What Did The Memorial Day Fairy Bring You?

I only ask because that bastard brought me another infection, perhaps a relapse of the strep throat I caught a week before I left Flag (was that really only 3 weeks ago?), and perhaps something new. I am feverish and my throat hurts and I feel like crap. But I'm also coughing so I think it might not be strep again but something new instead. Which is good and bad. Good because a lingery strep infection with autoimmune disease can be damned serious so if it's not that, that's good. And bad because whatever in the hell it is, autoimmune disease makes it potentially dangerous and likely to screw me up for months. Dammit.

Miscellanea

New cable is always fun because there's new weirdness to find. I was lying in bed recently flipping through channels, and I ran across this thing on Fuse called Pants-Off Dance-Off. This is a game show where the contestants dance and strip to a song while the video for the song is playing behind them along with snippets of them talking about themselves from an earlier taped interview. While they dance and strip.

The viewers vote for who they think should win. I don't even know what the prize is, but of course I stopped to watch me some of that. And people, it is just wrong.

This one 40-something woman contestant had said something like, "My overall motto in life is just to love God," in her taped interview, which was an awesomely weird thing to see a person talk about in the middle of a striptease. Her biggest competitor was a 20-something guy who is the gayest man alive. How do I know he is the gayest man alive? Because he danced for 3 and half solid minutes with both of his arms above his head yet still somehow managed to take his clothes off. This show is possibly the best worst television ever made.

We also get BET here, which we did not in Arizona, and so this afternoon we were lounging around in the living room enjoying some music videos on BET. Right after we watched Prince's When Doves Cry, remarking about how it had been so long since we'd seen that and wasn't that nostalgic and vacuous in that delightfully 80s way, BET put up a text screen that let us know we were watching Music For Grown People. But they couldn't make us feel old and sad, we just thought that was hilarious.

Speaking of inappropriate laughter, last week on the way home from somewhere or another, E & I stopped at a sandwich shop to pick up some dinner. They had the television tuned in to FOXNews and while the sound was down, we watched as the crawler text displayed FOX's typical jingoistic insanity, and the level of hypocrisy and extent of propaganda was so severe that naturally, E & I just burst into laughter. What other response are you going to have in a sandwich shop, right?

We were the only customers in the restaurant at the time so this was not, shall we say, subtle. All the punky libertarianesque-looking boys who worked behind the counter started stealing nervous glances at us, which made me start considering chatting them up all friendly-like next time to keep things smooth because these kids are grilling me up the best Philly cheese steak I've had in over a decade, yo.

And to keep things random, here's a snippet of a conversation we had around here today:

J: Want anything else from the store?
E: Yeah, Mike Sells corn puffs.
J: Is that what they're called, Corn Puffs?
E: I dunno.
J: That's a completely new product to me, so can you be any kind of specific to make sure I get you the right thing?
E: Yeah, they're by Mike Sells, and they're corn puffs.
J: Great, that'll help.

FYI: They're called Puffcorn Delites, so it's a good thing I'm college educated.

Diana

Neither of us could face another cardboard box today so once we got ourselves up and around we headed to downtown Dayton (the bridge in that picture goes over the Miami River) to the Dayton Art Institute to see their exhibition on Diana Spencer. (Completely unrelated tangent: right next to the Dayton Art Institute is the biggest Masonic Temple I have ever seen.)

I should admit up front that Diana was the subject of one of my first major crushes. I was only about 10 and at the time I wasn't really able to identify it as a crush, but retrospectively it's pretty clear that's what it was. It had nothing whatsoever to do with royal trappings or princess fairy tales or anything like that. It was just about her. I thought she was stunningly beautiful, and that she radiated kindness. (Plus, I'm a sucker for a British accent in a sweet, soft voice.)

I remember watching the wedding at my dad's cabin up in central Alaska, where I used to spend summers as a kid. My dad had just married my first step-mother. While she was kind-of a hippie, she also had a little bit of that stereotypical Barbie brand of femininity going on, and she always seemed let down that I rejected all that and showed an early strong preference for the tomboy routine. When I expressed an excited interest in watching the royal wedding the summer I turned 11, she was totally stoked. I think she thought I was turning into a young lady, instead of turning into a young lesbian, but whatever, she made us some great snacks and we had a fabulous time watching the event together.

I was disappointed in the way the exhibit was put together. It was interesting to see a bit of the lineage of Spencer women, but that's all there was, just a little bit. There was one room with Diana's childhood things in it that was a stark reminder of just how normal she always seemed, especially considering the family in which she was raised and the one into which she eventually married. She liked stuffed animals, preferred jeans to dresses, and used to like to slide down her family estate's massive staircase banister on a tea tray.

The room with her wedding things in it was definitely the centerpiece of the exhibit. (And she also wore flats/slippers, Freakgirl -- of course, they were diamond encrusted and had solid gold piping, but you know, that's almost the same.) It was weird to see the old, familiar pictures of her and Charles again. At the time, I thought they looked happy and madly in love, but now only she looks that way to me, and he looks like he's just performing another role.

The wedding room emptied almost directly into the room with the things from her death, funeral, and memorial events, which I thought was unpleasantly emotionally jarring and completely inappropriate. At first, I thought they were going to skip over her charity work altogether, which would be outrageous, but it turned out that they just made a smaller exhibit room for it later in the walkthrough with only some pictures and letters on display. It did not do her justice.

The last room on the walkthrough was the gown room, and even though I'm not one of the lipstick lesbians, there were a handful of dresses in there that I'd have knocked an old lady out of the way to get. (Speaking of which, the Silent Generation was doing an excellent job of making total fucking hypocrites of themselves while there, because they were all acting in the ways I remember them bitching at Gen X not to act in when I was little, i.e., cutting in line, talking far too loudly in a museum, invading other people's personal space, and there was even a little bit of shoving.) In particular, there were two purple Versace evening gowns that I was drooling over. My mind went straight to shoes, which shoes would I wear with those? And that was probably my girly behavior allotment for the month.

I wasn't allowed to take pictures inside the exhibit, of course, but here's a picture of me under the sign for the show. Can't you tell from looking at our images so close to one another that Diana would've been much happier if she'd just told that Charles guy to take a hike and waited another 5 or 6 years for me to catch up? Sigh.

PS. In the general part of the museum, I also saw my first in-person Monet. One of the Water Lilies. Meh. I liked all the Italian art from the 1500-1600s a lot, though, which is the same stuff I remember liking a lot in Art History class, and some of the French Renaissance stuff was breathtaking.

Obliviousness

People think I'm smart, and they're right, it's one of my few innate gifts. But people also think I'm sharp, and my friends, let me assure you, I am the dullest knife in the drawer.

I once had a conversation about the film Thelma & Louise, part of which went something like this:

Jen: I loved the ending to that movie!
Friend: The ending? Of Thelma & Louise? Really?
J: Yes. Wasn't it awesome how they just made that huge jump in the car?
F: Um, that was the Grand Canyon. And they died.
J: No way.
F: 'Fraid so.
J: Well, fuck.
F: Just out of curiosity, what did you think happened?
J: I didn't think it out any further than that they decided to keep running, and off they flew in the car.
F: So the movie ended for you as Thelma and Louise were flying away in their car?
J: Yes.
F: Oh, Jen.
J: Not flying like that, jumping the chasm, you know what I meant!

Ennui

If there is any task more boring than doing dishes and laundry while cleaning shelves and outfitting them with grip liner, I don't want to know about it. I'm having a Sisyphus sort of a day. Which, because I'm me, just reminds me of Camus, who wrote about Sisyphus in the context of suicide -- more specifically, that if you sit and think it out, there is a pretty decent reason not to kill yourself even though life and everything in it is completely fucking absurd.

The world, says Camus, is a hopeless, meaningless sort of place. And we are the sorts of creatures who are always desperately seeking hope and meaning. The problem is apparent.

Camus proposes three responses to this problem, but only sees one of them as being better than a cop-out. There is suicide; there is religion, which Camus views as philosophical suicide; or there is looking the problem square in the face, comprehending it, giving it the finger, and deciding to be happy anyway. The last choice is the only good choice. You find joy in the pain, you find reason to go on knowing there's no reason, you fight like hell to be a decent person in an indecent world, and you find meaning in the search for meaning even knowing there is no meaning to be found (although creating meaning is a laugh riot if you are doing it right). Sisyphus is the Absurd Hero.

We don't agree on all the little details, Camus and I, but on this one we're close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades.

"The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing."
Albert Camus, writer/philosopher/smart guy

"Strong human beings make the choice to survive."
Christopher Titus, writer/comedian/smart ass

It's all just rock and roll, really.

It’s an Apostasy Party & You’re Invited

So entirely uninvolved in religion and the formal rules thereof am I, I have only recently learned that I am still officially Catholic.

I was never into any Christian faith to the extent that I believed any of the big things you’re supposed to believe. I did attend a Christian fellowship twice a week with a friend’s family while I was in elementary school, but her parents were eventually asked to keep my questions quiet, to not bring me back anymore, or to at least dump me into the adult Bible study where I couldn’t lead the other children astray. (Always a good student, though, I played a pretty smokin’ game of Bible Trivia and almost won a 6-foot chocolate bar competing against the older kids who had a lifetime of indoctrination. I lost when I couldn’t Name That Hymn. Harrumph. I could Name That Stones Song in three notes.)

I was never involved in the Catholic Church at all. Never did catechism, never did confirmation, never gave a single confession; was once threatened by my mom -- who was not even Catholic -- with being enrolled in Catholic school for junior high but swore I’d get myself expelled and make said expulsion exorbitantly expensive for her so that enrollment never actually took place.

However, my paternal grandmother did kidnap me as an infant to have me baptized (I know the groovy Jews let you have loopholes on technicalities but I imagine poor Gram had to do some hard Hail Mary time for that), and apparently that’s all it takes to be counted as a member of the club, and I’ve just found out that one has to write to the parish where one was baptized and ask to be taken off of the membership list. I've read I should also cc the diocese to make sure they formally turn me into an apostate, and that they will probably drag ass about it while giving me some bullshit line about retaining my opportunity for deathbed confession and thus a chance at Eternal Heavenly Bliss. But I am totally uninterested in risking having to spend eternity with a deity who threatens to send people to hell for picayune infractions of senseless rules, because it sounds like the sort of eternity where I’d just feel compelled to bicker with god all the time, and thus probably not very much fun for either me or him.

And this isn't even going to come close to being the weirdest letter I've ever written, but still, it feels pretty weird. I'm wondering if I should tell them precisely why I don't want to be counted as a Catholic. Because that's the kind of letter that could get long even without getting into the major faith-based beliefs I don’t share, like Immaculate Conceptions and Virgin Births and Resurrections and Transubstantiations. I suppose I could try to summarize:

• Queer, queer, queer.
  
  
• Sex? I’m a huge fan. Marriage? Not so much. And did I mention queer? I do mean really, really queer; queer even for a queer; like, queer in the sense that I like things that even lots of other queers think are queer. (Has the word lost all meaning yet? Good, that was kind-of the point.)
  
  
• No birth control, are you people fucking kidding me? That starts off by being woman-hating, just like the no woman-priest thing, and it winds up being family-hating. Prohibitions on birth control serve no moral good whatsoever.
  
  
• It takes your church a ridiculously long time to apologize for the things you do wrong, let alone try to make right for it, and that pisses me off on general principles.
  
  
• While we're on that subject, where is the accountability for any of the wrong behavior of your Church as an entity? Is the wrong located only in the soul of the individual and thus the only accountability possible is that which is either mandated by secular law or located solely in the confessional? Because it’s not just me on this one, I know a lot of the rest of the world is similarly unimpressed with the idea that your wrongdoings to others and to society at large are not just absolved, but also totally resolved with private penance.
  
  
• Y'all recently appointed a real asshole to be your new Pope, and the man wears Prada shoes. If you were looking to emulate Jesus and/or set an example of right moral behavior for millions of people across the world, then oughtn't you consider foregoing the designer fashions at least until all the people of the world have shelter, food, clean water, and basic medicines? I mean, it's not the designer shoes, you get that, right? It's what they represent? It's the billions of dollars that the Church takes in every year, and then spends how much on things like fighting against condoms and safe-sex programs, and promoting queer-bashing? Which brings me right back to…oh, nevermind.
  

You see where this is going, right? Everybody sing:

This is the apostasy letter that never ends
It just goes on and on my friends
Some woman started writing it, not knowing what it was
And she'll continue writing it forever just because
This is the apostasy letter that never ends...

The best possible way that this could end is if they send me a letter officially excommunicating me, which I may very well frame and hang on my wall.

The Geese Are Attacking The Plumber

So I got my days all screwed up and tomorrow is our date with E's mom, while tonight we had dinner with her local queer boyfriend -- who, btw, is the excellent storytelling friend I mentioned in my inaugural post here, and for whom the blog is indirectly named. Tonight he was regaling us with tales from the farm where he works, one of which included the sentence, "I have to get off the phone now, the geese are attacking the plumber."

I laughed until he told me that geese have razor sharp teeth. Geese have teeth. (Okay, they're not really true teeth, but they are tooth-like structures on their bills that are very sharp and allow them to tear at their food.) I am probably the only grown-up to whom this is news, but my god, toothy geese is some freaky shit. Is Wes Craven writing DNA code?

We only got half of our new living room furniture today, which was a major bummer. The loveseat that we bought off the floor showed up just fine, but the couch that was supposed to be virgin to all asses but our own showed up with a leg cracked in half. The guy tried to deliver it anyway but we weren't having any of that. "Bring us a new couch," said E. And rightly so. 'Cause you know once they deliver it, they'll never show the hell back up to fix the couch leg, no matter how many of their children's souls they swear on. They allege they will come with a new couch by Tuesday or Wednesday, and I am still dumbstruck that this sort of thing won't take 4 weeks.

PS. Yesterday we had hail here and a tornado close by. The baby birds that dwell in the pond are all fine, but I am considering forfeiting our security deposit and digging us a cellar right through my bathroom floor. Hell, it already smells like feet, what's a little wet dirt?

Initial Observations

The suburbs of Dayton, Ohio are alarmingly similar to the suburbs of Miami, Florida. The structure & layout are a smidge different, but driving through Kettering the other day, I could have sworn I was right back in the little 'burb near the Miami International Airport, where I grew up. It doesn't help at all that the area around here is known as the Miami Valley and we live close to Miami Township so I see signage that says Miami all over, including on the television weather crawler and going by on work trucks: Miami Plumbing. Plus, the All-Knowing Internet tells me there are at least 3 more Miami Townships in neighboring counties.

My location-vertigo after a cross country trip usually wears off after a couple of days, but I do believe that this is going to be a bit of a challenge. (It reminds me of one of the similarly themed challenges my mom dropped on me when, after she divorced my dad and my first step-dad, she next married a guy with the same first name as my dad and the same last name as my first step-dad. Who are you again, dude? Some Dad-like guy, gauging by the name.)

I don't know how well other people adjust when the bigger life changes come sailing down their way, but I am rather much a creature of habit, so any time I switch spaces in a significant manner I have some minor difficulty until I can carve out a nice new comfortable rut. In the beginning, there's always a list of things I have to repeat to myself regularly until my autopilot software picks them up and remembers them on its own. Some of the things on my list right now:

• Don't undress in front of my bedroom window. It faces clearly and directly onto a main thoroughfare of the apartment complex.
  
• Buy some curtains, since I'll never remember not to whip my shirt off in front of the window, and exposing yourself is an embarrassing reason to be evicted.
  
• TV comes on at 8 here in Normal America, so stop channel-surfing frantically at 6:59 trying to figure out which channel the show I like is on.
  
• I am probably better off not knowing exactly what my new back door neighbor is burning out in his yard for several hours every afternoon.
  
• Similarly, I am almost certainly better off never knowing why my new bathroom, only periodically, suddenly smells overwhelmingly like feet, then the smell vanishes just as mysteriously as it arrived.
  
• Eighty percent humidity is very different than 13% humidity, and it definitely means I have to stop thinking that slightly damp clothes from the dryer are "dry enough" because that's the recipe for moldy clothes.
  
• Gas appliances smell like gas and this does not require a telephone call to the maintenance office or to anyone at the gas company. Also, I probably won't die.
  
• Find the box with the carbon monoxide detector in it today.
  

Ducklings & Goslings, Oh My!

We have both! Okay, so I'm an idiot. I thought the goslings were ducklings. Look, I'm a city kid -- if it waddles and swims then I think it's a duck. But as I learned fairly early this morning, if it honks, it's a goose.

High Speed Internet!

::runs around in circles, falls::

Plus which, the movers have come with all of our stuff (and really pissed off the ducks, who quacked with a highly annoyed tone the entire time the guys were unloading; the ducklings went into hiding). I have never been so happy to see my own bed. Between the bed and the functioning high speed internet -- which, frankly, is every bit as good as crack -- I may never leave the house again.

Happy Mother's Day

I still have a weird relationship with Mother's Day as a result of the weird relationship I had with my mother, who died in 2002.

My relationship with Mother's Day got a little weirder this year when, for the first time, service employees at restaurants and shops I've visited throughout the weekend have wished me a Happy Mother's Day. WTF? I checked my boobs and there is not an infant hanging off of them, I am definitely not carrying a diaper bag or anything like that, and I've not been wearing one of those My Kid's An Honor Roll Stoner At Her High School t-shirt, so I am rather baffled by it. Did I cross some magical age threshold in the past week -- I could certainly believe that the move has aged me significantly in a week -- or should I blame Ohio for this new experience?

Anyway, Happy Mother's Day to all the great moms out there. I respect and appreciate good mothers more than I can say.

We spent the first night in the new place last night, and aside from the usual learning curves regarding things like thermostats and finding the right hot water setting and all that jazz, I think we are going to be very happy with it. So far, so good.

Here's a picture of the desk I built for myself today, and as soon as I get the high speed 'net thinger figured out I'll try to put some up of the little ducklings who live in the pond in the yard. They are yellow and fuzzy and small, but starting to explore their world with gusto. So cute.

We're Just Going to Live at Holiday Inn

We got off to a really slow start today. We slept in, lounged around in bed drinking coffee, took very long, hot showers. We finally managed to get out the door to breakfast at about 11:30.

Went to Bob Evans (some regional flava) and I had my first encounter with midwestern passive-aggressiveness. I ordered a breakfast deal that came with scrambled eggs, bacon, home fries -- they had no hashbrowns, like real Americans -- and white toast. The waitress brought me toast with some kind of yellow-orange spread on it that looked vaguely like it could be a nuclear byproduct since nothing natural is that color. I'm allergic to soy, so I can't eat spreads because they're almost always made from a soybean oil base. I explained this to her briefly and asked if they had real butter.

"Sure, I'll get you some and be right back," she said, leaving my toast on the table.

"May I have some fresh toast?" I asked with a friendly smile. "I can't eat this."

"Oh sure hon," she agreed.

Meantime, I discovered that my eggs weren't all the way cooked, and my home fries, even aside from not being hashbrowns, sucked. The server came back a few minutes later with butter and fresh wheat toast, dumped it on the table before I realized what it was. I really didn't want to get into a power struggle with a Bob Evans waitress, so I sucked it up and ate the wheat toast. But then we noticed, driving out in the car afterward, that she charged me for the wheat toast. We drove past the restaurant about 4 times today running various errands, and I gave them the finger every time. (Yes, I am aware of how petty I'm being about this.)

Even after hours of cleaning today, we still have so much work to do at the new place, but I really like it. E did a great job finding us a place to live while I was out west packing us up. The apartment is much more like a townhouse than an apartment. We have skylights and a fireplace. The building is brick, we have a cute little porch out the sliding glass doors off of the dining room, and it is directly by a small duck pond.

This afternoon we went on a massive shopping spree -- the first of several, I'm sure -- at the Target. (Obviously, I am still on boycott embargo. I even entered a Wal-Mart tonight for the first time in about 3 or 4 years, if only to buy a Subway sandwich therein. I only felt a little dirty.) We got a bunch of the requisite household & cleaning items, and some groovy stuff for the bathrooms. I got some new bedding, and a chenille striped shower curtain about which I am ridiculously stoked. Clearly, between that and the cursing at Bob Evans, I've lost all sense of proportion at this point.

We also ordered a washer & dryer for our apartment from the Home Depot, and I was amazed that they will be delivering it on Wednesday. You cannot get anything done in Flagstaff that quickly. Hell, in Flag, you cannot even get a salesperson to wait on you by Wednesday. We got our cable turned on today as well, so things are coming together and the place should be liveable enough for me probably by tomorrow evening.

Nonetheless, we are halfway seriously entertaining the idea of just selling off all our stuff directly off the back of the moving van, and then simply staying here at the Holiday Inn where we can order movies to our TV already, and the nice lady comes in every day with fresh towels to clean up and make our beds for us.

We're Here!

There's green! There's water! Our apartment was clean and ready for us! Woo-hoo!

We checked into a hotel because we were beat and our moving truck isn't supposed to come until Monday or Tuesday, so we have no beds yet. Lots of work to do over the weekend, cleaning the place and buying a few immediate things. But for now, rest.

Tomorrow? Moving Adventure: Phase III begins.

Rockin' Down The Highway

We made pretty good time today and didn't stop much, even for any cheesy tourist attractions. Although we did pass the exits for the Herbert Hoover Presidential Museum (Motto: Not the worst president anymore!), Marion John Wayne's birthplace, and the covered bridges of Madison County.

We stopped here for gas in Omaha, which totally cracked me up by reminding me of Megan's cat. It did not much look like the sort of place Wally would want, though. It was all heavily right-wing, with pro-W and pro-war stickers all over the walls, and the clerk behind the counter only grunted at me while I bought water so he didn't miss a word of the Dr. Laura show.

Nebraska wasn't really for me, and I thought Iowa was much prettier. On the western border is the Missouri River. We passed little rivers all the way through the state, along with farmland, rolling hills, lots of silos, and more of my friends the stealthy cows. We stopped at the cleanest rest stop either of us has ever seen. It was a joy to pee there, even though a cleaning lady was hovering, and we learned that Cedar County, Iowa was a part of the Underground Railroad. YAY, Iowa! Then at the eastern border of the state we saw the always fantastic Mississippi River.

We got into Illinois and decided to stop for the night in Peoria (so we could watch Lost, natch), which was not exactly the best decision we made all day. There was a ton of construction where we first stopped and we were wholly unable to locate either the Outback Steakhouse or the Holiday Inn where we planned to eat and sleep, but we did take a nice tour of one of the many malls Peoria has to offer. Then we took the bypass around the city and negotiated our way to a Best Western with a Cracker Barrel out back.

As most of you know, I am one of the political gays who will boycott your corporation for being sexist, racist, homophobic, or in any other way socially/criminally irresponsible, so it may come as a surprise to learn that we've been eating at Cracker Barrels all the way across the country. But due to the difficulties arising from the food allergies both E and I have, we'd never be able to eat if we didn't blow off the boycotts, so I've suspended those for the trip.

Cracker Barrel, horrific as they are as a corporation, is some mighty fine eatin'. In the darkly hilarious category, I've learned that, due to some litigation wherein it was basically proven that they are racist fucktards (hence the reason for my boycott), Cracker Barrel now actually has to post a sign at the entrance of all of its restaurants that uses some legalese that translates roughly to, "We are deeply sorry for being racist fucktards, and we promise not to do that again. So even if you're not white-sheeted white, come on in for some down home vittles, y'all." At the one where we had dinner tonight in Peoria, they sat us under this picture. That is one queer-looking female -- do you think they were onto us?

In Lincoln NE Tuesday is Partytime

We got in kinda late tonight, at least in part because we had to take a mini-tour of Lincoln, Nebraska in order to find a hotel room. We asked, and it's not like there's graduation or conferences or anything. We were just told with a shrug, "It's always busy on Tuesdays, we don't know why." All righty, then.

No posting yesterday because for some reason I couldn't connect any faster than 28.8 (!), plus all the fatigue caught up with me and my thyroid whacked out a little so I felt like a bowl of stale ass. I'm a bit better today, but this traveling, it is hard on me.

Because the universe seems to enjoy balance, just like everything was hot in Santa Fe, everything was damn cold north of Denver. Rural Colorado is a trip, y'all. Some of the sights while we stayed on a quaint little dirt road lane: a late 70s model Camaro with a bondo fender and 3 different colored body parts; a table full of the local Heathers at a Red Robin; and a lady who was not a lesbian wearing a mullet non-ironically. I could not snag surreptitious pictures of those things or else you know I would share them.

While I was in Colorado, I took a little walk up the street to the local cemetery -- I love graveyards -- but that turned out to be a bad idea as it was too far for me, I was too tired, and it made my legs kinda wobbly. (The muscle weakness in my legs is one of the worst symptoms of my disability.) On the upside, I found the macro setting on my camera so now I have a new feature to play with. If I can figure it out, maybe I can get some groovy pictures of something besides huge, wide open desert-scapes. Not that there's any more of those on the trip.

We spent practically the whole day driving across Nebraska. Ever wonder what Nebraska looks like? Here ya go. About 90% of what's visible from I-80 looks just like that.

We kept hearing the local conservative candidates' ads on the radio, and while they were all pretty bad, one in particular was just egregious. I didn't catch which candidate it was for (we heard it around the Ogallala/North Platte area but I'm not sure just how local it was, and it may have been one of the gubernatorial candidates) but it harped on illegal immigration and meth, as if these were the two most pressing statewide issues. Yeah, I'm sure those illegal immigrants are just pouring over the borders here in Nebraska.

The meth thing I kinda get, but the guy managed to scapegoat the immigrants for it, "Over 80% of the meth brought into the United States comes from south of the border." Hmm. Over 80% of the meth that's brought into the US approximates, how much, 5% of the total meth count? You make that shit in the bathtub from stuff you buy from the Wal-Mart, don't you? Racists suck.

Not a whole lot of tourist attractions here in Nebraska. Our choices came down to: the original Pony Express station (boring), Buffalo Bill's House (more boring), Pioneer Village (too far off the highway), the Heartland Museum of Military Vehicles (like I need another reason to bring Homeland Security down on my ass), or the Great Platte River Road Archway Monument.

So what I have for you today is the Great Platte River Road Archway Monument. Oh my, the Archway. This thing was so terrifically cheesy. First of all, there's one of those radio stations you can tune in to for information, and the guy delivering the message sounds like a DisneyWorld employee -- on meth, heh. Somewhere in the middle of giving us directions and telling us about the attraction, the guy goes, "WATCH OUT! You might get stampeded by some wild buffalo!" Did he mean these? Or this one?

So we turned off the highway and followed the signs back to the Archway, and it turns out that we had to make like seven or eight turns to get there, plus take a frontage road, which was a huge pain in the ass. And then when we got there at 4:15, the radio station guy told us they closed at 4. Which was okay, because it was $10 each to get inside the Archway, and fuck all that. But they do have a human maze. And there were speakers hidden in the vegetation around the Archway entrance playing pioneer muzak. No, I am not making that up.

Is it wrong to mock Nebraska for this? I don't think so. It's not like I'm judging. Just a little friendly mocking.

Meanwhile, there is random signage and graffiti all along the portion of I-80 that we drove today that all say just two words: Trust Jesus. (I couldn't ever anticipate it coming up so didn't get pictures, although I did snap this shot of a massive cross welcoming you to church camp.) I don't really know what to make of that. I kept wondering, Trust Jesus with what, exactly? I mean, I'd probably trust Jesus to hold my wallet, but the world is pretty screwed up so I don't think it's exactly a feasible strategy for a life philosophy or anything.

And then just to end this post on a couple of totally random, puerile notes:

Here's a King Kong burger sign that I thought was just awesome on its own merits.

And trust me, I looked, but I did not see any.

Open Mike Night

Request for haiku
Makes for challenging writing
Anything for Liv

Easy day today
Staying with E's aunt, uncle
Hour from Denver

Delightful people
We are staying through Tuesday
Learning how to grill

Harleys everywhere
In central Colorado
Snaky roads are fun

There are no flowers
Just lots of wind, rocks, mountains
And good classic rock

Rocky mountain high
Colorado Springs is red
As in: GOP

In a quickie mart
I heard a guy bash Dubya
"Worst Prez of all time"

James Dobson: Eat me
Focus on the Family --
Finger of the dyke

Pablo and Gracie
(That's Senor Pablo to you)
Sunday dog blogging

This was really hard
I almost didn't do it
See you tomorrow

:)

Anybody Want A Pamphlet?

We aimed for Pueblo, Colorado today and we made it!

Eager to get out of Gallup, which was so much less than pleasant in its Febrezeyness, we hauled ass early and then stopped for breakfast at the Sky City Casino just outside of Grants. Food? Meh. E winning $250 at the craps table? Yeah, baby. (I lost $45 playing the Wheel! Of! Fortune! slots, but we won't dwell on that.)

There's mostly a whole lotta nuthin' in western & central New Mexico. It's all desert-desert-desert, butte-butte-butte, tumbleweed-sage brush-semi tractor trailer. The billboards are all depressing and enraging, and fall into three major categories: ads for hotels, restaurants, and truck stops (which isn't really offensive except as a constant reminder that capitalism owns our collective ass); exploitation of Native Americans; and weirdo fundie abstinence only promotions. "I Chose to Wait for Marriage and I'm Happy!" in 40 foot lettering just inspires me to bust out the Visa and buy a billboard that announces "I Chose to Fuck Early & Often and I'm Ecstatic!"

All the reservations, along with the abject poverty in the surrounding areas, make me weep.

We stopped for lunch in Santa Fe and had the cutest little gay waiter (sorry Michael, no pix) at some trendy cafe in a downtownish sort of artsy/touristy district. Nearly everything in Santa Fe has this groovy adobe architecture to it, and I am so bummed that none of my pictures came out (apologies also to the GeekBoy). While we didn't really have the time for a tour, the cute little gay waiter gave us directions to the Georgia O'Keefe museum, and we did swing by so I could snap some evidence for the lovely Olivia. {{{LIV!}}}

Everything in Santa Fe was also hot. The restaurant was hot, the shop in which I bought a gift for E's aunt was hot, and the waiter, cute and gay as he was, brought us warm water with no ice. The hell? Isn't that a European thing? Warm water at the table with no ice? You Europeans, I love your bidets, but ice my water down twice, please.

Speaking of the bathroom, have I mentioned my pee-shyness? I'm not modest, it's this weird psychological thing. I am clueless regarding its origins, but I have a really hard time peeing if any of the other humans are within earshot. This is presenting somewhat of a challenge, since nearly everywhere we go there are herds of other women who are all on the same pee schedule as I am. I was considering peeing on the side of the highway, since I really don't care if someone sees me, it's all about the sound, but I figure in George W. Bush's America that could potentially get me labeled as a sex offender. The best places for me to go so far have turned out to be little out of the way gas stations, such as the Hooter Brown's Truck Stop in Raton, New Mexico, where a little sign on the bathroom stall requested, "Please throw your paper in the toilet, not the trash, because they stink!" You betcha, Hooter Brown! Gotta say, though, I can't imagine that pee paper smells any worse than the desolation in Raton, New Mexico.

I tried to get pictures of cows all day -- I like cows -- but either my timing was always off or cows are much stealthier than they'd have us believe. I think I'm going to have to bet on my own bad timing there, since I shot nearly 100 pictures today and almost every single one of them sucked. The ones I really wanted were taken right over the New Mexico/Colorado border, as we blew into Colorado in the late afternoon listening to women's voices from 80s pop radio: Pat Benatar, Cyndi Lauper, Janet Jackson, Stevie Nicks, Chrissie Hynde. But the light was all weird and I'm not very good with the camera yet, thus they didn't come out.

After that, while we were we were smoking around bends and over hills, past arroyos cutting through rocks and vast prairies extending off into the distant horizon, trying to make Pueblo before it got too dark, I was looking out the window at my own image reflected in the side mirror, the drifting clouds doubly reflected by bouncing off the windows and then superimposed over my face in the mirror, and it got me to thinking about the gossamer motion of time. Particularly about our perpetually shifting place within it; never static, never fixed, always passing from one moment to the next to the next. It's true, what they say, I think -- that thing about the only time being right now, the only moment being this one. I hope you guys are all extracting every possible ounce of joy and pleasure from this moment, every moment, the only moment. I know I am.

Enough with the Febreze Already

So I'm sitting here in a Quality Inn in Gallup, New Mexico, and I can only assume that they are heavily invested in the Febreze stock, because OH MY GOD you guys, I've actually got my shirt pulled up over my nose so I can breathe. We've had the window open for the past hour, and it's still pretty bad, but we are both so tired we can barely walk so we will be steeping in hazardous chemicals toughing it out.

Obviously, we managed to get out of the house and out of town late this afternoon, which was a minor miracle. We still had a lot to do when we got up this morning, and then the movers took a little longer than we'd anticipated. But the goals were to get out of the house, and if possible, get out of the state, and we accomplished both so we are satisfied. So exhausted we are seeing double, laughing hysterically at cactus plants, and every muscle is screaming every time we move, but we are satisfied.

Some weather came in right as we were taking Route 66 to I-40 to leave town, and I snapped this sloppy through-the-windshield shot of one of the trains barreling toward a rainbow. There was a double rainbow a few moments later but I couldn't get the camera to see it.

This is so cheesy, but I had to do it. Here I am standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona. It's such a fine sight to see. In the background, that is unfortunately not a girl, my lord, in a flatbed Ford, slowing down to take a look at me. So funny, we managed to stop and take this shot on the corner of Route 66 and Winslow Avenue, and then just a block further down the road, there was a sign with the lyrics to that Eagles song for tourists to stop and take pictures on that corner. Whoops.

(E just turned on the hotel room heater, so now, rather than smelling like Febreze in here, it smells like fire. Fire beats the hell outta Febreze.)

I don't really understand why, but there are these dinosaurs in the desert right outside of Holbrook, Arizona. This is what they look like when you are going 80mph and someone will not slow down so you can get a better picture. And this one totally looks like he's coming over the hill to eat cars.

Okay, I'm running out of functioning brain cells creativity, and these fuckers at the Quality Inn totally lied about the high-speed connection, so without any further narration, here's a few shots of some buttes on the border between Arizona and New Mexico.

Yeah, so we just couldn't push it any further than Gallup, where the drivers go at Stop signs and stop for no apparent reason at all, and where the water tastes vaguely like petrochemicals, so we're in for the night. E's already snoring and I'm late for surfing my fave sites. Thanks for reading!

Ahh, the great American Road Trip. :) What adventures await us tomorrow?

Goodbye, Flagstaff

I’ve lived in Flag for 11 years, almost to the day. I moved here on what could best be described as a carefully chosen whim; young, in love, anxious and exhilarated to start a new chapter in my life. Things didn’t go even remotely in the way I’d imagined. They hardly ever do, right?

I’m leaving older, single, disabled. I’m headed to Ohio to help take care of a sick relative. I’ve only been to Ohio briefly in the past; I know next to nothing about it. Which, coincidentally (or not, you make the call), was also the case when I moved to Flagstaff.

Flagstaff was home for half of my 20s and half of my 30s, and I have loved it fiercely. The place has character. Route 66 runs straight through downtown, there’s a drive-thru guns & liquor store, and 80+ trains cruise through every day. It’s a beautifully freaky high desert mountain town where a sight such as Sean Lennon dressed in a purple fur coat, sitting on the sidewalk outside a local coffeehouse surrounded by adoring little hippie fanlings, is not uncommon.

I had no idea the desert could look like this until I came here. In my pop-media saturated imagination the desert was always sort-of a cliché, with sand dunes and jagged red rocks and various species of cactus plants, vaguely like something out of a Road Runner cartoon. But this is the image we used to see driving into town from our place every day.

Practically everyone who’s moved to Flag from somewhere else has a How I First Saw Flagstaff story that involves both surprise and falling in love with it instantly. I’ll never forget driving up from Phoenix -- which place I hated instantly -- and seeing the awe-inspiring San Francisco Peaks for the first time. After a couple of days and a trip out to Hart Prairie, I knew I was coming back to stay a while. And I did, less than 8 weeks later.

The first year I lived here, I spent roughly half the time somewhere else. We took trips to Tennessee, Las Vegas, and Southern California. One of my best friends died only 8 months or so after I left him back in South Florida, and then my girlfriend’s only brother died just three weeks after that, so we hit the road and traveled around for a while to try to work stuff out. We went to stay with some musician friends outside of Athens in rural Georgia, we spent time in the French Quarter in NOLA, we went to Disney World. We came back to Flagstaff again in the summertime.

After a bunch of hassles around education in my youth, when I was 26 I finally started attending a university out here that I kinda dug. (I would have liked it much better if I could have gone to grad school after the first year.) Started taking theory classes, instantly fell in love with that, too. It gave me a language to talk about all the things that had been swimming around in my head since I was a little kid, plus think them out a lot further and in deeper detail. Finally, things started to come together in my mind in a way that made sense out of my identity, my life, my world.

Probably the most fun I got out of college altogether, and what I will always think of when I remember “my college days”, happened here, drinking, talking theory, cracking jokes, and building friendships with my favorite profs and classmates. The bar we liked was in the basement. True story: I peed in the men’s room of that place for, like, two whole semesters without realizing that I was peeing in the men’s room. I swear that I was not so drunk as to misread door signs, I just didn’t notice.

I did a lot of healing in Flagstaff in my mid-late 20s. I finally let go of all my childhood traumas, I changed my name, I planned a future in academia. And then at 29, I became disabled and had to drop out of school. Things got seriously frightening around then. My relationship with my girlfriend fell apart, all of my local friends moved away, no one could figure out what the hell was wrong with me or why I was so sick. About two years into that scary-ass rollercoaster ride, when I was 31, this little baby-faced cop showed up at my door one day and told me that my mom, with whom I’d always had a really troubled relationship, had died. I spent the rest of that whole year in court with her asshat boyfriend.

By the end of that, I was more drained than I had ever been. I’d lost nearly everything. I didn’t have my health, didn’t have any professional future to consider anymore; was both lover-less and motherless; all my dearest friends were dead or far away. My sisters and I had become distant, and for various reasons, I’d never enjoyed much of a close relationship with the rest of my blood family. My illness forced me to give up writing almost entirely. (I used to write novels, among other things. I still find that particular loss very difficult to deal with and I do not talk much about it.) It was like life was cleaning me out.

This wasn’t the first time that that had happened to me. I had lost everything before. More than once. But this time I managed to learn some profound things from the whole experience set. They are not the kinds of things that are easily articulated. And I don’t think it really had anything to do with Flagstaff itself (I think place is much less important than lots of other people seem to think -- in that regard anyway), but Flagstaff is the place where it happened, so in my emotional body, there will always be these connections.

I will always love this town. Although, due to my disability, I don’t know if I’ll ever make it back out here to see it again. But there will always be these connections.

Last night, my last night here, after E (my housemate) went to bed, I was up doing the last bits of laundry for the trip. Restless, I went outside to take one last look at the Flagstaff night sky -- which is particularly beautiful because Flag is a dark sky city -- and while I was out on the balcony blowing bubbles, I saw a shooting star. Can't tell you what I wished for, since that's against the rules, but know it was good.

So long, Flagstaff. Thanks for all the experience, the magic, the intensity, and the growth. ::kisses::

Hello, Internets

The primary purpose of this blog is to chronicle a cross country road trip/move from Northern Arizona to Southern Ohio (dude, that is across most of the country), but if I like the process, I might keep it up after that. Probably the only people who will see it are people who already know me, but I understand the etiquette of the medium dictates that I ought both explain the name of the blog and give a little introduction to myself somewhere here up front.

Naming first.

The world is deeply, thoroughly fucked up. Everyone even marginally competent already knows this. We are all being subsumed by morons on an authoritarianism kick, like an invasion of the idiotic body snatchers, for one thing. For another, fate or irony or whatever it is that steers the universe clearly gets right off on watching us try to figure out how to navigate our way through everyday interactions that, without warning and for no apparent reason, suddenly slip sideways and cease to make an ounce of fucking sense.

I have this friend who makes a semi-conscious hobby out of finding the precise moment where a perfectly normal interaction falls/jumps/gets shoved off of a cliff. He is an excellent storyteller. He'll say something like, "So the other day I'm on I-40 and I realize I need new windshield wipers, which, you would think, would be an utterly banal errand," and I know it's coming. I know that the story I'm about to hear is going to involve three different stores, five clerks, two managers, a hitchhiker who doesn't speak English but wants to trade my friend half a box of Ho-Hos for a ride to the mall, a small woodland animal sprinting into the middle of the mall parking lot, and a bottle of Gatorade dumping into my friend's lap in the ensuing fender bender, so when the cops show up, it looks like he's peed himself while his Mexican friend watched and ate Ho-Hos.

"You Would Think" is the phrase my friend always uses to name the moment when a thing transitions from operational to insane. He spends a lot of time in those moments. I also spend a lot of time in those moments, and they are the sort of moments that make for excellent blogging, so it seemed appropriate to call a blog that. (Plus, it was either You Would Think or Finger in the Dyke, and really, contrary to the rumors, sometimes I admire a bit of subtlety.)

As to self-introductory material, probably the most important thing anybody needs to know about me is that I think that judging people is so passe. With very few exceptions, and as long as there are no victims involved, I don't make judgments about people based on whatever they do. I don't make judgments about what they do for a living or a hobby or a fetish. I don't care how much money anyone makes, how they dress, or whether they've got tattoos on their necks, bones through their chins, or spikes implanted in their backs. I don't make judgments about weight or race or age or anything like that. I don't care who people fuck, or how they fuck, or if they fuck. I don't care if they're germophobes or neurotics or slackers.

And it harm none, do as thou wilt, and all that. A lot of people say this sort of thing. Not very many turn out to be sincere about it. But I honestly just don't care what kind of freak flag people have or where or how they fly it.

Unless it's interesting. If it's interesting, then I totally want to see pictures and trade gossip.