, spitting out the open door of the car just to get the taste out. I will say this about it, though: it works. Sweet zombie Jesus does it work. Ten minutes later I was on the road when it kicked in and it is like the back of your head getting hit by a car carrier. One second you are a normal, somewhat tired person and then the next second BANG! you are the most awake person in the world.

The other downside, besides the taste, is that the next four hours are something of a blur. I drove, certainly, and I have vague snippets of memory of the time – loudly and vocally debating with myself whether to take the Schuylkill or the Turnpike to the Boulevard is the clearest, followed closely by singing along to every note of the Original Broadway Cast album of Avenue Q – but not a whole lot else.

But finally, at 3:39PM and after 2,685.8 miles, I pulled up at home and remembered: this is the best part.

I have said numerous times that while I am someone who loves traveling I hate being other places. And that’s true; I really, REALLY don’t travel well. But I do it anway for two reasons. One is that I crave new information like teenage girls crave bad vampire movies, and going places I’ve never been is a simple and easy way to get some.

The other is that feeling from getting home, that indescribable feeling – believe me, I’ve been sitting here trying to describe it and I am officially giving up on the process – and if a week of bizarre crap across half this amazing country and back is what it takes to get it, well, that’s what it takes.

JLK

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Solo

Gone Walkabout, Day Six: In Which Precious Little Actually Happens

Once I had made the plans to head back home through Chicago, I always knew that this was going to be an easy day. Chicago to Cleveland is only 350 miles, and when you’ve routinely been clocking 450-500 miles a day a quick little 5-hour shot like that is chump change.

So, then, the very few interesting things that happened on the road yesterday were:

- I mentioned that my uncle lives off of US30 in Indiana. He does, out near Valparaiso, but from there he commutes to Chicago. After making that drive in the outbound direction yesterday morning I do not envy him his morning commute of 40 miles into the frankly baffling Chicago interstate system. My GPS spoke more in the first half hour trying to get out of Chicago (“keep right,” “keep left,” “bear right,” etc) than it did on any entire day the  rest of the trip. The Byzantine system of highway interchanges would test even the toughest driver, but to do it in rush hour traffic twice a day, great gods. The man is made of sterner stuff than I, though inasmuch as he hunts spies for a living that was sort of a given anyway.

- Since my driving day was reasonably short, I made the one and only sightseeing stop of the entire trip when I went to the University of Notre Dame. It was 35 degrees and pouring when I was there, so I didn’t really get to DO anything other than drive around and look at how pretty everything was, but suffice it to say I have now seen yet another college campus that assures me that I was utterly, totally robbed at LaSalle (on the campus front). Notre Dame isn’t THE nicest campus I’ve ever seen – that’s still, and likely always will be, UCLA – but I’d wager it’s probably #2 on the list, even in a depressing December rain.

- On a related note, deserted college campuses are kinda creepy. Even the nice ones. Anyplace that is SUPPOSED to have lots of people in it is always weird and uncomfortable when there aren’t people, and being dark and rainy in the middle of the day does not alleviate that weirdness any. (And, before you ask, I never loved rehearsing in empty theatres, either.)

- The drive across Indiana and Ohio on I-80 is only slightly less boring than the same stretch on I-70, and only there by virtue of the fact that things resembling civilization occur a little more frequently along the way.

- This does assume that we include Toledo in our definition of “civilization,” which I am frankly not 100% sold on.

- Important safety tip #3: If you find yourself driving cross-country on a Midwestern interstate on a dark, rainy, and otherwise unpleasant day, and you find yourself at a point in your life where you have a thing for someone, and your iPod serves up “Tunnel of Love,” unplug your iPod from whatever is broadcasting it to your stereo and throw it out your car window. You may want to increase your speed a little before you do this so that you guarantee it will shatter into unrecoverable pieces when it hits the ground.

You must throw it out the window because if this confluence of circumstances takes place it means that not only has your iPod inadvertently gained sentience a la Wintermute, it has also become manipulative and psychotic like Wintermute and it knows that the combination of a seemingly-unending Midwestern winter and a 45-minute folk opera about the birth and death of a marriage will convince you that the pursuit of relationships is an inherently and absolutely doomed endeavor.

- Actually, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, if you are on a long drive with your iPod set to album shuffle you should probably avoid Bruce altogether. Song shuffle, fine, go for it, but when you listen to entire albums straight through… suffice it to say that no matter how bright things seem at the start, Springsteen albums never end happily.

Tomorrow: the story of the final push home (and oh boy do things happen).

JLK

Gone Walkabout, Day Five: In Which Important Lessons Are Learned

Yes, I am aware that we skipped a day there. I’m going to go back and do day four after I get home – it’s a lot of ridiculous stuff and I would be hard-pressed to do it justice out here on the road, especially in my current state (i.e. completely drained of all energy reserves). For now, we continue with just road days – check back in late Wednesday or so for the full recap on my 40 hours of actual vacation in and around Kansas City.

Moving on to the body of today’s ravings:

As I’m sure we all know, my primary concern in all things is your safety. Yes, YOU, reading this right now. Your safety. It keeps me up nights.

With that in mind, let me give you a very important safety tip.

If a person you know – a person you care about, even – says to you, “hey, I’ve got an idea. Let’s drive from Kansas City to Chicago by way of Des Moines,” look into their eyes, take a deep breath, and kill them. You must kill them before they kill you, or worse, before they cause you to kill yourself.

Anyone who suggests such a thing clearly has evil intentions.

I left Kansas City at 7:30 yesterday morning and had hit the snow line by about 8:30. Everything I saw was completely covered with snow until I was just outside Chicago around 4:30.

That is eight solid hours of driving through a winter wonderland. It’s not everything it’s cracked up to be. In Missouri and most of Iowa it’s not TOO bad. There is terrain there, at least. The road goes up and down, there are hills and bluffs and the occasional rock face. In Missouri and Iowa people build farmhouses reasonably close to the highway. There’s stuff to look at.

And then in Iowa there is the issue of the wrecks.

By the time I got to Des Moines and got onto I-80 there was serious snow on the ground – I’d estimate more than a foot. And it wasn’t long before coming over a hill I saw up in the distance a car abandoned on the side of the road. As I got closer, though, I saw that snow had actually been plowed over the car, meaning it had been there for some time. I didn’t think much of it, but then I saw another one. And another. And another.

By the fourth one I was pretty well away from Des Moines, and that stretch to Iowa City is pretty desolate. It isn’t like there are gas stations every mile or so you can walk to if your car breaks down. I started to wonder – what happens to the people in these cars? Do they just start walking off the highway towards the farmhouses in the distance? Do they just abandon the cars entirely? Does someone pick them up?

Then I saw a car, in the snow, abandoned, but this time it was upside down and covered with police tape. Lying there, on the side of the highway, upside down in a 5-foot snow drift, taped off.

Driving past, I said out loud to myself, “what’s up with THAT?”

Shortly after this came the first abandoned tractor trailer. Again, out in the middle of Iowa nowhere, off the side of the road, snow piled up around it. The snow had drifted up high enough to block the driver’s side door, and the other door was flush up against the embankment at the side of the road.

The first thought in my head was: is there a dead guy in there?

The second thought in my head was: I have wandered into a Stephen King story.

Then came the second tractor-trailer, this one on the median, this one upside-down. THE ENTIRE THING. Cab and payload both, laying upside down in between the lanes of Interstate 80, covered in snow.

I said, again out loud, “what the FUCK is going on here?”

Between Des Moines and Iowa City I saw a total of about a dozen of these, mixed between cars and tractor-trailers. Just left to rot in the snow by the side of the road. I know this isn’t standard procedure because I drove past two crews working to haul cars back onto the road that had ended up out there earlier in the day.

I started to wonder: does the Iowa Department of Transportation determine if you are somehow a “evil” driver, and then leave your wreck out there for all to see as a warning, like the Royal Navy hanging pirates at the mouth of a port? Are they automotive scarecrows of some kind?

I though the creepy haunted highway stuff was bad, but I didn’t know what bad was – I had no CONCEPTION what bad was – until I left Iowa and found myself on the Illinois Tollway.

(“Tollway,” seriously?)

Interstate 80 in Illinois – the Tollway to you, pal – is a highway connecting Chicago to the Iowa border. It is the worst road I’ve ever seen. Oh, yes, I’m planting my flag there. It is worse than the pre-construction 309. Worse than the Schuylkill. Worse than the Garden State Parkway on a Sunday night. Worse than Route 1 through Princeton. Worse than anything you can think of. It is the worst road in the history of the universe. You heard me. It is the worst road in 14 billion years.

“But, John,” you say, “I’m looking at it here on this map and it doesn’t seem so bad.”

“Oh, are you?” I say.

“Yes,” you say. “It’s pretty much straight for the whole length, and my contour map shows that it barely changes elevation at all.”

“Well, okay,” I say. “But let me ask you something.”

“Sure,” you say.

“Do your nice little maps have A FUCKING FOOT OF GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING SNOW ON THEM?” I ask.

Remember earlier, when I noted that in Missouri and Iowa people build farmhouses close to the highway? That’s an important contrast, because in Illinois for whatever reason they don’t do that. So, while you’re driving on a highway that is for some reason almost completely deserted, the only thing you can see, aside from the occasional dead tree, is just a solid field of white. Perfectly flat. In every direction. Almost out to the horizon. It’s just your car and the road, and everything else in the entire world is just white.

It’s HORRIFYING.

It’s hard to accurately get across how desolate this drive is. If there weren’t so much snow it probably wouldn’t have been so bad, you could at least see the fields and whatnot, but the snow smears everything together into one solid mass. At one point I had to get gas and when I pulled off the sign on the exit ramp read “GAS 4 MILES.” The gas station was FOUR MILES from the highway! And care to guess what’s between the highway and the gas station? Anyone? Any guesses?

That’s right – more snow and more white.

For the first half hour or so I figured I was just going through a blank spot or something, that eventually SOME semblance of civilization would appear. And I was right, it did – you start seeing buildings and stores and whatnot about 20 miles from Chicago. Until then, you have to deal with 140 miles of stone white nothingness.

I did not handle it well.

At one point it got  so monotonous and so mind-numbing that I saw a sign for US 30 – known better to most of us as the White Horse Pike – and I was SURE that I had fallen asleep at the wheel and was dreaming that I was back in Jersey. It took me a couple seconds to actually remember that US30 goes all the way out here, that my uncle lives off it in Indiana.

You can only stare at a solid field of white for so long before it starts seriously messing with your mind. About 100 miles from Chicago my iPod (set to album shuffle) served up Darkness on the Edge of Town, and while listening to the end of Racing in the Street – admittedly one of Bruce’s most unhappy songs – I thought, “if I just turn the wheel a little bit to the right…”

I shook my head and said, “I’m going crazy.”

(Important safety tip #2: do not listen to Darkness on the Edge of Town while driving cross-country. The River isn’t a great choice either.)

By this point I was at the point of cracking the windows (in 31 degree weather) and blasting the radio so that I wouldn’t get hypnotized by the road again. I’d been driving for seven straight hours. My leg was killing me. I had to do something.

I saw a sign for an upcoming rest stop that had a Starbucks.

Now understand that I am not a fan of Starbucks. I don’t care for any of the usual stupid crap people get mad about with Starbucks (globalization, homogenization, whatever) – I just really dislike their coffee.

I saw the sign and said, “the hell with it, I’m gonna fucking die out here.”

I limped into the rest stop – quite literally limped, after seven hours in the car my leg had stopped working completely – and found the Starbucks. It was across from the Panda Express. I am not making this up. The rest stop, which is technically called the DeKalb Oasis (not making that up either) has a McDonalds, a Starbucks, and a Panda Express. Like you do.

I limped over to the Starbucks counter, and when the guy came over I simply said, “black coffee. Large.” I paused for maybe a quarter of a second before I remembered my manners. “Please.”

The coffee guy looked at me and said, “do you want – “

Before he could finish his sentence I opened my eyes as wide as I could and gave him a look clearly indicating that if he kept talking my next sentence was going to consist primarily of the loudest and vilest profanities I could muster.

He said, “large black coffee, right,” and turned away faster than I would have thought him able.

Tomorrow – home.

JLK

Gone Walkabout, Day Three: In Which The Road Begins To Take A Toll

Okay, so, last night. Yesterday was a short driving day, only about 250 miles from St. Louis to Kansas City, but all the same after dinner last night I was dead tired.

And I mean DEAD tired. I sat down to start writing up the story of the road yesterday and I just couldn’t stay awake. You know that thing you do in a meeting, where you’re really tired and you have to keep your eyes open and look like you’re paying attention, but you also have to keep your head up even though it feels like there’s a brick taped to your forehead? That’s what I was doing last night, and eventually I realized if I actually fell asleep at my laptop and let my head go all the way down the laptop would probably lose. So yesterday got put off until today.

Tonight, unfortunately, I find myself also pretty tired. Not too tired to get this stuff out there, mind you, but a little too tired to whip up a complete narrative on two days. So today we’re going to do yesterday with a series of short vignettes (mainly to see if I can do “short,” I’m guessing no) and hopefully tomorrow we’ll get to cover today.

So, to wit:

- The drive from St. Louis to Kansas City, while short, is not nearly as boring as the stretch from Columbus to St. Louis. There is much in the way of actual geography between the two cities.

It's still better than Illinois.

Admittedly not a LOT of geography, but there’s at least an elevation change you can clearly see here.

- No wacky stuff on trucks yesterday, but we did get some quality wacky sign action. First there was this guy:

I saw that and I was like, well, that’s certainly a definitive statement on the subject.

What I didn’t know at the time was that it really WASN’T a definitive statement. “Jesus is real” merely sets up the pins. This bad boy knocks them down:

The second picture is so bad because I wasn’t prepared to take it – I didn’t realize the first was part of a series and that the continuation would come so quickly. You would think that folks of the sort to spend what has to be significant dollars advertising  on a major interstate would have the presence of mind to alert you to the fact that there are multiple signs and that they are related. Next time, in addition to “Jesus Is Real” or whatever message you choose to impart, put something like “Sign 1 of 3″ at the bottom right corner so we know to keep our eyes peeled for the rest of the message. (Though I would be willing to hazard a guess the rest of the message is not something like “and everything is nice.”)

- Something I caught twice on the road but was never able to get pictures of: actual sheepdogs. Like, big herds of sheep with a couple dogs running along with them. I’m not really the sort of person to say that things are “cute,” but even I will admit that those came close.

- The signs for road numbers in Missouri, like in Ohio, are shaped like Missouri. This is the bad kind of “cute” and part of the reason I don’t really define things as “cute” that often: “cute” usually means annoying. I don’t know why but the whole “signs shaped like states” thing annoys the hell out of me. Missouri, though, adds a twist to it: whereas in Ohio, if the road number doesn’t fit inside their little Ohio decal, they reduce the font a little bit to compensate, in Missouri they just WIDEN MISSOURI. Now most of the time you wouldn’t notice this except for when you get one exit with two numbered highways on it and the sign (which I repeatedly tried and failed to get pictures of) has two Missouris of different widths on them.

I wish I was at the highway planning meeting when these were designed.

Highway Commissioner #1: “Okay, we’re going to go with the Missouri-shaped highway signs?”

Highway Commissioner #2: “Yeah, they’re cute.”

Highway Commissioner #3: “Uh, guys, the number decals we bought, we can only fit two of them on the Missouri signs.”

Highway Commissioner #2: “That’s fine, we’ll just get some other, smaller decals.”

Highway Commissioner #3: “We spent 114 million dollars on THESE decals.”

Highway Commissioner #1: “Okay, so how about we just widen Missouri on the signs with three numbers? No one will notice.”

Highway Commissioner#2: “Yeah, that’s still cute.”

- Continuing our wacky sign theme, you know those LCD warning signs that there are, like, two of back home? One on 95 at Allegheny and another one at Broad? Okay, once you get out into the Midwest they’re fucking everywhere, and unlike the ones we have that are never on, these things are fountains of useful information out here. My favorite is the list of upcoming exits and how long it will take you to get to each of them. Genius, that.

However, once you hit St. Louis on I-70, and for a solid 20 miles thereafter, the warning signs say:

“Interstate 64 Now Open. Completed As Promised.”

Does MissouriDOT just blithely promise to build highways and then not come through so often that the populace has become jaded and mistrusting? Maybe it’s a “Show Me State” kind of thing, but as I have long maintained on that particular subject: fuck you, Missouri.

- My entry into Kansas yesterday at approximately 2:59PM increased the number of US States I have been in to 35.

- I am not actually staying in Kansas City. I am staying just south of Kansas City in Overland Park, KS, which has been voted one of the 10 nicest places to live in the US. And it is quite nice, if you like shopping.

When I arrived at my hotel, one of the questions the staff asked me was “are you here for shopping?” I thought it a bit odd at the time and said “no, I’m here for a basketball game.”

Then I drove around Overland Park a bit.

Understand something if you’ve never been to a city out in the Midwest: what we of an eastern extraction think of as “suburban sprawl” is pissant shit compared to out here. My hotel here in Overland Park is on Metcalf Street, which I think is sort of the main drag. I have now driven 10 miles of it and it is NOTHING BUT STRIP MALLS AND CAR DEALERSHIPS. NOTHING. I’ve ventured off Metcalf a bit when I needed to pick up some supplies – again, nothing but shopping centers and office buildings. I’ve covered large stretches of Overland Park the last 30 hours or so and I haven’t seen so much as a single house. There are CARS everywhere, and people in them, and people shopping in these places, but I’ll be goddamned if I can figure out where any of them fucking LIVE.

Back home we complain about “suburban sprawl” when someone puts up a Best Buy on a vacant lot. You have no idea how good we have it. You have no idea what suburban sprawl really is: it is FRIGHTENING. We’re lucky that there is enough pre-existing population density to keep our hometown from ever looking like this, and thank god for that. The next time you hear someone complain about suburban sprawl in Holland Township or whereever, ask them if they’ve ever actually seen an area the size of Bucks County given over to nothing but commercial real estate, and then kick them in the junk. They have no idea what they’re talking about.

- Unfortunately, it has turned out that spending 8 hours a day in my car does quite the number on my back, and through my back my leg. Originally my plan was to head south from here, to hit San Antonio for a bit and then New Orleans on my way back home. It doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.

The problem is that going south from here means six more days of driving, and I don’t think I’m up for that at this point. Driving this much is causing me to take my daily max of Vicodin, which is bad for two reasons:

1) Vicodin is delivered with Tylenol, and there is a limit to how much Tylenol you can take in a day before it starts to, you know, kill you.

2) At my current consumption rate I do not have enough Vicodin to last six days.

You may note that “getting addicted to Vicodin” is not an issue here. I have asked three different doctors if I should be worried about this and they all said no. One of them actually laughed and said “you’ve been watching too much House.” And they’re probably right – as someone who has taken other, much more powerful, narcotic painkillers, Vicodin isn’t that great. Getting addicted to Vicodin would be like getting addicted to Bud Light. Why even bother?

Anyway, instead of heading south I will be heading back home tomorrow. I’m getting the procedure done on my back in like two weeks, by which time I should hopefully be able to do all the driving I want, and it’s not like San Antonio or New Orleans are going to go anywhere anytime soon (well, San Antonio won’t at least). Instead of just heading back the way I came, though, which would be incredibly boring, I am returning by way of Chicago, and then Cleveland. This not only affords me the chance to see and drive through areas I never have, the time spent tomorrow in Iowa will increase my state count to 36.

It’s weird, the things that make me happy.

Tomorrow: Iowa and Chicago, where I will Titan up.

JLK

Please forgive our minor service outage.

The report on today’s road silliness will come tomorrow, I promise. For now I am just stone dead tired.

Apologies.

Gone Walkabout, Day Two: In Which My Ulterior Motives Are Revealed

Beginning, as they say, at the beginning, this morning brought with it yet one more awful superlative to add to an already-long list of awful superlatives:

Today, I was colder than I ever have been in my entire life.

Before this morning the coldest I had ever been was on Valentine’s Day of 2005. (That isn’t a Valentine’s Day crack, I just remember the date.) It was about a month after we closed Hurlyburly and Janice, who played Darlene, was appearing in a benefit performance of The Vagina Monologues. It had been snowing for the better part of a day and it was fucking freezing cold to boot , but I had promised her I’d go and I’m a sucker for charity (a charity performance being the only possible way to make me pay to see the unmitigated crap that is The Vagina Monologues).

Between the foot-plus of snow and the performance being at the Prince (which meant trying to park downtown in a foot-plus of snow), I decided to take SEPTA. But between the continuing snow and blowing wind it was damnably, ridiculously cold. I had bundled myself up in three layers of normal clothing and even borrowed my father’s gigantic goose down parka, winter cap and thermal gloves. I had taken every precautionary measure against cold that was possible, save the surefire measure of not actually going outside.

Getting down there at 8 o’clock wasn’t too bad. My father drove me the two blocks to Frankford Avenue so I could wait for the bus in the car, and back then the 66 dropped you off right by the door to the station at Bridge and Pratt.

Coming back at 2 in the morning, though, that was another story. The 66 only runs twice an hour that time of night, and back then the 66 loaded way the hell up Bridge Street, about a block from the station and with no protection from the elements. I must have just missed one bus when I got off the El or they were running behind on account of the weather, because I stood out there on Bridge Street in the snow for a solid half hour FREEZING MY FUCKING ASS OFF.

I actually recall thinking at the time that if it wasn’t so goddamn cold it would have been quite pretty. It was the middle of the night and there was no one around for blocks and the snow kept cars off the road, so between the snow and the lack of traffic it was about as close to silent as it ever gets at Bridge and Pratt. And since it’s a major SEPTA station the entire area was floodlit to the hilt with orange sodium lights, which combined with the snow to make an oddly beautiful winter scene, ruined only by the fact that it was FUCKING FREEZING.

Before today, the coldest I had ever been was a half hour on a city street. This morning we surpassed that in a parking lot in a little over 90 seconds.

I remarkably managed to get out of bed this morning (more on that later) promptly at 7AM, and once I checked out I had to make the unfortunate walk from the hotel lobby to my car. Now you might be thinking, and rightfully so, that a walk from a hotel lobby to a car shouldn’t ordinarily be that unfortunate. And under most circumstances you would be correct.

In this case, however, it was unfortunate because a temperature of 11 degrees Fahrenheit and sustained winds of 40MPH translate to a wind chill of approximately -15. That isn’t in the frostbite zone – it misses by a few degrees – but it hardly matters. That is Death Cold.

In the summer here (well, home here, not here-right-now-in-Saint-Louis-here) we talk about really hot days where you walk outside and the humidity is like getting hit by something. A wet sock, a hot towel, pick your metaphor. -15 degree wind chill isn’t like that. It’s not like getting hit by something. It’s… I dunno, it’s the OPPOSITE of getting hit by something, if such a concept exists.

When you first step outside you simply register that it’s cold out, and that’s it’s very cold and oh my, isn’t this unpleasant, but that feeling only lasts for a little less than a second. Before that second is up you get hit with the wind, and that is… I’m not sure I can even describe it. It’s like the life gets sucked out of you. Not only life, but the very WILL to live (/snicker, end of Episode III, /snicker). Remember reading the Jack London story “To Build a Fire” in 7th grade? It’s that kind of cold. You just want to stop. You might as well, it feels like you’re closing in on absolute zero anyway. It’s the kind of cold that makes you think, “you know, I’m a basically good person, I’m pretty sure I’ll end up in heaven.” Cold like that is what it feels like to be a monster in Final Fantasy and have someone cast Shiva on you.

Put it this way: when I stepped out of my hotel this morning, it was too cold for me to shout profanities about how cold I was.

But, hey, going back to the getting out of bed thing, I have a confession to make: the LaSalle-Kansas game isn’t the only reason I embarked on this ridiculous excursion.

One of the problems that comes out of the nuclear annihilation of my lower back is that sleeping in my bed hurts. A lot. This is some bizarre function of the fact that my bed is a twin and it is JUST big enough that I can lie in it but cannot roll over. If I roll over in my bed I hit the wall next to it. For the last however many years this has never been a problem – when I rolled over into the wall I’d wake up for a second or two, shift myself into a more comfortable position, and go back to sleep.

NOW, though, thanks to some fabulous biological alchemy, when I roll over into the wall next to my bed it feels like someone is jabbing the business end of a katana into my lower back and I wake up screaming. I put up with this for a little while but eventually decided, in the interest of sleeping through the night without excruciating pain, to sleep in the recliner in the living room. It’s reasonably comfortable and, most importantly, I can’t roll over and hit anything. I don’t sleep that well on my back, but sleeping through the night a bit restlessly is far preferable to being woken up every hour or so by every single pain receptor below my waist.

But a road trip, now, hang on a second. A road trip means hotels. Hotels mean king- and queen-size beds. Bigger beds means being able to sleep without bumping into anything.

Seeing LaSalle play Kansas in person AND sleeping in an actual bed for a week? Sign me the fuck up.

I wish I had more interesting stories about the road today, but aside from one big thing and a couple little things (which I will get to shortly) nothing that good happened on this leg. No detours through unanticipated states, that’s for sure. As I mentioned yesterday, the stretch of road between Columbus and St. Louis may be the most boring stretch of highway in the Western Hemisphere. It’s farms. And more farms. And more farms. There’s a city or two, sure, but one of them is Indianapolis, for Chrissakes. And it’s flat. It’s the flattest thing you’ve ever seen. Flat farms. For 450 miles. It’s death.

But, I have another confession to make: the LaSalle-Kansas game and sleeping in beds weren’t the only reasons I decided to make this trip.

I could have flown to Kansas City for the game and stayed in a hotel out there. It would have meant less driving and thus less hotels and thus less sleeping in beds, and it would have been slightly cheaper, and I am documented as being really, really, REALLY bad with airplanes, but I still could have done it. Some people are saying that I SHOULD have done it, that I must be mad to willingly drive to Kansas City (and beyond) when I could just take some NyQuil and get on a plane.

To that I say: I drove out here for two reasons.

1) My car is more comfortable than an airplane.

2)

After many long years, finally.

I haven’t had breakfast at a Waffle House since I was in Amarillo in December of 2000. Many long years have I waited, and my long wait was worth it.

Waffle House is a shining exemplar of The Pizza Hut Theory (“Pizza Hut is not pizza, but it is delicious”), so much so that I think it should really be renamed The Waffle House Theory. For breakfast this morning I consumed a waffle with butter and syrup, bacon, coffee and orange juice. The coffee came from ground up coffee beans and I am reasonably certain the syrup was actually refined molasses, but other than that the names of everything else I ate are cruel misnomers at best.

A Waffle House “waffle” is not like anything you’d get anywhere else. For starters, it’s as big as a dinner plate. When you first see it from a distance you balk at its sheer size. The thing is like a foot across. There’s no way I can finish that big a waffle, you think. Then the waffle gets placed in front of you and you notice the second odd thing about it – it’s the size of a dinner plate and about as thick.  The thing might be a quarter of an inch high if it’s that much. The foodstuff I was given that was marked “butter” was nothing of the sort. It had never been near a cow. As near as I could figure it had never even been near a food science laboratory; if you’d told me it was dropped off here by aliens I would have seriously considered the possibility. The “bacon” did not come from any animal you or I would recognize as a pig and did not even taste remotely like bacon. The three strips of fried matter I was told were bacon more closely resembled wooden paint stirrers in consistency and and sturdiness than anything involving pork and salt. The orange juice was, and I say this quite literally and with zero comic exaggeration, the most vile tasting liquid I have ever consumed in my life, and that includes once having a shot of Three Wise Men.

However, despite these obvious deficiencies, I WOULD EAT THIS SHIT THREE MEALS A DAY FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE IF I COULD.

This would, of course, not be a particularly LONG life, but it would be a life suffused to the breaking point with pure pleasure. Despite its highly dubious pedigree the atavistic joy of eating Waffle House breakfast cannot be understated. This is the best tasting food on earth and for the most part it ISN’T EVEN FOOD.

It’s a good thing that I only get Waffle House once every ten years or so when I drive across the country, because if this shit were less than two days’ drive away the sheer level to which I would fuck up my insides would make my endocrinologist faint in terror.

(Hi, Dr. Cavale!)

Much like my fateful reunion with Waffle House, the other minorly interesting things that happened today – the only things, in fact, to punctuate the brain-crushing boredom that was the run from Waffle House to St. Louis – were also cross-country classics.

Since the scenery, for the most part, is such absolute shit one of the truly interesting things on the road once you get out into the Midwest is the insane things you will see on the back of trucks.

First up today was the true classic, and perhaps the greatest single realization of the form, the “truck towing like three other trucks.”

This can't be safe.

I’ve only seen one of these so far, but as I get into Oklahoma and Texas I am certain there will be more.

This afternoon, though, came the mother of all “weird things on trucks.”

Are you kidding me?

That, my friends, is a tank.

A TANK.

On the back of a truck. And not, like, an army truck. A privately-contracted hauler.

Which means that someone BOUGHT this tank and shipped it someplace.

God, I love this country.

Tomorrow: a quick shot to Kansas City.

JLK