I'm Big in California

Walking to the campus library, I was accosted by two gentlemen. "You there!" they cried. "Lad! Come hither, and gaze upon our magic lens, so that we may capture your likeness and broadcast it to the many! Furthermore, I wish to ask of you two questions, both very brief." So I was interviewed by the Press-Enterprise, some sort of local news group. You can see the video online at www.pe.com. On the right hand side, where the video player is, click on "Professor Blah Blah talks about the President blah blah". I don't make my appearance until around minute 3, but it's ok because you've got nothing better to do.

That same day, yesterday, I saw a stupid looking white guy with a waxed mustache, and then saw him again today. COOL, HUH?!? I bet he has to wax that thing every morning before he goes out. Or he sleeps in a special mustache barometric retrovibration chamber that holds his head in place and contains speakers that play music to soothe his mustache. Or he doesn't shower, which judging from his ratty hair and air of unrecognized genius seems the most likely explanation. I've got my big stupid test tomorrow so I'm trying to review 35 pages of notes, but since this is all I've been doing since moving here it's really boring and I want to go out and eat a huge dinner so I'll come home and be comatose. Also sleeping on the couch cause your cat popped the air mattress sucks out loud.

1,532 miles later

Here you go, unedited. I plan to keep this going while I'm in California, or at least until you come kill me. I figure it'll help keep my life in order, stay in perspective, and remain marginally sane. The past two days have been nothing but monstrous endurance challenges, and in the evening I wrote a few paragraphs on what happened. The first one, 12/27, is pretty awful. Sorry.

December 27^th

Today I began my road trip. This is not the first road trip I’ve been on, nor is it the longest, even though I will have driven over 2,200 miles by the time I’m done. But this road trip is different from all the others because this is a one-way trip. When I reach the western edge of the country, I won’t be turning around. My new apartment will be my new home for the next year, unlike college where family and free dinner is only an hour and a half down the road. I will not be retracing my passage to the west any time soon.

Today I watched the sunrise from the interstate, and watched it set from the interstate, 600 miles later. This long passage from one coast to the other is more than a road trip, it is a long dusty birth canal, and when I pop out on the other end Adulthood will be waiting with a mask and latex gloves, ready to snip the umbilical cord. Once I’m there I can’t crawl back in the womb of my parent’s basement. But this rebirth in the California desert is essential, I feel, towards my own advancement as a person and in the world. I’ve discovered that complacency can grow if one remains idle for too long, and Marietta is not a place I want to find myself being complacent. Of course it is difficult forcing yourself away from a place of comfort and ease. In Georgia I have great friends, family, and am in familiar surroundings. Riverside isn’t just another town, it’s another state, another time zone, a completely other way of living. Couple this heavy change with the responsibility of paying for gradate school and making my own way through life, and I’m not surprised I’m nervous and anxious. Spending dozens of hours on bland Midwestern interstates staring with no distractions but the bleak, flat landscape leads to a lot of introspection.

In other news, while I was bombing through Alabama early this morning I saw what at first appeared to be a good ol’ boy pick up coming up on my right. An older gentleman with a neat mustache was driving, but what threw me for a loop were the words stuck across his rear window. At first glance I thought it no more than another, typical bumper sticker letting other commuters that God is blessing or hating some specific group, usually America and Foreigners, in that order. However this particular man had “God Forgive America” spelled out, which I thought was a nice change of pace in the usually one-track-minded South.

Also I locked my keys in the car while stopped in Malvern, Arkansas, population 9,000.

December 28^th

Things I Saw In the Texas Desert:

• An overcast dawn sky like well-worn denim. Clouds stretched across the entire skyscape, in some places thinner and tantalizing with faint hints of what brightness lay beyond, and in some places thicker and a dark sunless color.
• A windmill farm. A wind-power-generating field. A field of windmills.
• Three (3) tumbleweeds.
• A man walking down the side on the interstate with a large, wooden cross over this shoulder. There were wheels attached to the end dragging across this forsaken desert.
• The burning exhaust output of an oil refinery.
• A low bank of white clouds, heavy with precipitation, seeping over a desert ridge against the dark backdrop of dusk. It looked as if a giant wave were crashing against the far side of the mountains, the foaming crest exploding over the top.

Today I drove almost exactly 800 miles in 13 hours. 775 of those miles were spent in Texas, a bitch of a state. The last time I was through here we drove across during the night. This vastly improved the scenery compared to yesterday. I’m saying that I would rather stare at a black piece of construction paper for twelve hours than gaze out at the scenery in Texas. The paper and Texas are equally dynamic in this regard.

The drive became exciting only when both dusk and I arrived to the far western edge of Texas. The sun fell against a scattering of a desert rain clouds, an oxymoron perfectly in line with the general moron-like nature of the state, and created a stormy and colorful background. Color up to this point in the day had been limited to “brown” and “tan”. Night provided a glimpse into Mexico. As I-10 sped along the border before running through El Paso and up to Las Cruces, I saw endless miles of streetlights and settlement stretching across the entire night horizon in Mexico. But something about the huge Mexican city across the border kept nagging at me until I realized that the massive population in that city existed almost entirely in residential areas. There were no centers of light that indicated commercial buildings, no buildings over three stories tall in fact, and it seemed as if the there were no development past countless, grid-like streets and their accompanying lights.

Today I’m going to do a lot of nothing here in Las Cruces. There’s some football and a few naps on the schedule. Maybe later I’ll drive through the town and find some Native Americans. Around midnight I’m leaving on the last leg of the trip, a final 700 miles, arriving at Riverside around noon on the 30^th. Then moving in, skipping unpacking save for a 3’ x 5’ UGA flag and then watching Georgia play Virginia Tech at 5 p.m. (PST).