After that, it’s our move and MD apartment; trust me, you’ll want to be around for that.

See, York would be a great place, a charming little medieval gem nestled into England’s eastern countryside, if everyone else on the blasted planet didn’t know that it was a charming little medieval gem. My appreciation of the ancient fort smack in the middle of town is somehow lessened every minute my photo of it has to wait for the cretin who’s lived long enough to earn the right to not know how to use his camera.

Perhaps the little city’s biggest problem is that it has too much tourism list-checking potential. You’ve got York Minster for your old church enthusiasts²), The Shambles for your medieval-market-cum-chic-boutique shoppers, Clifford’s Tower for your history buffs, some abbey ruins for your goths and braver emo kids, and JORVIK Viking Center for your clueless parents who think Vikings might as well be pirates and want some edutainment for their tweenage scrubs³. The choices go on and on.

As you might have guessed, “near other people” is not how I’d choose to spend a vacation, so I spent the day vacillating between annoyance and aggravation, with a little disaffection mixed in for good measure. Eventually, when we’d experienced just enough timeless architecture and quaintness that we thought our little hearts would burst for joy, we headed off to our next overnight stop – Edinburgh, Scotland.

Act 2: Edinburgh – putting the VAT to good use

I’m not sure who was the first person to tell us that we would be visiting the city of Edinburgh smack in the middle of a large-scale modernization process that would render many of its central roads completely unusable and reroute all well-intentioned vehicles to bizarre locales via even stranger traffic patterns…but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t our travel agent. They’re building a city-wide tram system, which I’m sure is great for the locals, but was somewhat less than great for us and our two relevant road maps – one of the entire United Kingdom, and one of a roughly four square block area surrounding our hotel.

Also, our unique⁴ itinerary meant that many of our days would be spent seeing as many sights as we could wring out of our current locale, and the following evenings would be spent driving to the next city. When you’re trying to do as much as possible, your days tend to run long, which ended up putting us at many of our destinations after 10 PM – in this case, we got to Edinburgh closer to 11. It was a little late for check-in, but we hoped for the best.

We continued to hope for the best as we drove circles around the city center, trying in vain to hone in on our destination from construction-battered thoroughfares and obscure side roads alike, our current road’s name changing with what seemed like every passing block. In fact, when we finally did locate our hotel 45 minutes later – a mostly unsigned section of otherwise residential townhouses in a quiet part of downtown – it turned out to be on a street that actually did change its name three times in one block. Luckily, we were able to rouse the night clerk from what I’m sure was an otherwise pleasant slumber and check in. I carried our bags upstairs while Amy attempted to pay for overnight street parking. That’s a story you’ll have to get from her, but the best I could tell from her harried summary, it involved a combination of calculus and a special decoder ring.

The hotel being, as I mentioned, in a residential area meant that it was small (9 rooms, if I remember correctly), but it still managed to be nicely appointed. The only downsides were an immovable shower head and a toilet that needed priming – pump, pump, flush, and you were usually fine.

After using said bathroom facilities the next morning, we wolfed down another delicious restaurant-style breakfast and headed out on the town. The tram work really did destroy the charm of most of the central shopping district; luckily, I’d rather be caught dead than in the shopping district⁵. All the good stuff’s at the top of a hill (smack in the middle of the town) with Edinburgh Castle. Tourist congestion does, of course, increase the closer you get to the castle itself, but there’s no getting around that – there are some amazing views and a ton of history to be had up there.

While visiting Edinburgh Castle, don’t be surprised if you experience 3 seasons in 1 day – it’s a local phenomenon known as “Scotland”. I think it’s something in the whisky. The sky can cloud over and pour down rain in a matter of minutes; the rain will then slow to a drizzle, soon giving way to a warm, sunny day. Watch in wonder as flowers then bloom before your very eyes⁶.

Once you’re done with the castle proper, head out the gates and down the Royal Mile for some – what else – wonderful little shops. At least, there must be some wonderful little ones mixed in with the morass of brightly-colored, guadily-decorated tourist bait, and I’m trying out this new thing where I give cities the benefit of the doubt⁷. At least you’ll have pretty stone buildings to look at while you’re passing prestigious establishments like the “Museum of Childhood” (I took the hit for you on this one – don’t waste your time).

The whirlwind of the last several days had left us worn out, so after several hours of wandering the Castle’s surroundings, we headed back to the hotel for an afternoon nap. A couple hours later, we woke up hungry, so we decided to find the nearest tasty-looking restaurant and eventually settled on a little place called the Grosvenor. Nestled cozily into a row of storefronts, I knew this place would be a winner when I was accosted outside the pub by a cheerful drunk on the phone trying to tell his mates where to find him:

“Hey–’Ey! Whassis place called?”

“…Huh?”

“‘is place. How d’you pruhnouse it?”

(Caught sufficiently off-guard, and actually seeing the name for the first time myself) “Umm…’Gross-ve-nur’?”

“Sa’it again?”

“…’Gross-ve-nur’? I’m not all that sure.”

(into the phone) “See? ‘Grudveshuh’. Noone can…iss right over…”

My usefulness clearly having expired, we left our new friend to his deliberations and went inside. A Beatles cover band (shocking, I know) was getting ready to play, so the place was relatively full, but we managed to find a table near the back. We settled in and, after our usual menu indecisiveness, decided on our dinner selections for the evening. I left A at the table while I went up to the bar to order.

This is when I was reminded that we were in the UK. It was after 6, so of course the kitchen was closed. If they served food to absorb all the alcohol everyone was drinking, how could their full house of patrons be expected to stay long enough to hear the cover band’s version of Paperback Writer at the end of their mediocre set? We walked down the street to a grocery store, picked up some sandwiches, and headed back to the hotel.

And the morning and the evening were the…wait a minute. On second thought, we were actually in Edinburgh for two days. So, um, stretch that post-York part out a bit, add an extra breakfast and a visit to Holyrood House in there somewhere, and you’ll have a semi-accurate picture of our time in the Scottish capital. If you’re concerned enough about chronological specificity that this bothers you, go watch a congressional hearing or something. They tend to be pretty picky about getting to the bottom of cause-and-effect timelines, and they’re great with details. You’ll fit right in.

1. Have I mentioned that just about every breakfast we had in the UK was fantastic? Even in London, where I expected the least amenities, the continental breakfast meant all-you-can-eat cereal/muesli, juice, and toast, along with some eggs, potatoes, sausage/bacon, beans, tomatoes, and fruit. I ate like a Bactrian camel (that’s the one with two humps for storing fat, just so we’re clear) each morning, and I loved every minute of it.
2. (and your people who like to climb narrow stairways so they can marvel at how narrow they are
3. I, of course, refused to go inside, but the best I could tell was that the whole establishment was a shameless profiteering abomination that Erik the Red would have been happy to loot and subsequently raze
4. read: insane
5. Unluckily, the UK has adapted to this aversion – each major city has approximately 12 shopping districts, the nearest one never more than 2 miles away, no matter where you are.
6. Again, some of that may have been the whisky.
7. It doesn’t usually do much to change my final conclusion, but at least it reduces my (physical) headache count for the day.

Act 2: Wherein driving in England triggers a catharsis rivaled only by years of aggressive psychotherapy

London out of the way, we can begin to relive the adventure that was the rest of our 2-week journey. Neither of us would have been content staying solely in the city for that long, even though we surely could have found something new to do each day. Oh, no – we flew across an ocean, and we were going to make the most of it. No pre-packaged group tours for us, either – we’d do it ourselves or die trying. Surprising how close we came to accomplishing both.

The heart of our trip began with us heading to Heathrow to pick up our rental – “Pick any car you want,” the clerk told us while handing us a key that would, of course, only unlock one particular model. I’ve since come to see this exercise as a sort of pre-initiation into the British road system. Confusion, frustration, and a profound sense of resigned amusement quickly become your closest companions when you venture off the beaten path in the UK (and sometimes when you’re on it); the sooner you realize this, the more fun you’ll have staring into the abyss.

We ended up with a champagne-colored diesel Vauxhall Astra¹, which we soon discovered to be possessed. It accelerated and decelerated on a whim, and its windshield wiper motor was apparently attached to some sort of rudimentary AI that determined the wipers’ speed based on calculations of land speed and planetary alignment.

A took the first turn driving in order to give me the chance to practice my hobby of criticizing things in which I have little to no firsthand experience and so that I would have ample opportunity to get acquainted with the fold-out road map of the UK which was to be our trip’s main navigational tool.

This brings me to the first, and perhaps only, piece of practical advice I have for anyone planning a trip to the UK: if you have a choice between shelling out an extra $60 to download UK maps to the GPS you already own and sticking with the colorful yet tiny print of the map your travel agent gives you…

Buy the GPS maps.

Few things are as initially entertaining yet ultimately time-wasting and maddening as realizing that there’s a good 5-10-mile East-West discrepancy between where that tiny road identified only by a capital letter and 3 or 4 digits stops and picks up again on your worthless, worthless map. Don’t get me wrong; it’ll eventually get you from A to B; you just have to be willing to go through M, Q, and Z on your way there (and there aren’t any gas stations in Z, so be careful).

My first initially pleasant surprise from the road trip portion of our vacation was that, on England’s equivalent of American interstates (the M and larger A routes), you don’t have to worry about getting off an exit and driving 2 miles in a random direction hoping to spot a gas station. Service stations are clearly marked², and they’re one-stop shops – you’ve got gas, food options, an arcade, and dirty magazines all in one mini-mall arrangement.

My excitement at this dropped off sometime around the point I realized that the service stops were engaged in a polite British form of price gouging, but I suppose it’s just a typical convenience tax. Yay capitalism, etc.

After our first pit stop (our destination was ~4 hours from London, and we started with somewhere between 1/8 and 1/4 tank of gas), I took over driving duties and was soon lulled into complacency by the relative ease of M-route driving. Sure, you’re on the wrong side of the car and road, but we had an automatic transmission, and it only takes a few near-brushes with death to learn how to recalibrate your sense of being centered in your lane. As long as you’re on a main road, it’s mostly a straight shot – not a lot of confusing foreign traffic law to clutter up your experience.

Rolling into your first small town – after dark – is a different experience altogether. Always on the lookout for your next turn, you’ll be amazed at how many locals appear to think they’re still on M1 – driving 50 in a 35, passing you on whichever side they choose with 6 inches of lateral room to spare³, coming from directions you didn’t know existed, all while you try to navigate a clockwise-turning roundabout that everyone’s warned you about but no one’s explained⁴.

Act 3: In which we glimpse the very face of evil, though fleetingly, betwixt an end-aisle display and checkout counter

Eventually, we ended up at our bed & breakfast just outside of York. We turned out to be the only guests of a pleasant elderly couple genuinely concerned for our wellbeing, as we’d kept them up past 10 waiting for our arrival⁵. After unloading the mobile version of our lives into one of their upstairs bedrooms, we asked them if there happened to be any restaurants or grocery stores nearby so we could grab some dinner and stock up for the next day. They gave directions to a Tesco and a separate shopping area that supposedly had several restaurants to choose from, and we headed back out.

20-30 minutes later, we were lost; finding ourselves completely unable to locate this mythical gustatory oasis, we switched directions and headed back to where Tesco was supposed to be. We did manage to find it, as Tescos are hard to miss, being the monolithic, simultaneously sterile and inviting Wal-Marts of their culture. We spotted a restaurant nearby, though, so before grocery shopping, we decided to stop by, on the off-chance they were still serving food.

Miraculously, the kitchen at Frankie & Benny’s was open until 11, and they seemed to be grateful for the business, as we were the only ones in the New York-style Italian restaurant that late. As we ate our pasta and listened to the overbearingly loud 1950′s American rock & roll that I spent the better part of my formative years being force-fed, I wondered how a restaurant so clearly tailored to the local demographic of York, England, could possibly be lacking customers on a Wednesday night; but I quickly stifled my overactive analytical side. This was, after all, the only place in England we had been able to get a hot meal after 7 PM, and we had just come from the largest city in the country, so who cares if they still operate under the mistaken assumption that Big Girls Don’t Cry? Not me.

Having had our fill of traditional British marinara sauce and Caesar dressing, we headed over to Tesco in an attempt to defray future meal costs by gathering a cache of snack food. Somewhere among the aisles of Thai Chicken, Ham and Mustard, and Roast Beef-flavored potato chips, bags of currants, and Unsalted Roasted Monkey Nuts⁶, I made a crucial discovery: snack food is different in England. Eventually, I think we settled on a potato chip sampler bag⁷, some peanut butter bars, peanuts, raisins, and a couple bags of trail mix that ended up tasting like gym socks with just a touch of vinegar.

All that to say this: remember how I compared Tesco to Wal-Mart – what was it – two paragraphs ago? Well, Tesco’s similar to Wal-Mart, alright – you’ve got your housekeeping supplies, office supplies, appliances, food, wine in which to drown your failures, etc. – it’s just that, when you get back up to the front of the store after satisfying all your material cravings, you realize that Tesco wants a tentacle (how slick they are, dripping with the mana of freshly-consumed souls) in far more than your mere earthly existence.

You see, Tesco doesn’t just sell things that you can touch. Oh, no. At Tesco you can buy a microwave, a box of cereal, a ruler, cell phone service, Internet access, car insurance, home insurance, and life insurance, all with the smiling face of a satisfied minion under the store’s brand name just to let you know that everything will be OK. Tesco is England’s real-life experiment in Orwellian consumerism, and it wants to know why you’ve been shopping somewhere else.

Our senses of autonomy adequately chilled (and our back seat filled with the spoils of a free-market smorgasbord), we headed back to our B&B for a fitful sleep.

1. I was hoping for at least a Citroen, but instead we ended up with a company that appears to be some sort of Peugeot rip-off…OK; I’ll stop pretending I know anything about European cars now.
2. I think the distribution works out to roughly every fifth “Don’t drive tired” sign. We’ll get to that problem eventually over here – we just have to work on drinking, texting, and flossing while driving first.
3. Granted, that’s not entirely their fault, as roads in the UK are typically only physically wide enough for 1.5 British cars – which works out to roughly .75 American cars, .47 SUVs, or -2i Hummers
4. I once heard them described by someone in terms rivaling the Homerian depiction of Charybdis in the Strait of Messina. They’re, um, not quite that bad; just don’t stay in the right lane if you want to take the next exit, and you’ll be mostly fine. Mostly.
5. Perhaps I’ll pontificate on the virtues of getting a local SIM card for your already unlocked cell phone later.
6. No, I’m not joking. That’s an actual product. You at least have to give the peanut marketing departments over there marks for creativity.
7. Yes, all three of the flavors I just mentioned – tune in next time for my review of the effectiveness of Tums and the tastebud-neutralizing properties of silicone desiccant packets

I realize that I was mid-series with the whole “how to plan a wedding” thing – and, if you so desire, I can still offer many helpful tips, including how to fulfill your cake designer’s thinly veiled requests for psychotherapy and how to avoid having an open wound on your ring finger during the ceremony. The series as a whole felt uninspired, though, apart from the several brief anecdotes I can provide on the theme, and I have larger and more recent stories to tell.

I use the term “recent” loosely, as the events I’m about to relate took place roughly 5 months ago as of this writing, but oh well. A 600-mile move and a semester of grad school got in the way of my art (and provided me with more source material, should I ever get around to recording it). Without further ado, then, here is the beginning of married life as I know it.

Note to new readers: I actually like England, despite what I’m about to say. You’ll just have to trust me that what appear to be relentless mockery and unfounded criticism are really just the ways I show love.

The thing A and I did most right in the whole trip organization process was to book a flight out of the country the next afternoon. It took us a good 4 hours just to leave town after the reception, and after that we had to drive an hour to the nearest airport with more than 5 gates, so I’d prefer not to imagine having to wake up for anything resembling a morning flight. 3 o’clock worked just fine.

Every coin has two sides, though, and the flip side to this was that a Trans-Atlantic flight that left at 3 PM was scheduled to put us on the ground around 7 AM local time – perfect if we had been well-rested, but that’s just not going to happen on a full Airbus without the aid of

1. a first-class ticket, or
2. copious amounts of ganja prescription medication,

both of which would have produced hangovers too brutal for a full day of sightseeing and were out of our budget, which we had already blown on rooms at Best Westerns and an economy-size rental car¹ . Instead, we would be forced to remain mostly awake while perhaps the only unsatisfied homosexual flight attendant I’ve ever met roamed the aisles calling out “Coffee…tea…SkyMiles²…” in the angriest monotone I’ve had the impish pleasure of encountering in recent memory.

Act 2: If I have to be a tourist, at least I get to be miserable doing it

Disclaimer: London is, of course, a city of great architectural and cultural beauty, full of vibrance, diversity, and sophistication. I just don’t always experience these things in the way others do, that’s all.

Remember when I said we were supposed to land at 7? Well, we got there about 1/2 hour early. Good, right? More time to explore the city and all, right? Yeah; that’s exactly why it’s bad. Imagine having the day I’m about to describe after about 3-4 hours of fitful, uncomfortable sleep.

After deplaning, getting through customs (a relatively quick, surprisingly non-invasive process), and exiting the terminal proper, we were presented with our first problem of the day. Being strangely more paranoid than I have been on prior overseas trips about ATM card-skimmers and the like, we had brought with us an amount of hard cash that was just slightly too large to be advisable. It all happened to be in our home currency, though, which wasn’t going to help us get on the train out of Heathrow. As is my custom, I abandoned my principles at the first sign of difficulty and headed for the nearest ATM, where I withdrew £50.

This turned out to be just enough money to get us train tickets into London and 2 Oyster cards (London’s transit system debit card), each with one fare. We found out we wouldn’t be needing the Oyster cards as quickly as we had imagined, though, since the Victoria Station Tube stop was closed for emergency service – several good signs all rolled up into one. This meant that we’d be taking our 2 weeks’ worth of luggage and walking until we found the next station. In the rain³.

The hike did give us a chance to change some of our nigh worthless American dollars into somewhat snootier British pounds along the way; what it didn’t provide us with is breakfast…or brunch…or whatever meal we were on by then. We noticed this when A, with little warning, added dizziness, nausea, and a headache to the list of baggage she was toting. We found the nearest Starbucks and huddled with our bags under an outside umbrella and feasted on a muffin and coffee. At least, that’s what she did; I, being the somewhat more venturous half of the couple, decided to go across the street to get a more traditional English breakfast. I returned 10 minutes later, slightly confused by the menu choices and the general lack of English spoken by the eatery’s employees, carrying a plate of hash browns, baked beans, and grilled tomato quarters which I had a somewhat incomplete recollection of ordering.

A fraction of our stomachs full, we were sufficiently equipped to board the Tube and finish the trek to our hotel.

Actually, that’s an oversimplification of the ensuing process. With the Victoria Station stop closed, getting from St. James’ Park to Marble Arch is a two-transfer, three-line ordeal. Add in the facts that the London Underground is a labyrinthine system of staircases⁴ and tunnels, only some of which you get to ride a train through, and that we had managed to hit the system right around the second peak of morning rush hour, and you have a recipe for a fun-filled Monday morning.

We had landed in London 1/2 hour early, but by the time we finally got to our smallish yet surprisingly well-appointed Best Western, we were roughly 2 hours behind schedule. Our schedule, at least – we were, of course, still several hours early for check-in, so all freshening up was done in the lobby bathrooms before we stored our bags in the lobby’s luggage room and headed out for a full day on the town.

Act 3: Wherein fatigue-induced amnesia distorts my recollections of the day

Our first stop was Westminster Abbey, which I hadn’t ponied up the entrance fee to actually see the inside of on any of my prior visits to London. You’d think from the name that it was a church, and you’d be partially right if you had taken into account that, historically, church and state have been even closer pals in England than they have been in America. I’m sure if one looks close enough, there’s something spiritual about the place, even if the only ones being worshiped are the military, literary, and scientific heroes (who aren’t all British, mind you) whose headstones/monuments provide the bulk of the Abbey’s interior decorations. The art and architecture are all very inspiring, of course; I’m just not sure exactly what they’re supposed to inspire. They’ve worked wonders for the tourism industry, at least; it’s difficult to even move inside the Abbey.

Nothing ominous or warlike about this, noo...

After our tour of the Church of War⁵, we headed to a quaint little bistro for lunch. The Churchill Cafe is a charming taste of London’s tourist district – a loud, inattentive staff who speak poor English jostle customers out of their way, insist there’s no tap water to be found in the entire restaurant, and serve up worse sandwiches than you can buy for less money at Tesco. It’s everything I love about the city summarized into a 45-minute crash course of pure frustration.

Our appetites somewhat sated, we headed back out on our hike, roaming around Buckingham Palace, St. James’s Park, and heading back toward the National Portrait Gallery so A could get her fix of what might be the dullest branch of fine art ever invented. At least entry was free. Before we roamed the museum halls, we found a bench to give our feet a rest while we planned the rest of our evening. Rather, she planned the rest of our evening – as soon as my brain realized it didn’t have to focus on keeping my body upright, it shut down the rest of its faculties, and I began to lose consciousness. I still carried on a conversation, but that’s only because I’m well-practiced at putting very little thought into what comes out of my mouth. At that point, I was probably mumbling gibberish about elephants on trapezes while she extemporized on the benefits of touring Picadilly Circus. Eventually, I woke up enough to stand up and keep walking, but I’m honestly not sure how long we were there.

I also have very vague recollections of what happened the rest of that day. We walked through a park in a residential area as night fell, but after that…well, I could still be dreaming, for all I know.

1. Not to wish misfortune on anyone (far be it from me), but I’m still waiting for the whole “worldwide economic crisis” thing to hit England. 1.4:1 is nowhere near low enough an exchange rate for them to complain about.
2. I think he meant “SkyMiles applications”, but he was apparently both disgruntled and lazy
3. although, did I really have to mention that part? You already knew we were in London.
4. apparently, escalators are for fatties, which is fine with me until I have to carry two unwieldy 50-lb. harbingers of lumbar pain and a backpack or two while climbing
5. OK, so that’s a little unfair – unfair to the rest of England’s churches and cathedrals, which are all trying their best to be monuments to the Empire’s military success but have only managed to procure the bodies of lesser heroes to adorn their transepts. Maybe I should just call Westminster “the largest Church of War” instead of “the Church of War”.

To be sure, there is much to be said, and updates are forthcoming. The forth, however, will be awhile in coming. Someday I might finish my “how to plan a wedding” instructional series, but I’ll definitely have things to say about honeymooning in England and moving into an apartment 2 states away that we had only seen via one picture on the Internet and a realtor’s word of mouth.

I’ll say those things directly (read: Classes start in a week, and I’ll be lucky if I remember my honeymoon at all by the time I have enough free time to write about it.). Stay tuned—or, more realistically, go on with your life and check back every c0uple weeks; I don’t intend to perpetually neglect my writing.

However, I do want to take out a bit of time here and there to record at least part of the insanity of this summer for posterity and possible future elaboration. In that spirit, what follows is the first part of a series I began a month or two ago. Like I said, it’s still oversimplified at this point, but I had to get something up here.

Wedding planning is more complicated than you may think…at least, it is if you’re a male and haven’t been vetting your bridal party since elementary school. Since I’m having to go through it, though, I figured I’d be helpful and try to give you as complete an overview as possible of the entire process so you’ll know just what to expect. You might not do everything in the same chronological order as listed, but you’ll have to do all of it at one point or another, so pay attention¹.

As I’m currently in the thick of all this myself, I don’t have an overabundance of time to sit down and write about it, possible therapeutic benefits of such a practice aside. Hence, many of my descriptions will be insufficient, and my updates might be few and far between. Um…sorry?

The proposal

The official start of the wedding process is typically left up to the male, the first in an interminable series of tests of his patience and resolve. He is expected to procure some sort of ring-like apparatus and devise a completely original yet still traditionally romantic way of presenting it.

The Halo 3 proposal should be reserved for…unique circumstances, so I opted for something slightly more boring—a home-cooked dinner followed by a surprise around dessert time. If going this route, I suggest following my lead and serving at least one full bottle of wine with the meal, reserving most of it for the one doing the proposing. This will cut down on the nerve factor and, if done right, will give you the swimmy-eyed look you’re going for with little to none of the pesky emotional investment.

The rings

Photo by pennydogaccessories

Mentioned in passing in the previous section, the rings really are an important part of the whole affair, symbolizing as they do the unbroken nature of the marital bond, eternal love, and I’m sure several other intellect-withering clichés that aren’t in use in my part of the country.

For the proposal itself, any placeholder ring will suffice, with preference going to a Cracker Jack box toy or, perhaps better, a ring decorated with a skull and crossbones—the special mixture of delight and repulsion you’ll get from the latter will be worth the trip to Hot Topic or wherever you managed to actually find a ring like that.

Some girls will want to go ring shopping with you before you’ve even hinted at proposal. These girls are, for the most part, to be avoided. Men reserve their right to buy their wives completely inappropriate gifts, and if that right is usurped before the marriage even begins, who knows what will be next on the chopping block?

Finalizing her ring setting and stone can be a journey unto itself, as any respectable jeweler will have at least one 600-page catalog for her to look through. Somewhere midway through this process, you might start to think, “Won’t I need a ring too?” and you might consider mentioning this thought to the jeweler.

Don’t bother. Men have approximately five viable design choices, and they’re not all that distinct; you might as well get the jeweler to bring them out in their accompanying boxes and play Five-ring Monte—it’s as discerning a decision-making tactic as any in this situation. Of course, you’re welcome to go with the two-tone yellow and white gold Celtic band that looks like it was forged in an Oakland recycling plant, but if you do, at least send me a picture.

The flowers

Flowers? But…aren’t flowers in church just for funerals and Christmas? Apparently not.

Gladiolus, Hydrangea, Peony, Lily, Iris…I recommend saying “yes” frequently during this part of  the planning.

Problems with your florist? I feel for you, but I can’t help you. Short of sneaking into the florist’s bedroom and ensuring they wake up next to a pair of oversized garden shears, there’s not a lot the man can do in this situation, aesthetically ill-equipped as we are wont to be. I don’t even have the vocabulary to get involved. Make sure my boutonniere doesn’t

1. look like it was wrapped by Egyptian embalmers, or
2. look like a garden path shrub

and we’ll be fine. Turns out that’s enough of a request anyway. Seriously, look at some of the pictures out there².

The dress

the Prina Tornai...also known as the "Beetlejuice dress"

Ah, the dress. Surrounded by mystique, superstition, and reverence, having the proper wedding dress is of paramount importance to your wedding day and, by extension, the overall success of your marriage. Don’t look at the price tag³.

Surprisingly, this has been probably the least complicated part of my wedding planning process to date, ranking well below reception tablecloth fabric in difficulty. It involved one afternoon of my fiancée and her mother driving 1/2 hour to a nearby city posing as a metropolis and looking at a few boutiques until she found just what she wanted. Boom, done. Just like that. Pray you’re as lucky.

The tuxes

With her appropriately dressed, chances are you’ll be expected to show up in something other than a t-shirt and jeans. You may have designs on that classy number you saw in Dumb and Dumber all those years ago, but it turns out those can be really hard to find, and you’ll want to conserve the creative energy it would take to arrange that for pulling pranks at the reception anyway.

You don’t get to go dress shopping with her (and what a shame that is), but you’d better take her tux shopping. You want something that you like that also looks good on you; she wants something that looks good on everyone who might possibly be wearing one, from your fathers all the way down to the ringbearer. How considerate of her—but let’s look at it this way:  if you were planning the wedding…there wouldn’t be a wedding. So there’s that.

Next time on “how to sabotage—err, plan a wedding”…

• picking your wedding party
• catering
• the cake
• the venue
• the reception venue
• the reception decorations
• and much, much⁴ more…

1. I’ll be doing this from the perspective of the male in the equation, both for my relevant experience and because there’s just not enough useful advice for us out there (blast you, Knot).
2. but not all of them; you’ll go blind far before you finish
3. Actually, I didn’t go on the dress shopping trip for a couple different reasons, so I don’t know whether they even have tags, or whether they’re just on display like the steaks at a fancy restaurant—if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.
4. too much?

I wish I could say I blame you. As some of you may know (and the rest of you are about to find out), I’m currently planning a wedding—more on that later, I’m sure. It’s taking up a good bit of my writing time, so updates might occasionally get sparse…except on the honeymoon, when I plan to update twice a day. That is what one does on one’s honeymoon, right? Update? Giggity.

Anyway, I wanted to let everyone know about the shiny new e-mail subscription feature I’m offering to loyal fans and curious Internet voyeurs alike—that descriptively-named link over there on the left should take you to a straightforward page where you will enter your e-mail address, and helpful little blog gnomes will then update you if I ever write anything again. Should something go wrong with my brilliant plan, though, you’ll only know by carefully scouring the site for updates once in awhile, so don’t forget it’s here.

Sound good? Good; glad we’re on the same page about all this.

Oh, and for those too lazy to look left, here’s the link again.

Anyone who’s ever listened to Coast to Coast AM immediately recognizes the discontinuity in that last sentence. Art Belle’s long-running call-in show is a brilliant collection of the world’s most entertaining people made all the more amazing by the gravity with which it presents itself. It’s insomnia, hallucination, and paranoid schizophrenia distilled into several hours of the best radio you’ll ever hear.

If you listened to the show back when Art was actually hosting it, you got a real treat—hearing his thinly veiled derisive replies and follow-up questions to the time-travelers, witches, and space aliens who called in to deliver their prophecies and galactic histories to all who would listen. He eventually got enough and retired to his compound somewhere in the desert, going off the grid only to avoid detection by the kind of people who hack into utility company mainframes so they can find the UFO that’s secretly powering the city. He comes back to host the show every now and then, presumably when he feels his life is lacking sufficient crazy.

All that to say that the inspiration for this story came while we were driving along the interstate and listening to the most refined-sounding British woman imaginable talk about light, third eyes,  connections to the spirit world, and how unicorns can cure autism with the concentrated light sprialling out of their heads. It’s a good thing I wasn’t driving; we definitely would have hit something during one of my fits of uncontrollable laughter or gasps of epiphany.

After a particularly rousing segment², the show broke for commercials, which are always an important part of the theatrics. Somewhere in the middle of their standard ads for the razor that never goes dull and the short-wave radio that runs on urine³, they threw in what’s apparently the flavor of the week nowadays—a build-your-own crisis garden kit.

Knowing I’d be likely to forget this wonderful tidbit the next day, I texted myself a reminder: “Note to self: check out SurvivalSeedBank.com.” Yes, they have a website. Yes, it is thoroughly precious.

Sales tip #1: Open with a horror story.

Having grown up listening to my dad’s brand of…emphatic talk radio, I thought I’d heard most of the pitches: There’s going to be one world government, they’re going to take away your guns, they’re going to separate families to break people’s spirits, and then the end will come. There was fear of massive inflation, government spying, and the proliferation of rap music⁴. What I don’t remember is anyone suggesting that people plant vegetables.

This is tricky ground for me, as it forces me to mock people for doing something that I actually agree with on its face: more people should definitely be growing their own food, we should be buying locally grown fruits and vegetables as much as possible, and people need to learn to be far more familiar with the earth and how the general farming process works…but for entirely different reasons than we’ve got here.

From what I gather, the basic idea is that our entire global economy will fall apart (the best-laid plans, etc., etc.), utter chaos will ensue, and there will be no food on any store shelves anywhere. When that time comes, you’re going to want seeds. Seeds that apparently produce food instantly at whatever time of year this “crisis” hits, as the site doesn’t appear to mention stockpiling food⁵ to eat until your seeds actually sprout.

The good news is that these aren’t hybrid seeds and aren’t genetically modified in any way to die after one year of producing plants. I wasn’t aware that was biologically possible, but I’ll take their word for it; they seem like trustworthy folks. That still doesn’t help me eat the day I find out my local grocery store is completely empty (or even those next few weeks, which I hear are crucial when it comes to staving off starvation), but I thought I’d throw it in there since it seemed like such a positive aspect of the product on offer here.

OK, so plants don’t necessarily grow as fast as I’d like to eat them. Is that my only problem? Well, yes, assuming I also have an acre of fertile land to devote to gardening, have a ready supply of water, and am not completely inept at anything that involves actual manual labor. This is where the rabbit hole of inconsistency splits off into several snake tunnels, each of which ends in a hungry rattlesnake with a strange bitterness toward Peter Cottontail stories.

Sales tip #2: When identifying your market, shoot first, ask questions later.

First, let’s explore the types of people this highly targeted marketing campaign is likely to reach and where they’re likely to live. Now, keep in mind that these are, by and large, unsubstantiated, mostly cruel stereotypes…but I’ve built a great faith in my ability to accurately stereotype people groups, so we shouldn’t have a problem here. Heck, if those gun-toting redneck inbreeds listening to the radio can do it⁶, I should be able to do it far better. I mean, I have a liberal arts degree.

The way I see it, your average talk listener radio falls into one of four main categories:

1. Standard familial basement-dweller living off the pity and Twinkies of his mother. Yes, these are the ones who write the blogs.
2. Trailer park resident.
3. Bomb shelter owner.
4. John the Baptist-style desert hermit.

Ask yourself, if you will, who out of the previous four people groups might have access to even 3 square meters of tractable land, proximity to a water reservoir (enough for both drinking and watering) should the “grid” self-destruct, and an inkling of how to nurture life in even its most primitive forms. Oh yeah, and how many of them know how to go about eating a vegetable that hasn’t been pre-steamed, chopped, and injected into a sausage casing?

OK, you got me on one count – the desert hermits have drilled their own wells, so they’re good for at least one of those…and I suppose their guard dogs have taught them a thing or two about keeping things alive⁷.

Sales tip #3: Grammatical errors make you look like an Avurage Joe.

That should probably be enough to poke a few holes in their business plan, but let me add one more thing before I go. This happens to be my favorite quote from the entire website:

Indestructible Survival Seed Bank Can Be Buried To Avoid Confiscation.

Yes, it’s printed like that, all caps and everything. It’s A Tactic That Conservatives With A Weak Background In Formal Writing Use To Look Important. Not only that, it brings to light just one more problem. Can you guess what it might be?

It’s OK, I’ll wait.

Got it?

That’s right—if the government (or your local mob, or the “belligerant lower class”⁸) comes for your food and all your means with which to make food, and you bury your seeds—great, you’ve got seeds, but what are you going to do when they come for the lush acre of vegetarian paradise you’ve got in your back yard 3 months later?

You shoot them with the shotgun you buried next to the seeds, of course. That’ll teach ‘em.

Ed. note: For a fun (though most likely lethal) drinking game, do a Google search for “survival seed bank” and take a shot every time you see the word “gun” or “firearm” mentioned in the same breath as this product.

1. Sweet heavens; I knew there was a website—I didn’t know the website was worthy of its own essay.
2. Who am I kidding? Just about every segment is amazing.
3. …in case you’re without power, and your arms are blown off in a bombing, leaving you unable to hand-crank a radio to get your militia updates
4. That last one’s come true. God help us all; they’ve come for our youth, and we’ve said nothing, because our youth wouldn’t pay attention anyway.
5. Another talk-radio staple; I’m really surprised they dropped the ball for their giant bag o’ rice manufacturer tie-in here.
6. See?
7. …though I can only assume they’ll be crestfallen when they can’t teach their eggplants to respond to German attack commands.
8. The site’s term for “poor people”

If the title wasn’t enough to warn you, you might not want to read this if you haven’t seen the movie…then again, you might; who am I to judge your reading preferences?

I finally got around to seeing Watchmen the other night. Until then, I had carefully maintained a fog of ignorance about the movie—its plot, its characters, its sources, critics’ opinions, everything I could reasonably avoid. All I knew was that the story was set in America during an alternate-timeline version of the 1980’s where normal people dressed up as superheroes, and only one person actually had any real powers—and that turned out to be wrong anyway, so I think I did pretty well with keeping myself in the dark.

The whole “no one actually has powers” thing gets shot down in the very first scene, which features walls being destroyed by fists, counters by heads, and plate glass by a human body flung by another human. The audience is never told exactly how the antiheroes became superhumanly strong and/or fast; it’s just left as a given while being at least implicitly denied by the script, a device that becomes a sort of motif throughout the rest of the more than 160 minutes of the film.

First things first…

The script is clumsy; there’s no two ways about it. Supposedly much of it was lifted directly from the comic, which offers little explanation for lines like “…[the city] screams like an abattoir full of retarded children”, but at least gives the director and screenwriters an (albeit flimsy) excuse for the stilted, staccato dialogue that pops up so often.

With Watchmen, Zack Snyder has taken several steps away from stylizing  his source material’s most graphic moments, choosing instead an unflinchingly realistic take on much of the violence that provides both the backdrop and the character development in the story. The film is brutal and unapologetic; one wonders if Snyder’s artistic vision would have forced Watchmen into an NC-17 rating if the movie’s would-be rapist had been successful.

I’ll admit that I had been hopeful about the movie and that my hope had begun to flag an hour or so into the story, about the time a sex scene climaxed with the girl moaning sensually, “Your fingers taste like I’m licking a battery.”

As the evening wore on, though, the awkward gestures of a story clearly too big for its presentation began to fade into the background, and its central themes came into sharper relief.

“If God did not exist…”

Dr. Manhattan, the story’s only true “superhero”, is your standard physicist transformed by a freak accident into an indestructible being capable of manipulating the world around him at will, able to see the entirety of his personal timeline at once.

Being American, though, and of a demure disposition, he allows the government to manipulate him into winning the Vietnam War for the US and is thenceforth hailed as a god, America revering him, the rest of the world in turn fearing America out of respect for the damage an angry Dr. Manhattan could inflict on them.

He’s mostly a decent guy, though, and concurrently with the rest of the action in the film, he’s working on a way to provide the world with a limitless source of free energy, aided greatly by his powers.

As he becomes more familiar with those powers, though, human pursuits seem ever more meaningless, Earth an unfriendly place, his mutual link to humanity fading. Eventually the film’s villain, playing on his increasingly fragile psyche, induces Dr. Manhattan to abandon Earth altogether.

I’m reminded of Franco Ferrucci’s The Life of God (as Told by Himself), in which a God as amazed and amused with his own power as any of us in his position would be  journeys around the earth, lonely, and creates man to have a companion, only to have his humility and benevolence manipulated by his creations, who eventually convince him that leaving and making a fresh start of it is his best option.

There’s one key difference, though—the God of Watchmen is man-made, which may perhaps be one of the easier ways to understand the Christian doctrine of Jesus being “fully God and fully human”. This God, far from omniscient, knows only his own past and future—his prescience of others’ timelines exists only inasmuch as they relate to his own.

Poetry and Pragmatism

In the end, the film’s “villain”, Ozymandias (whose namesake is an ancient king in a Shelley poem of the same name), succeeds in engineering a planet-wide catastrophe in God’s name, causing the world’s population to set aside their national differences and unite their efforts in the interest of defeating a new common enemy.

This plan is worthy of in-depth exploration in its own right, raising as it does the inherent problems involved in the pragmatic calculus that’s been so much the focus of popular culture recently.

Ozymandias is cast as a villain, the consummate Judas to Dr. Manhattan’s gray area-dwelling Jesus. Manhattan’s plan to bring lasting peace through abundance is thwarted by Ozymandias’ brand of peace, which is made to seem as effective as it is unpalatable to the modern conscience.

We aren’t given a chance to see if the free energy promised by Manhattan’s optimistic plan would have solved the world’s problems or if nations would have found something else to divide them, but we are told in no uncertain terms that the mutual fear and hatred of a common enemy has brought the entire population together for as long as they can be convinced that God is out there, waiting to strike again.

There are several problems with that peace, of course, the first (and perhaps most relevant, given our recent political climate) being that it was attained through an act of extreme violence in which thousands of lives were snuffed out in a matter of minutes. Revulsion at this is almost immediate, but it begs the question, “How different is destroying several cities in the name of stopping global war from torturing and/or killing a detainee in the name of stopping a terrorist bombing?”

The second concern with this brand of peace, one to which the movie chooses a more characteristically heavy-handed approach, is the fact that it’s manufactured. The only Watchman unencumbered by moral uncertitude, Rorschach (yes, it’s cute that the ink blots on his mask can be perceived in different ways, but his own perception of the world is clear as can be…very cute), is also the only one who objects to keeping the origin of this newfound peace a secret in the interest of its continuance. As such, God is forced to silence him.

And so the movie closes—God leaves, and the two bookends to the story are the murders of the two ends of the Watchmen’s moral spectrum—The Comedian, whose selfishness is flaunted constantly; and Rorschach, whose “heroism” began and ended in the most unselfish ways possible. Ozymandias has created a costly peace, one whose suffering he claims to participate in, and the role of the Watchmen is ambiguous in a new way.

Inconclusion

Certainly, there’s more to discuss. I haven’t touched on civil rights, the feminist movement, conservatism (OK, maybe I did a little on that note), or vigilantism, all themes directly or indirectly questioned by Watchmen. I’ve opted instead to talk about the themes that resounded with me, and I’ll end with the theme that resounded to the script’s writer (may he be hoisted by his own, etc, etc):

The movie is all about moral certitude and the various costs of moral certitude…[people need to] look past their own egos, their own fears, and see what’s truly positive — what’s going to benefit the world and the people around them, and not exclusively themselves.”
-Screenwriter David Hayter quoted in the Los Angeles Times

Interestingly, the only two characters in the movie who seem burdened with such certitude are the two who fail to survive.  The world is not a joyful place for the others, but they remain alive, the only evidence of their inferiority to an audience that has spent the past 2 hours and 40 minutes being schooled on the pitfalls of pragmatism being our own socialized internal objection to their methodology.

- An acquaintance, on hearing I’d be in Chicago for the weekend

My girlfriend’s spring break is this week, so we decided that, in grateful recognition of the world outside Tennessee, we’d take a mini-vacation. Our choice of Chicago, partly influenced by my wanting to visit some close friends I hadn’t seen in a couple years, was met with full-throated support from all those important to us around here.

After thorough research of our travel options (having basically decided on going less than a week before we were to leave), we settled on driving the 600+ miles from here to there, our—or at least my—desire to save money outweighing our desire for convenience.

We knew rain had been forecast in Chicago for the weekend; what we didn’t know was that the rain would spread a couple hours southeast of the city. We found this out when, roughly 7 hours into the trip, the heavens opened and poured forth their blessing upon us in truly extravagant fashion. As we got closer to the city, the rain let up a bit, settling into a mist as we slowed to a stop in front of my friends’ apartment.

Maybe it’s just because the show was set in Chicago, or maybe it’s more that, as a general rule, most of my memories of human interaction during my formative years have been replaced by more comforting and easily parsed scenarios from popular television, but I think Chicago’s apartment buildings will always remind me of Family Matters. The three-story stone-and-brick style conjures an influx of images of Carl, Harriet, Steve, and his nerd-fantasy alter ego Stephan, all warm reminders of a simpler time that never really existed for any of us.

All that to say that I was already positively predisposed toward the building in which my friends run their modern mini-commune—I immediately fell in love with the hardwood floors, high ceilings, spacious floor plan, leaky skylights, and kitchen filled with booze that was to be our home for the next few days.

The next day was Sunday, and after sleeping in and having a late brunch at a great local grill, three of us headed to the Art Institute of Chicago for their Munch exhibit and whatever else we could fit into the few hours we had before the museum closed.

As usual, the museum atmosphere kept me intrigued for roughly an hour, hour and a half—long enough to appreciate Munch (or at least the pieces of his that are actually part of the exhibit) and discover Yousuf Karsh and Peter Blume, but not long enough for the museum to close. The rest of my time was spent wandering idly, waiting for the museum to close and send us back into the frigid rain outside, which it eventually did.

We headed back to the apartment for some fantastic local pizza then proceeded to plan out the next day. A trip to the Chicago Transit Authority’s website proved ominously prescient of our experience with the local subway system—redundant fare card names, misleading links, generally poor organization. Eventually we settled on a location we felt likely to carry 1-day passes, watched a movie, and headed to bed.

Monday morning, the only day of our trip that the weather forecast offered us any glimmer of hope for unmolested sightseeing, dawned gray, but not rainy. After stopping at a local…financial establishment to get our subway fare cards, we set off on our walking tour of downtown. Our intention was to take in the sights, seeing as many local attractions and famous buildings as possible along the way, but the damp 40-degree weather and our morning coffee quickly turned that into a diligent search for Chicago’s nicest public restrooms. In order to facilitate any needs in that area you may have, I present you with some of our most prestigious findings:

1. The Merchandise Mart
2. Sears* Tower
3. Chicago Cultural Center

Don’t say I never helped you.

Somewhere along the way, the cold started getting to my hands – I had brought gloves, but they were the large polyester kind, designed more for operating a snow shovel than a camera, so I had been braving frostbite with one hand in the interest of artistic fulfillment. In the interest of keeping my extremities intact, we began to look for a clothing store, something by no means in short supply in downtown Chicago.

What were, however, in short supply in downtown Chicago at the end of winter were gloves. T.J. Maxx—no. Filene’s Basement (whatever that is; it was attached to T.J. Maxx)—no. Macy’s (for crying out loud)—no. Old Navy—not a chance; not content to simply be out of gloves, they had embraced their lack of supply and fully geared up for summer, offering a surreal display of flip-flops and brightly-colored shorts to the bejacketed, shivering public.

Half of the clothing stores, places whose sole business is to supply people with items that will cover their bodies and protect them from both the elements and breaches of primitive notions of morality, suggested a drugstore as the only place that might have gloves. A drugstore, whose sole business is to—well, in Chicago, they sell liquor, but that’s another story. This seemed, to me, a case of an industry being in poor touch with its consumers, but what do I know? All those 60% off sales must mean they’re doing something right—I mean, they have to have some extra cash around to be letting stuff go at such a discount.

After giving up on the glove search, we resumed our tour, wandering around a building that we thought was next to an attraction in our guide book, only to discover after 20 minutes or so that the building we were in was in fact one of the attractions we were looking for, just one that the book had placed several blocks away. No, Frommer’s—thank you.

After a few more hours of this and a couple more misplaced buildings, just when the lactic acid content of my legs was beginning to surpass actual muscle tissue, we decided to call our hosts about dinner. We ended up meeting them for Thai food, after which we proceeded to walk around a couple bookstores in a different part of town.

Thus, our day ended around 10PM, having put in a solid 8 hours of exploring the city on foot and a couple more looking for bathrooms. We mounted the stairs to the apartment as rain began to fall once more.

We were scheduled to leave at some point Tuesday afternoon/evening, but we wanted to get in a quick (yeah, right) tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s home-studio and his work around Oak Park before we did. We got out our second subway day-passes and boarded the Blue Line. That was our first mistake.

Sure, it was our only subway option from the apartment to downtown, where we’d have to switch to the Green Line to make it out to Oak Park, but with all the times we were delayed waiting on “signal clearance” or the train in front of us to leave the station, we might as well have walked. We were certainly used to it at that point.

The Green Line, though a long ride out of town, was slightly better as far as reliability was concerned. We traveled due west, across large swaths of the city that look for all the world like they’re still on fire, or at least haven’t been rebuilt since being destroyed by one.

Eventually we made it out to Harlem (Coincidence? I wouldn’t be so sure.) and found our way to the nearest Starbucks. On entering, we were greeted by strains of Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah” wafting over the speakers—a paean to the long-awaited availability of coffee, but no indicator of the quality of said coffee. My latte ended up occupying a place on the taste spectrum roughly between burnt milk and a gym sock, and my fervent attempts to fix the problem with nutmeg and cinnamon served only to give me the sensation of drinking a sort of spice rack broth, perhaps as part of some cruel hazing procedure.

My thirst for suffering now slaked, we headed off to the Wright house. The ban on interior pictures of the house keeps me from relating the tour in any meaningful way other than to say that it’s worth the $15 if you’re ever in the area—ask for Allen. Once the tour was over and we’d finished in the gift shop, we headed to a delicious deep-dish pizza lunch and proceeded to wander around the neighborhood. Wright’s houses are all privately owned homes, so I had to content myself with real estate ad-style shots from the sidewalk through the intermittent rain and wind.

After satisfying our curiosity in Oak Park, we decided to head to the northern part of town for a stroll near Lincoln Park, also known as “where all the rich ——-s live”. We caught a glimpse of several gorgeous old condos inhabited by people with the worst kind of self-conscious taste in furnishings, including the former Playboy mansion, then headed back to the apartment an hour or so after dark.

A relatively small dinner later, we gathered our carful of belongings and said our goodbyes, putting our departure time around 10PM. Chances were that we wouldn’t make it far.

My wonderful, helpful GPS decided it’d take us out of Chicago on different roads than those on which it had brought us in, which ended up meaning 30 miles or so of toll roads. Great.

Now, I was under the impression that tolls collected from highway passengers were used to maintain said roads, providing a pleasant, reliable traveling experience to people who use them often. Apparently, Indiana prefers to pool their highway toll revenue and, once a quarter, invest it in a Ponzi scheme. We paid a total of $4.75 in tolls over 3 stops on our relatively short stint on I-90, and I’ve never in my life seen an interstate with more bumps, cracks, and tar ridges. Either this thing was a cow path before they started collecting tolls, or someone’s been taking very nice vacations with public funds—too bad we had already crossed the Illinois border, or I’d know exactly what was going on (RIP, Blago—we’ll miss you).

Upon exiting the toll road from hell, we decided to reward ourselves with milkshakes at a local Steak ‘n’ Shake, which turned into waiting for 20 minutes for 2 to-go milkshakes. I guess they’re just more complicated to make than I thought; I wouldn’t want to second-guess the highly-trained night shift.

After about 100 miles of driving, we were directly between Chicago and Indianapolis and ready to fall asleep, so we decided to stop at the first cheap-ish place we saw. That happened to be a Super 8 occupying an exit almost by itself, its only companion lodging being a place called “Sunset Inn”. We opted for Super 8.

It turned out to be the only Super 8 I’ve ever seen with the nerve to charge $100 per room, but since the entrance to the only other motel in town was quite flooded, we had little option, taking my AAA discount at the Super 8 and calling it a night.

The next day proved to be mostly what one would expect from 500+ miles of driving—mostly boring. Between getting to the motel as late as we did and being asked to check out when we were (combined with the time zone difference and Daylight Savings Time change), I still hadn’t had enough sleep to properly prepare me for an 8-hour drive, so I leave you with the following sobering realization I had on the road.

Apparently, when I’m tired, I need a constant influx of food in order to stay sufficiently alert to drive. My metabolism seems to be such that any gap greater than 10 minutes between feedings induces hallucinations that the cars on the horizon are really multi-colored horses that want nothing more than to frolic with me in the fields lining the interstate. I was assailed by nightmarish visions of my possible life as a long-haul trucker, having one day to be gingerly cut from the cab, hoisted by an industrial forklift, and forced to eke out the rest of my days with a camera crew from the Style network following my every move as I painfully reassimilate with the society that has come to shun me.

Then I let her drive for awhile.

*Soon to be Willis…whatever; no one’s calling it that.