rock over London. rock on, Chicago.

the Black Keys

To be an American soldier today is to serve a people who find nothing amiss in the prospect of armed conflict without end. Once begun, wars continue, persisting regardless of whether they receive public support. President Obama’s insistence to the contrary notwithstanding, this nation is not even remotely “at” war. In explaining his decision to change commanders without changing course in Afghanistan, the president offered this rhetorical flourish: “Americans don’t flinch in the face of difficult truths.” In fact, when it comes to war, the American people avert their eyes from difficult truths. Largely unaffected by events in Afghanistan and Iraq and preoccupied with problems much closer to home, they have demonstrated a fine ability to tune out war. Soldiers (and their families) are left holding the bag.

– Andrew J. Bacevich
Sunday, June 27, 2010

here’s another attempt to sell the doll house. this one has more pizazz.

I’m in Virginia. I am at dad’s house.
Aarti lands in … fourteen hours. I am still up.
it took me twelve hours to get here. something near 700 miles. I am getting too used to these kind of drives. I didn’t even look at a map. it’s like a muscle memory, like a golf swing or a pitching motion. 
during my drive out, I ate a tunafish sandwich at a truckstop in Ohio. stories that begin with a sentence like that usually end with “food poisioning. the end.” but oh no: didn’t get sick, and it was just about all I needed. that and a bunch of grapes. I laid off the tunes (well, not entirely), kept the window down. cruised, man.
so now I’m back here, again, in the DC metro area. this time for a long time. job is eleven, twelve days out. I’m anxious. I want it get going. I don’t know if I mentioned this, but I’m gonna have my own office. and someone in my department who works under me. not directly, you know, but under my position. holy shit.
this weekend, starting tomorrow, I’m unloading the truck, picking Aarti up, driving to Charlottesville, loading another truck, driving back up to DC … and then, who knows? I live out here now. I live in DC. I don’t visit anymore. I live here.
I need to find a running route. I need to deposit some checks. I think I need to find a drug store. I need to make sure my ass is at the international terminal on time. I need to email Mar. I need to find a breakfast place, where I can dissect the paper and guzzle coffee on Saturday mornings. right now, I need to go to goddamn sleep.  
so put the word out. it’s on.

well heyy, look at that.

“I find nothing interesting about the Mexican.”
– the dumbest thing I heard all day today. said by a relative, no less.

there’s a lot of people in my mom’s house right now. my brother, my niece, my aunt, two cousins, mom. grandma. me. we’re all kind of on top of one another, and I am a little-bit ready to go. on Wednesday I made it official and accepted that job with Council for a Strong America. I am moving to Washington. I am hyped.  
pros and cons about DC. let’s stop fucking around, let’s talk it out.

pros
. monuments
. the Smithsonian
. cherry blossoms
. multiple nearby airports
. public transportation
. Aarti lives there
. this record store I know in Arlington/Dupont/Georgetown
. a MLB baseball team that sucks and has a fickle fan base, which makes tickets cheap
. the Washington Post
. Mt Pleasant
. Capitol Hill
. Marion Barry

cons
. the federal government
. democrats
. republicans
. people who work for politicians (except Smith, he’s alright)
. the Washington Redskins
. the Georgetown University men’s basketball team
. northern Virginia
. traffic
. mobs of tourists
. $5 for a beer
. Maryland
. Marylanders who drive cars
. Marion Barry

something to think about, anyway.
tomorrow we’re all going out for some dysfunctional family fun at a minor-league ballpark in one of the most grinding ghettos in the United States. the Railcats are hiring. I’d be all over this is I weren’t about to be employed again. or I’d tip it over to my friend Dave Weinberg. I don’t know; I think this would be perfect for him. I should do that.

story of the year right here:

Gary Brooks Faulkner, an American citizen who told police he was searching for Osama Bin Laden, has been arrested in northwest Pakistan armed with a gun, a sword, and Christian literature.

I had a dream last night.

I was at church choir rehearsal. I used to sing in the choir occasionally in high school at our family’s church. oh man, our family’s church … now there’s a barrel of monkeys I will refrain from delving into.
the longtime choir director has no formal training, I believe, beyond her years of singing on Sundays. her direction drove me nuts when I was also in a couple of high school choirs (the lamest of high-school extracurriculars), because I could see  she was just waving her arms around however she saw fit. that approach wouldn’t be so bad — if it works, it works — but the choir sucks. and they’ll suck tomorrow morning during service. they always get A’s for effort, but not much else.
anyway, I was at church choir practice (which I’ve never attended outside of dreamland) and Nadine the director was doing bumps of cocaine during rehearsal. choir practice drug use!
I found this funny. what a strange place for coke. I laughed, but Nadine didn’t see the humor in it. she channelled some Queen Latifah indignancy and began berating me for being off key. she had gone on the offensive on me, had flipped the script. I was taken aback.
I’m off key? I thought. but you just snorted a bunch of cocaine!

and here’s where I woke up to my alarm.

Iowa was terrible.

it was all like that above, at breakneck speed. in the backcountry, the roads are dangerous and terrifying.

no, no. no. it wasn’t. Iowa is actually very nice. it is exactly as you remembered it. it is wide, and incredibly flat in some places, and still full of rolling hills. and the skies are huge. it’s pastoral. it’s rural. it naturally has the sleepiest city of 200,000 that I’ve been through in a while. it is Iowa.

“you can mix and match on those two-for-one king-size candy bars.”
– cashier at truck stop on I-80

I left Indiana at 1 pm on Wednesday, and got directly on the interstate near mom’s crib. I-80 runs across the country from New York City to the Bay Area, and it goes right through Des Moines while doing it. so I got on board that wave, put on the cruise control and was there in six and a half hours.
now six and a half hours is a long goddamn time to spend on the road. because you are locked into an unnatural position for so long, in a state of atrophy, I’ve tried to skip out on the awful stuff that you tend to consume when you’re traveling. the snacks you buy at truck stops. 32 oz. fountain drinks. candy. packaged shit. everything loaded with salt and fat.
I have been successful at this until I punted on this trip. never again, man. I downed a bag or two of M&Ms, half a hoagie, a bag of salted cashews, a Chicago-style hot dog, a bag of fries and a diet pepsi. all while sitting on my ass over two days in my pickup truck.
beyond the gastronomic boot I took to my gut, I took a lot of pictures. most of these were taken either from overpasses, or tenuously out of the window of my car while driving with my knees. my camera sucks and so does my eye for a good picture, so I usually take a large quantity of shots. out of that, I figure, I’ll get one or two decent ones. maybe something that would be a summation of the drive, of the scenery. this one works:

this storm followed me for about 200 miles. every time I stopped it would catch up with me, and I’d get dumped on again.
this isn’t based in any study, any meteorological science, but having watched the nightly weather report for eight years in Chicago’s media market, I have gained an assumption that systems move from west to east over this far side of the plains. storms come from Iowa. storms like this one. it was big, dropped all kinds of rain, looked very severe and was above me for a good chunk of the day. and it really threw my sense of direction off, because it’s large mass in the sky full of crazy angles and it obscures the sun. thank god I was in the midwest where everything’s on a grid and you can almost see where you’re going.

“how’s the construction on the highway in Illinois?”
– County prosecutor, making small talk after the press conference

my hotel was a block away from the Drake University campus in Des Moines. it was summer, so there were no students, and it was very quiet on Wednesday evening. so I watched the Blackhawks win the Stanley Cup (this is a bandwagon I will have absolutely no problem getting on. I’m gonna get a t-shirt.), got six hours of sleep and was up at 6:15 for the 9 am press conference.
there’s a couple of reasons for this. first, I was not sure exactly where the press conference was going to be held, save looking at it on a street map, and I wanted to get there, make sure I could find parking … to be hassle-free. second, I wanted breakfast, which I got continental style in the lobby. and third, and this is not a joke, I can’t tie a tie to save my life. I wanted at least a half hour of leeway to get that fucker around my neck and looking presentable.
of course, none of this turned out to be necessary. it’s not like downtown Des Moines sees a lot of traffic jams. so with time to spare, I think I was the first person at the “press conference” — which was me and a handful of local media in front of a podium placed on the police station’s steps. the Des Moines river was twenty yards on the other side of the street. the county sheriff showed up twenty minutes late for the event, and we all just kind of stood around and enjoyed the weather until he arrived, and then the speaking went off without a hitch.
my interview took place afterward at a coffee shop, and lasted a little over an hour. when it was over, and I hit the road again, it began to pour.
this was the beginning of the aforementioned rain. kind of put a hitch in my plans. I had watned to stay off the interstate on the ride back, see a little more of the state on the way out. it’s hard to see much in a rolling thunderstorm, so I was faced with a choice: the easy way out, the way I had come; or the road less taken, US 34?
I decided to stay off I-80 the whole way back, which proved time consuming.

“how far can you see?”
– Mike on the phone, east of Galesburg, Ill.

I’m a big fan of the interstate highway system. god bless you, President Eisenhower. with it, you can drive just about anywhere in this country. and that is fucking cool, dude; any half-awake idiot can get in their ride, and if they got the gas money and the gumption, they can drive across an entire continent. no papers necessary, unless you’re hispanic in Arizona. America is a big place. there is all sorts of shit to see out here, in the thick of it.
most people don’t even do this. but think of all of the towns, the cities, the lives, the views, the bridges, the rivers, that don’t hit an interstate. the shit you would never see if you never took a blue route.
I don’t know. if you don’t like blowing through a farm town at 40 mph; of stopping to occasionally stretch your legs and stand in the bed of your truck at a high point; to cruise through low crops at 60 mph, blaring Chuck Berry and not seeing the horizon in any direction, only distant houses and stands of trees like islands on a green sea; if none of that picques your interest, don’t take the long way home.

my back hurt when I got out of the truck at 10:45 pm. mom and grandma had hit Jimmy John’s on customer-apprecation day and loaded up on subs. so I pounded one, a glass of tea, and passed out in bed.
I rolled over when my phone rang at 7:15 in the morning. someone left a message. mom and grandma left around 9:30 for a funeral; someone from church had passed away. 
I listened to the message at 10:30 when I got out of bed. got the job offer. that’s what happens, kids, when you dress to impress and drive hundreds of miles to show your interest. good things, they can happen.

last night Grandma and I drank tea, ate donuts and watched “True Grit” while mom painted an old bathroom cabinet pink. she’s gonna make it into a doll house that my niece can screw around with when she arrives later this week.
no one watches John Wayne movies anymore. I don’t bemoan that. but have you ever seen “True Grit?” it’s at the stage in his career where Wayne … it’s hard to characterize John Wayne in “True Grit.” Rooster Cogburn is the character from which all other violent, hilarious, redneck hillbilly lawmen of the Old West descend; this character is the archetype. and Wayne won a Best Actor Oscar for his performance.
oh, and the Coen brothers are directing a remake starring Jeff Bridges, due out later this year. bonus.

alright. enough screwing around. let’s drive to Iowa.

I was gonna take the train tomorrow night from South Bend to DC in order to have a second sit-down interview with this nonprofit I’ve been trying to get hired on at.
but the woman whom I was to have met with is bailing on me. bailing! she’s in Iowa, and she’s staying an extra day because now she has landed a meeting with Tom Harkin. so I got bumped for Tom Harkin.
so. because I don’t want to fly to DC next week, I am driving, tomorrow afternoon, to Des Moines. I am going to attend one of the nonprofit’s press conferences at the Des Moines police department on Thursday morning. and then I’ll have my interview, and then I’ll drive back in the afternoon. six-hour one-way trip, man. and Iowa is pretty bland, if I remember correctly.