Elk City, Oklahoma — The coffee maker in the motel room malfunctioned, giving off a wispy curling smoke such as might be seen in a horror movie and stinking up the room in a way John Waters might appreciate. I’ve gone down to the lobby to get a cup of lobby coffee and have it here next to me. I have not yet drunk enough of it.
A huge storm came in the night. Around 2:00 a.m. I was awakened by thunder. There was that and the causal lightning and buckets of rain. It was after 3:00 before I got back to sleep, to dream of the Cadillac Ranch and the great Groom Cross, both of which are along Interstate 40 and both of which Owen and I saw yesterday in passing. At the Cadillac Ranch, the frontage road was clumped with the SUVs and pickup trucks of sightseers who had stopped to see the noted work of art, photos of which I had seen before and which is somewhat smaller in real life. As we passed the great Groom Cross, I saw no one and did not see the grounds with their array of bronze sculptures. While many poor could have been fed with the money it cost to erect a cross nearly 200 feet tall and fashion the accompanying structures, the poor will always be with us and would only have got hungry again so they will have to find some other way to get by.
There is also a leaning water tower in Groom, about which I did not dream.
The lobby telly says a cold front is coming. It is a barrier of stormy weather through which Owen and I will be motoring later today in the great yellow Penske rental. Time to finish the coffee, pack up, check out, and head out. Breakfast possibly in Oklahoma City.
Elk City, Oklahoma — Owen and I arrived just after 7:00 p.m. local time and secured lodgings at the Days Inn off Interstate 40 eastbound at exit 38. It was a good drive and fast, often at 70 mph in the 26-foot Penske rental. The vegas of northwest New Mexico were green from recent rains. The burgers at the Denny’s in Tucumcari were superb, the wait staff sullen and distracted, the men’s room a mess. Northwest of Amarillo is a vast wind farm, dozens of large white turbines arrayed for thirty miles or so across the plains, looking like nothing so much as the spaceships of an invading alien army. The American and Texas flags in Amarillo were large and extended in the stiff breeze; the girl at the Love’s truck stop wore a tight pair of knit shorts in an American flag pattern. Once across the border into Oklahoma, where the flags are much smaller and not made into clothing, the steady wind picked up dust and hazed the late afternoon view.
The Days Inn once had a Denny’s on-site and the floor plan at the front desk still shows it. The desk clerk said, “They closed it down and didn’t even tell their staff they were going to.” She said we could find dining at any one of a half-dozen eateries across the road. We crossed and chose the Western Sizzlin’, where it was Monday Night Buffet. In the lobby of the Western Sizzlin’, there is a photograph of the 66 Diner in Albuquerque.
Back here in the room now, we can hear the voices of revelrous travelers along the balcony outside our smoking room (“All I have available is smoking rooms,” the desk clerk said). The ashtray by my laptop is face down. Tomorrow’s goal is Springfield, Missouri.
This is almost certainly my final routine post from my desktop computer here in the home my wife, Susan, and I keep in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Later today, I will shut down and pack away this machine. Today and tomorrow, my adult son, Owen, and I load up the rental truck with all Susan’s and my household possessions. Monday morning, with Owen riding shotgun, we head for Chicago.
I have a laptop and expect I may post again from it tomorrow, and may scribble a bit about the trip as we make our way by interstate highway along the old Route 66. We’ll see.
“As you get older, you start to realize that what actually holds relationships together is just liking the other person in the relationship, wanting them to be around, feeling like they increase the value of your time and that you, despite your evil cursed nature, can do the same for them.” — Jeanne Thornton (interviewed in Bookslut)
“I see people who do not read: they are so limited in their lives, even in the good things. They do not see beyond their immediate surroundings; they are incapable of changing anything because they neither know what there is to change, nor how to go about it. They don’t understand other people, not even their own loved ones, because they do not have the habit of reflecting on the yearnings, motives, and passions of human beings. And whatever thing they experience makes much less sense than it does for someone who reads. Besides, what would a man see in the fields of La Mancha who does not know who Don Quixote is? Dusty roads, nothing more.” – Agustin Cadena, “Why I Read” (trans. Mayo)
“Facebook can seem at times an enormous simulacrum of the Pussycat Lounge, full of voyeurism and cynical, semi-professional exhibitionism, but obviously the divide between performer and audience that structures the flow of money, power, pity, and contempt in strip clubs has been largely obliterated online. Instead, there is the ambiguous simultaneity of consuming and producing spectacle, of performing the self, of spectatorship as performance, in a medium that immediately allows you to substitute yourself for any performer with broadcast responses of your own. This stew of contradictory and self-negating impulses makes up what now often gets described simply as sharing. It’s sharing when we confess something; it’s sharing when we link to someone else’s work; it’s sharing when we simply express approval for something; it’s sharing when a social-media service automatically announces some action we took. Online we all have a million hearts to give.” – Rob Horning, “The Failure Addict”
“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.” – Theodore Roosevelt, “Citizenship in a Republic: ‘Man in the Arena’”
“When it comes to writing, the despairing perfectionism known as alcoholism can be as tragically inhibiting as it is sordid to witness.” – Terry Castle, “You Better Not Tell Me You Forgot”
“It’s never enough to have lived through anything, you need to have a je ne se quoi about the way you put it into words.” – Michelle Tea, quoted by Jessa Crispin in “Sister Spit: Writings, Rants & Reminiscence from the Road”