We tour to Alabama every November. I think that must continue. Trump was elected one year ago this month. I have never seen the embodiment of the national mood so personified in a US President. We have stolen, we are stupid, we are a reality TV show, this is my home.
Alabama in November is lovely like Vermont in September. There are very few tourists, the air warm and dry, the sky is blue. White sand beaches lay empty to welcome the gentle teal tide.
Monarch butterflies bumble slowly to Mexico. They swim thru the air with the awkward grace of a drowning victim trying to stay afloat. No one knows they fly to Mexico with guidance of quantum mechanics, what some have called the purest manifestation of God. We must have hit two dozen butterflies with the RV windshield from Huntsville to Fairhope. Next month Alabama decides between a weaponized minister with a side interest in shopping mall teens and some guy named Jones. Small cotton fields with whimsical cotton bols flap on dry stalks like anachronistic jokes about a living wage. Globalization roils Mobile Bay. I want an ironic t-shirt. Alabama means more to America than we want to understand.
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Boom! There’s a canoe. Someone wanted me to find this canoe! The Universe had read my deepest thoughts and at that moment, (more deeply than I even knew in my convalescent joy), I wanted a canoe to be made flesh from the spirit of my mental storage garage.
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But I would be remiss to leave out Indiana. She is in the news so rarely. Once again, the states we travel to in America cease to be some place mentioned in passing by the news reader but instead become places I can see and smell and touch.
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The month of the Lion begets, we hope, the month of the Lamb. But let’s just say (and in fact we did say), it’s all fun and games until you leave Florida...
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There is something sub “Southern” about south Florida. The signs are everywhere: perfect white beaches and nigh invisible ocean water lapping gently, waiting for climate change to sweep the entire sand bar to the north Atlantic. The strip malls cheek by jowl with the mangrove islands and the dolphins. The impossibly gorgeous views from stilted houses in a gulf side sunset surrounded by a sturdy perimeter fence. A land of contrasts to be sure. Everyone is enjoying nature, with a large motor.
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Crossing the state line from Georgia to Florida opened like the Gates of St Peter's Heaven. We checked in at the Florida Welcome Center and a nice lady gave us paper cups with FREE fresh squeezed citrus! I've read the Oregon legislature was considering free doobies but that bill is still stuck in committee so we are going with Florida for the best state line welcome and all it's imperfect splendor.
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I am pretty sure that when you play peek-a-boo with a baby the Joy you see on his toothless grin when you pull your hands away is Epiphany. To get an epiphany, you have to think.
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The lawns are always crisp & green at Mac Doh. They are clean & perfect like their famous toilets. Some have a well hydrated square of Kentucky Blue. Others add shrubs and stake up non-fruiting trees. The lawn features depend on the whimsy of the managers read from “Exterior Lawnscaping of free-standing McDonald’s Franchise”. My familiar name for McDonalds is ‘MacDoh'.
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I do not ask why I do this.
I do not believe in your worries.
I am what I do.
Marvel or be gone.
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When the tire blew out on the Toyota Land Cruiser, we were on the last paved road out of Durban, South Africa on the way to Mozambique. Things were already going poorly with my girlfriend but I thought a trip to the coast to munch on prawns by the braai and wander the wild beaches might be a good memory to have for all. A rapid front tire decompression on a truck with a high axel going 110 kph is different from the annoyance of getting a flat. You can die.....
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In the late dark of the parking lot, the lights shine from above.
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Whore’s baths are like afternoon sex and perhaps that is too much information but being naked in my truck in the Walla Walla city park on race car day (bee’s in the blender boys!) has liberated me from certain arbitrary rules while introducing new ones. We are a two person military campaign on a secret musical mission, exploring the country of our births’, one late afternoon after the next.
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We have jumped off the twee dock that is our dear Portland & now bob, somewhat ungainly, in the waters of the rest of America. We are not in Brooklyn, or San Francisco or Robert Seigal’s apartment in northwest D.C. We sit in parking lots of retail outlets that are kind enough to let us park on their pavement.
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