One year ago today: March 17, 2023, the squirrel is angry.
Five years ago today: March 17, 2019, remember Santa’s?
Nine years ago today: March 17, 2015, $29k seems a joke todayl
Random years ago today: March 17, 2007, a then-new flat-screen.
What a nice day for a twenty-hour drive. And make that close to twenty-one hours since I got up this morning. It’s one of the blessings of mild insomnia, provided you know how to turn these things to your advantage. Here’s my report for the day in the order things happened. Up at 6:30 AM, I purposely slept in so I’d drive any unfamiliar roads in the daylight. I drove east past my usuall route and turned south in Kingston. My plan was to see Sweetwater and some new scenery. This took longer than it should since I got millenialized again. You see, to a millennial, the parameter “no freeways” doesn’t mean secondary roads. It means every dirt and gravel back road that hasn’t been plowed in five years;
To sustain all these towns even one more generation seems impossible as there is no evident sense of history or belonging. One weird event in Sweetwater was I saw an old building with the town name painted of brick. Thinking what a great scene, tried to get a photo. Sure enough, traffic everywhere, took me nearly a half hour. You see, I wanted my standard shot of me posing, which means using the self-timer. This is a nothing Sunday in a nothing town, near a dead end road long after church let out. Eight times in a row, when I set the camera and walked on set, some came along just in time to ruin the shot; Ah, here we go, this shot is faked from two others.
Here’s a small town on the northern Georgia border. That Esso sign used to be on thousands of street corners when I was a kid. But Esso, a vocalization of “SO” meaning “Standard Oil” got into a copyright war with another company with the same name. After a world-wide search for a word that meant nothing in any language, they settled on Exxon. (The only language with two XXs in a row is Maltese.) And that was short-lived when they were bought our by an Australian company with a different idea about pumping gas. Tour[ve heard of 7-11? That’s the hours the original location was open.
Now it is a novelty sign for a craft brewery. I have flong ago memories of these old signs. When I was around thirteen, maybe fourteen, I had dreams of getting the hell away from Texas with my “rock band”, of course I had no idea what we were up against. What fooled me was I worked so hard for that band and I knew others did not—but I was young. I won’t say foolish, since time proved that except for naively believing the world would recognize the sacrifice, I had exactly and correctly surmised the situation.
There was an abandoned gas station around fifteen miles from town and I wanted that old Esso sign for a “cymbal” to announce the start of our gigs. From behind the drummer would come the mighty gong. But fifteen miles is fifteen miles and nobody, particularly not my family, was going to help no “dirty hippie” start no damn “Beatles band”. As far as I know, that sign was still there when I hitchhiked out of town four years later.
El Dorado class of '21.
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Feeling like driving, I skirted Atlanta to the east, via a trail of these towns, including the one called Coaldale. These rusting sets of railway lines next to mountains of coal typify what the liberals have done to America. It is cheaper to ship the coal than mine it. Just over the border, I got myself on one of the finest examples of a twisting valley road in my life anyway. If there had been any notice, I would have recorded this, but I was half-way down this twenty-mile road before I realized it was incredible.
I stopped regularly until reaching Macon, when it got dark. Feeling like driving, I cut over to the freeway for the last 375 miles. I got millennialized again, the gas stations with freeway signs are supposed to be open 24 hours. No, Tyler, two pumps with credit card only are not the same thing. Pirch black by Valdosta, I was wide awake, but avoided my shortcut through Bushnell. Hence, I missed the ramp at Brandon, who call it everything except the Brandon ramp. This made for a thousand mile trip that I drove in 21 hours.
Listening to my audiobook during the empty times, I’m at disk ten of thirteen. He finally gets her in the sack, but she manages to complicate that as well. This book has exhaustive hours-long passages describing the sex act I will not describe any lest you waste as much time as I have already. How, you might ask, can a grown woman pushing thirty mess up getting married to the most powerful Duke in England? Stay with me here, you see, she cannnot accept his marriage proposal because he just found out she is a virgin and could be he is acting out of a misplaced sense of honor instead of true love. How odd she would task the guy when her only other option is “Will, the osler, with hair of moldy grey”.
