Driving Through Jeebusville

I sure don't like to prattle on about personal matters with this blog; that's not what I intended to do here. Actually what got me to get into this was steaming outrage about Katrina and the blatant criminality of it all. Over five thousand blog entries later and to be honest, I still haven't purged the anger.

But I'm on the road, not in a vacation sort of way and there's nothing I can do about it. I'm driving as fast as I can to Florida where both my elderly parents are institutionalized. My 90 year old father got pretty ill and was in intensive care for a week and now he's convalescing at a rest home. It was apparent to me that if I wanted to see either one of them alive one more time it was important to throw my things together and drive the 2200 miles to do so.

Buit drive is the operative word here. I fucking hate to fly; watching Up in the Air was like a case study of peculiar extraterrestrial activity. I imagine flying was once a pleasurable activity if you go back fifty or sixty years, when intentions were to place people's comfort and enjoyment first and foremost, instead of corporate bottom line. I think we'd all be better off in dirigibles.

I'll state one thing right now, I will never assume the surrender posture they want us all to do when going through those stinking, naked scanning cancer inducing, fourth amendment shredding pieces of intrusive shit machines:

please sir, no anal probe this time

which unfortunately are now in both airports I would have had to use. Plus I have a larger torso but holy shit, economy plane seats are complete insults to the human body even if you're a dwarf. And I for one, decidedly can not stand the entire cattle car aspect of shuttling the passengers around. Screw the deadlines and layovers and delays. I'm pulling a comfortable little motel room behind me where I do the decision making. Nice rest area? Time for a bite and a cup of tea. And no crawling over other bodies to stumble into a smelly broom closet to aim for a tiny basin. Any time I want I'll pull over and pee like a man should, aiming for rocks and ants and bellowing to the sky.

But as I drive further southeast I can feel a smothering gospel sense to the country. Haven't hit the billboards yet, but need to hit the radio search a lot more to skip the preachers; desklady yesterday said she'd pray for my safe trip; couldn't quite grab my camera fast enough today to take a picture of a hundred foot cross towering over a herd of cows out in a field. It's a funny thing, this a priori understanding, that everybody is conservative and god fearing, and since it's an election year the political campaigns down here try to out conserve and godfear the next guy. Basically the whole belly of the country is a bible belt from Florida to McCainland (What a fighter!), but I'm about to descend into the real swamp where endless billboards really start to chip away at your soul.