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October 17, 2002  Dateline - Selma, NC The Luxury Motel, chosen for its slightly misleading $22.95/night rate as seen from the I-95 South but upon closer inspection that rate applies only to seniors. So it was $27.95 for me. Fair enough. And deserved after a nearly straight 24 run from Boston, a jaunt broken only by a 4-hour deadnap in a rest stop off the Jersey Turnpike somewhere south of New York. "This doesn't bode well for our future." That was what I said to Cricket a month back when, after knowing one another, (& I mean intimately) for a few days, we were already having communications problems. She didn't care for the pessimism. A week or so later on the road in Duke or was it whilst holed up spooned and loving in the lovely Durant Hotel in Berkeley that I said the same phrase but to the contrary. At that moment, all things bode well. And so it has been. The devil telephone has done its part to separate us, and the sheer distance across this vast country of ours, well, it's been doing the rest. But we agreed that what was most troublesome was that pillow vacuum, that not having your lover face to face, and to spoon in bed, that both of us lived so much in the NOW that any distance be it physical or temporal, hurt. So we agreed to meet in New England. But that was a tough gig for me up there in Dan's attic: sifting through 20 years of the accumulated crap of a chronic packrat; dusting every little object; ad hoc-studio-photographing perhaps a total of 500 objects; and cataloguing them all in one long inventory to be sorted out and sold later on eBay. I burned out after two weeks of it. And something else was eating me. Winter. I could feel the lead and the lethargy of encroaching winter as October rains and cold snaps vied for my detention, made me feel all hemmed in as though any minute THEY would slam shut the giant doors of the wall, the new Berlin-esque "homeland defense" wall of civil liberty, instituting horrors like interstate travel visas, curfews, martial law. It's coming. Only the daft and the blissfully ill-informed Wal-Mart shoppers don't see what we, the writers, the thinkers, the walkers on the slippery rocks see. Or maybe it will indeed be a real wall, or walls. Just like the ones they use to keep the Mexicans out, vaulting corrugated steel blockades where the sidewalks end and men in green suites and guns protect "us" from "them." We are them. They are us. So I could feel that big steel door shutting, shutting me into a crowded room full of people largely not graced by the soul-cleansing open spaces of the west, and a room where already, on October 14th, I could see my breath. So I ixnayed the ainMae (that's piglatin for cut the throat of the doe-a-deer naive but sweet plan for a romantic liaison w/C in the Tippy Cabin on that lovely unpeopled lake in Maine where I spent my summer skinny dipping, drinking the water of the pond unfiltered, and drinking beer, drinking like a pirate every night alone in those woods to a roaring campfire, a notebook and a pen). Cricket expressed some relief that the Maine plan was off, especially since I immediately followed it with a new, more sensible plan. "Let's meet on the beach, in the sun, where it's warm!" She sounded hip to the idea, asked me to call from the road to let her know when & where to fly into, and that was that. I hit the road. Now here I sit, alone and insomniac in a shitty motel two car-lengths from the interstate listening to the airbrake thunder of exiting semi's and wondering... Why hasn't my phone rung in over 30 hours? Where is that even-a-brief acknowledgement call from C of my several calls to both her home and cell phone? I think I know well enough. I think I'm gonna get up in a few hours, hit the interstate south, and once again it's gonna be just me and the road. Just me and The American Road. And you, my Loves, my readers, whoever and whenever you are. Via con Dios.. Lord Duke RSM
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