travel log days 3 and 4: your biomes are so crass and churlish
Made it to Dallas last night and Nashville tonight, and managed to hold up tiny children both times. It turns out that small children, if told that a relative is coming to visit, will anxiously pace around the house until that person arrives and may even cry if their bedtime means they'll miss him when he's late. As a child I don't think I gave a crap at all about my family until I was told to start watching over younger cousins, so I was not prepared for the havoc I caused by getting lost on local highways and showing up an hour or so after my planned arrival both nights. This includes today, when I gave myself an extra hour just to prevent the same nonsense.
Tiny children are pretty cute though, especially when they get excited about every random thing you have to say and want to start random Phillipe-like anecdotes every two minutes. I have tried to persuade them that they should try caring that much about people besides random visitors, but I don't know what age you start processing that stuff at.
Seeing family is good. I have already made semi-promises about coming to visit again on the way back, although I really just want to take a different route through the northern states instead of ever, EVER driving the length of Texas again. Texas will hereafter replace Tennessee as the "fuck this" state of cross-country driving--and yet I am being asked to drive across it again come late May, when things are probably going to be pretty barftacularly hot. It's nice to be invited back, but I would like to drive through some states that aren't scorching hellpits. Texas also has sucky plant life, I would like to say for the record.
Other highlights of the past two days include the President Bush Turnpike, on which you can pay tolls by lobbing exact change into a metal basket, and the President Clinton Birthplace Museum. The former is great because if you're, say, sick of driving on Dallas and Fort Worth's freeways, you can just overhand huck that change as hard as you want without even slowing down much. I would also like to see toll booths which allow me to stick my arm out the window and clothesline a hanging target, or maybe one where I can get out of the car and furiously kick a mannequin. The Bill Clinton thing was pretty sad and small and the captions read like something Kevin Siembieda would write. I think the non-geeky analogies sort of left me a day after all the non-extremely angry ones. Maybe they have to catch up to me, like that nonsense from Pattern Recognition. Eff that book, by the way.
I'll be in Philadelphia by late tomorrow evening, so maybe I can befriend some locals in the time before I stop saying "FUCK that thing!" to conclude a topic of discussion. I really can't believe how much I'm looking forward to getting there.
Tiny children are pretty cute though, especially when they get excited about every random thing you have to say and want to start random Phillipe-like anecdotes every two minutes. I have tried to persuade them that they should try caring that much about people besides random visitors, but I don't know what age you start processing that stuff at.
Seeing family is good. I have already made semi-promises about coming to visit again on the way back, although I really just want to take a different route through the northern states instead of ever, EVER driving the length of Texas again. Texas will hereafter replace Tennessee as the "fuck this" state of cross-country driving--and yet I am being asked to drive across it again come late May, when things are probably going to be pretty barftacularly hot. It's nice to be invited back, but I would like to drive through some states that aren't scorching hellpits. Texas also has sucky plant life, I would like to say for the record.
Other highlights of the past two days include the President Bush Turnpike, on which you can pay tolls by lobbing exact change into a metal basket, and the President Clinton Birthplace Museum. The former is great because if you're, say, sick of driving on Dallas and Fort Worth's freeways, you can just overhand huck that change as hard as you want without even slowing down much. I would also like to see toll booths which allow me to stick my arm out the window and clothesline a hanging target, or maybe one where I can get out of the car and furiously kick a mannequin. The Bill Clinton thing was pretty sad and small and the captions read like something Kevin Siembieda would write. I think the non-geeky analogies sort of left me a day after all the non-extremely angry ones. Maybe they have to catch up to me, like that nonsense from Pattern Recognition. Eff that book, by the way.
I'll be in Philadelphia by late tomorrow evening, so maybe I can befriend some locals in the time before I stop saying "FUCK that thing!" to conclude a topic of discussion. I really can't believe how much I'm looking forward to getting there.