We left Zanesville at 6:30 yesterday morning and were home by 12:15, three pitstops included. I drove from Zanesville to just east of Hagerstown on almost ghost roads; there was a ten mile stretch on 70 east of Cambridge just after 7:00 when I didn't see another car in either direction then another ten miles when I caught up to a semi and a semi headed west. The sky was pink. From Friendsville uphill on 68 to Keysers Ridge just after 9:00 I passed a car and a truck, saw nobody - nobody - heading west until east of the exit to Oakland. The sky was turquoise.
Driving on rural interstates early Sunday morning, it was beautiful, it was spooky, the roads, the backseat, empty. We talked about how we will sell our house and move to wherever our grandchildren are living if they're not living near us, how we'll not buy the farm at the bottom of Sidling Hill and build a disc golf course, raise alpacas and sell their wool.
- The Occupations in Winter.
- Why Chris Hedges is suing Obama.
- Of course it's terrorism.
- The myths of multiculturalism.
- Fred Hiatt plays dumb, shits himself shitting you.
- Official new Villager meme: Romney = Gore.
- Even more Ron Paul and the progressives.
- It's not about Ron Paul, it's about you: The United States keeps killing innocent people, keeps propping up horrific regimes, keeps violating international law, keeps trampling on the lives of those who lack the power to defend themselves-- but Ron Paul is a racist, and believes in the gold standard, and opposes abortion, and in general supports some of the most odious domestic policies imaginable. What I insist, and what people like Glenn Greenwald keep insisting, is that Ron Paul's endless failings shouldn't and can't exist as an excuse to look away from the dead bodies that we keep on piling up. What I have wanted is to grab a hold of mainstream progressivism and force it to look the dead in the face. But the effort to avoid exactly that is mighty, and what we have on our hands is an epidemic of not seeing.
- Did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team? It's true, and they're pissing me off and creeping me out both alternatively and simultaneously.
- Me and my dogs.
- Found an old CD case before the trip, hadn't listened to Beth Orton or Mojave 3 in a few years:
INTERSTATE SONNET
Carl Marcum
A cigarette kiss in the desert. The wind-proof arc
of flame sparks inside the speeding Buick. Menthol:
a break from the monotony of highway nicotine—
most intimate of drugs. Make this mean sorrow
or thermodynamics, whatever small gesture
there is time for. Light another one, the vainglorious
interstate dusk and ash—the long, silver tooth.
This shirtless abandon, this ninety-mile-an-hour
electric laugh. The edges of windshield, haphazard
chatter. The clatter of the hubcap and the thunderclap:
the white-hot retinal memory of your life as a Joshua tree.
Permanence in the passenger seat. This long haul,
this first drag—nothing like cinnamon, nothing
like the iron taste on the back of your mortal tongue.
