state nickname: Equality state
Once I walked into a gas station somewhere along I-80 in Wyoming. It was log-cabin-esque with sofas and red-checkered-tablecloths and Star Trek was playing on a TV above it all and the pacing was completely different from anywhere I'd ever been. I was enveloped in a sudden feeling of home-- the first place I'd ever felt that sensation; since then I have been convinced home is a gas station in Wyoming but I have never found that gas station again.
Because I don't remember anything else of Wyoming today we will hear about one breakfast I had in Cheyenne and some other American commentary. This will of course be updated in good time.
*
The American road... Jean Baudrillard, who seems to link the disappearance and brilliant allure of the desert interstate with the disappearance and surfaceness and even vacancy of (the images that comprise) American culture, writes: "Driving like this produces a kind of invisibility, transparancy, or transversality in things, simply by emptyting them out. It is a sort of slow-motion suicide, death by an extenuation of forms -- the delectable form of their disappearnce. Speed is not a vegetal thing. It is nearer to the mineral, to refraction through a crystal, and it is already the site of a catastrophe, of a squandering of time." ... "Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everthing to be obliterated."
...that driving space, highway hypnosis they warn you of in the driving manuals, I could go farther with all that, and did, in my mind, but nobody wants to hear my reflections on French intellectuals.
A somewhat related but somewhat tangential thought was that only in America can you decide breakfast might be better across state lines. We had tea in the bluehued wonderland of a christmas card where the lights glow warm in the distance (warmly, innocuously, until day breaks and the dismal forms of buildings and roads mar the gray landscape--) and then there was Wyoming, with pancakes and eggs and gravelly-voiced waitresses, America in the soft psychedelic snow with all its buffalo meat and fireworks stands, oh America blinking by at 90mph i know your roads & thought of them all:
*
Imagine a land which lacks all understanding of tragedy.
back to the map
the I-10; an interstate which at least in New Orleans gets an article in front of it THE I-10 raised above the swamps Mobile, Austin, sinister Van Horn Texas and a snarl of Phoenix counting the miles till la promised land
I-5 waiting for Mt. Shasta to arise at your side and
I-40 Arkansas but Oklahoma turns you rusty red dirt and
I-80 and I-90 and coins tossed to Chicago tolls, opening out into Minnesota and Wisconsin and those friendly great Northwoods states that are open without being bleak and
I-95, the home-road the connector of it all wearisome with your blinking Report Suspicious Activity signs, I-95 dead sodium lights through the night leading towards somewhere I don't want to go,
there's I-25 through the desert states and I-70 which deserves its own line but i will spite it because i hate kansas and there's I-64 appalachian mama and really i should tell these roads by their chains, I-64 for Cracker Barrel and I-85 for waffle house and I-80 for fazoli's, now that's america Love's and Flying J and i know wasn't ever expecting you to be angelic (or was i?), america
That land is the USA.
I hear it was Kafka who said, "I like the Americans because they are healthy and optimistic."
well, this optimism, as endearing as it is, seems to carry with it the expectation (read: god-given-right) of Progress-- and then we miss the beauty of tragedy--
Tragedy is an important concept in understanding how the world works
in participating in the world
I mean more than "All life is suffering" / it's finding the tragicomic & surrendering to the perfection of tragedy / well, I shall write more on this when I can say it more clearly. The essence of the thought was: this nation would be better off if it could comprehend tragedy. Not surrender to defeatism & despair, like some nations... but maintain optimism and comprehend tragedy, both. Then, perhaps, we'll be a grown-up nation. I am rather weary of living in an adolescent nation.