Day 3 and 4: The Crossroads of America and Beyond

I keep waking up in unbearable pain from my sunburn – this is 3 days later.

Yesterday I dreamed about skinny dipping in an indoor pool with a girl I met at a party one time in Toronto last year. There were a lot of other people there too. I think we played water polo or something. Just before waking I was attempting to surf breaking waves on the tide pool.

I learned that the movement of water through a pipe is an unsolvable equation.

The LAV our “boys” are being blown up in Afghanistan in, are second to none around the world, according to one former GM source I talked to.

After the ice cream truck, I got a ride to the “crossroads of America” in the back of a protective father’s pickup. He knew his daughter was cute. But I knew she was laughing at me freeze my ass off in the middle of the night still wearing my shorts and trying to huddle up. From there I was picked up by a Willy Nelson/Uncle Jimbo grease monkey – known as a pot-head hippie by his buddies, despite the fact he wasn’t very environmentally conscious and hadn’t smoked a J since his daughter was born... 35 years ago. That’s the landscape we’re traveling through though – America’s backwoods, where global warming is as much happy horseshit as the politicians’ own ambition, the poor are held hostage by medical insurance companies in the pocket of Big Pharma, a place with none of the current presidential candidates could ever truly understand. I even met a “Mexican” who spoke with a Texan accent on the way through.

But it was funny coincidence to be picked up by this particular mechanic however, as he smiled with comfort as we passed the careful county sheriff. I didn’t find out until the end of the ride, and I probably should have clued in sooner, and who knows how true it is anyways, but as he tells it, this man turns out to have close ties to America’s own cultural love affair with hitchhikers. Turns out this man is part of Rambo’s extended family (not Sylvester Stallone – the actual John Rambo). Now, recall First Blood, the first in the recently butchered series. Rambo is he ultimate hitchhiker. He’s a man without a home, a victim of American foreign policy, and is not wanted by the land he went out expecting to die for. Across this land the social fabric still bears the scars of Vietnam, Nixon, and the rest of the lot. And that poignant first scene, if you’ll remember, was revived so well by the genius of Trey Parker and Matt Stone for the new lost generation, played out in cartoon form on South Park by the character Eric Cartman – himself known by just his last name, himself an equally resonant character. Cartman is the obese suburban adolescent, who manipulates his mother in individualistic schemes, with crass rhetoric, so he can play more videogames and eat more junk food, with no skin off his nose. When Cartman plays Rambo as the hitchhiker, nothing could be more fitting.

And so I help deliver the local paper door to door (it’s all they read anyways – you’ll be hard pressed to find a New York Times anywhere around here... and the gospel filled USA Today is pretty scarce itself) and move on from Ohio into Indiana, where condo developers of the most elite communities force residents to fundraise for a community center (while their eye remains squarely on the prize of new condo sales), even the bathroom graffiti in cultural hotspots is positive and religious, an hour of talk-radio goes by on the topic of “illegal” aliens, and aspirations are so far beyond means that one county can only make three per cent of the infrastructure payments it knows it should for road maintenance.