Red Light District

With the roar of the interstate drowning out my headphones, I clambered over the safety barrier, to retreat to the ditch while I walked.  In the dark, I stumbled over rough, unfinished drainage canals, and the wet undergrowth slapped at my legs.  I trudged on for a while before realizing I was never going to get any closer to my destination, and that walking across an interstate is a much stupider prospect than walking across a highway.  Defeated, I re-oriented myself for the return trip. There, beyond some trees, I saw the white lights of a parking lot. From there, I could just cut along the back of the commercial district.  Simple. 

To reach the trees, I traversed a broad plain, clear-cut in order to put up the massive power lines now hanging over my head.  Then, I had to fight my way through the brush. Branches tripped me, thorns tore at me, and dead wood sprang at me like a lash. Finally, I saw the parking lot. On the other side of a ten-foot chain link and barbed wire fence.

It was at this point that GWAR started playing on my headphones, as I fought my way back through the thorns and tripwires. Then, under the power lines, I stepped knee-deep into a... well, honestly, I don't even have finish the sentence. "Knee deep" very rarely carries a positive connotation, after all. Nobody ever steps knee-deep into strawberry shortcake.

Anyway, I try again at another point along the interstate, and this time I manage to climb a hill so steep that no one worried about putting up a ten-foot fence. Here, five feet was sufficient. I managed to vault that, and dragged myself to the hotel about half an hour later, utterly defeated by the suburbs of Baltimore.

The next day, I got in the rental car and drove to my intended destination - a strip mall which I had seen from my hotel window, half a mile away. 

America doesn't have a love affair with the car - it has a domination fetish. 
 

Through the desert on a horse with no name.

Driving through Connecticut over the weekend, my road trip buddy asked, "So, which states make up New England? Or is it just a few cities? Or a geographical region?"

I looked out the window at the car we were passing, and there I had my answer.

"Look out there," I said. "Wherever you find a middle-aged man with glasses, smoking a pipe while driving a Yaris... that's where you'll find New England."

I think I learned how to love America on this trip.

Can't keep a good blog down.

I'm typing this in over a public wireless connection in Baltimore. Nice city; for some reason, it looks exactly like I expected Baltimore to look, even though I came here with no expectations.

It's funny, though. The difference between Canada and the U.S. has always been one of small distinctions made large. Maybe it's the hot dog vending machines, or the orange terror alerts over the airport PA systems, or the Spanish subtitles everywhere, or the cops riding Segways (or perhaps most important of all, the fact that I've never been further east in the States than Minnesota), but it feels more like a different country nowadays than it ever did before.

That's not a bad thing, and it's certainly making the trip more entertaining.

I scribbled a whole bunch of poetic-sounding things on my boarding passes while I was on the airplane... as soon as I clean all the fast food receipts and related traveling debris out of my pockets, I'll put some of it up here.

Until the next time, then!