07.07.04 - 12:46 p.m.

the strange tidbits of others lives: the guy whose hobby is weedwacking, who bought a golf cart so he could drive around his yard and wack weeds. "do you wack any neighbor's weeds?" we asked. no, no he doesn't. just his own weeds.

and, speaking of bizarre coincidences, i can see what random google/msn/yahoo searches people have used to get to my diary. heh. and they're, uh, weird.

• I'm the number one match for a search of "Morgantown terrorist top ten" on msn.
• 21st place for a search for "boggy prostate" on yahoo.
• no. 1 for a search william meredith poem toothpaste kiss on yahoo.
• no. 101 for a search for search Barbara Kingsolver and Quotes on yahoo.
• and no. 6 on a search of misspelled Kruschev and the word recipe, or at least, my index of past entires is.
• and the most recent searchfor fake black boobs. man, in the 16-30 page of results for "fake black boobs" on msn search.

more strange scraps of other lives: the fighting electricians. the "stores" in the lockets at the railroad car plant. the woman who comes in sunday to set up her store, who sells hotdogs with homemade sauce to her coworkers, with a crock pot, the guy who had sex with his wife in the blacksmith shop and showed his manager the picture. "does that anvil look familiar?"

so: does that anvil look familiar? it should! stealing bits to comment on them:

i can't see the ocean. i'm so close and i can't see it. everything here's kinda grey, but that luminous grey when the sun's close but not quite shining. the mountains are ghosts.

first transcribed bit that grabbed me. frustrated expectancy. something's just there, just there. just. there. parfait.

"why do they put ads for strip clubs up on freeways? isn't that dangerous? i mean, wouldn't you totally stare at it? i know i did. i mean, it's like. has this woman up there with pink hair and her arms crossed over her chest, kinda leaning forward suggestively, and it says, "Pssst... FLESH." and then you keep staring cuz there's something next to that word FLESH and then you realize it says "psst, i'm at FLESH." turns out the club's name is Flesh. but by the time you figure that out, you've spent a good 3-5 seconds staring at it. and 3-5 seconds doesn't sound like a lot? but on a freeway going 80mph, that's a lot."

heh. i was shocked, the first time i saw a big-ass billboard for a strip club on the stretch of 64 between the mall and hurricane. IN hurricane, actually, this massive ad for some club in charleston, with this woman's face. her skin was as red as a lobster's. seriously. i was never able to figure out whether that was deliberate (she's HOT! she's DEVILISH!) or just really unfortunate. it always grossed me out. RED FACED. like lobsters that have been boiled. heh. once when i was a kid, my parents served boiled lobsters and i couldn't eat with everyone in the dining room because the lobsters looked so RED and so SAD. i ate in the breakfast room b/c i was so upset. well, anyway, now that billboard is gone, but there's another one facing the other way, just as you approach the milton exit, for an "adult superstore." they had an extra banner on it this morning: toys, 50% off! i wonder what kinda conversation that engenders in family cars. "look mom! toy sale!"

"somehow talking isn't quite the same as thinking what i wanna talk about. i always think of things i want to talk about, or write down when i get home, but i never do. i think it's something about the movement, the scenery, and the music in the background -- it affects you."

i tell myself stories, but they never come out right. they're stories: strings of narrative and images, ideas with forward motion, thought patterns that i want to imprint onto something, that i want out of my head and into the world, semi-independent of me, the originator. i once bought a dictaphone so i could record them while i drove, but it never worked out. i was afraid of the sound of my own voice, too stark, too valley, too girl-ish. too real. i'm impressed w/your rants because i wasn't ever able to let go.

"i wonder what it's like to be a trucker? you probably don't get a lot of action driving 20 hrs a day. but even so, there's something a little glamourous about it, isn't there? i used to wonder what it'd be like to just drive all the time. do that for a living."

and:

"i love these 18 wheeler trucks. they're like steel dragons, flowing along. all their lights lit up. across the top. the chimneys. the running lights. all those wheels spinning. the power of it, the speed."

trucker chic! so 1970s! actually: no. steel dragons is a great image. there is something romantic about being a trucker - it's the lost highway romance, noirish, half-empty, open road and stretches of the sky, here today, gone tomorrow, silent-man-romance. cowboy boots-romance. blues-romance. two things: first, the song 30,000 lbs of bananas by harry chapin. awww. more '70s stuff. cos he died in 1981. he was only, like, 38 or something, too. never the most subtle of songwriters - man, NOW i wanna hear harry chapin RIGHT NOW. hah. i love his melodramatic songs, all big and brawny, good guy, calloused hands, lost spaces. but trucks: they're like trains. they're modern trains, but moving. truck stops, open all night, coffee cups and grilled cheese, waitresses in uniforms like nurses, with a mouthful of gum and bruises beneath their eyes from sleeplessness, on their arms from some lover's quarrel, listening to the stories that come through and leave, every day, never the same, but there: fixed through it all. the highway a ribbon of black, the close always growing, smothering trees green arterial walls, the way we move, the way the strange circulatory system defines the circumferences and circumstances of the world. the map in my head is not a map of the land features, but a map of the spiderweb of roads radiating out from whereever i am. only the sky - for me - is free of this direction and distraction.

" 'she serves him mashed potatoes, and she serves him peppered steak. with corn. she pulls her dress over her head and lets it fall to the floor.' i find that so strangely sexy. i think it's that ... you can see the image they paint out for you. whup, there's my exit. goodbye 101, i'll see you in a coupla days."

- hmm. also, she's GETTING UNDRESSED. which means they're going to HAVE SEX.

"holy shit, that was thrilling. second and a half to spare to get back on my side of the road. passing cars, fucking cars that weren't letting me pass. you know, you should slow down when people try to pass you on a 2-lane highway, but these bastards weren't. whoo... adrenaline rush, nice."

- i never pass on two-lane roads. heh. i'm too afraid of getting smushed!

"the high voltage lines arcing overhead, and you just wonder where they're coming from, where they're going. they're connected, you know, beginning to end, one end to the other. you don't know where the other end is, but. you pass under it here, briefly intersecting, and then -- pass."

see above! but, man - i like this. image, idea, meme, whatever. those high voltage lines, there was controversy over them in WV in the 90s. some group opposed to some high voltage line called them the "marching monsters." and so i always think of them as marching, uh, monsters, this regimental line of martial monsers arrayed forcefully, chewing out an open clearing through the rampant green. and they go! man - cut through and across the mountains whether or not there's a road to guide them. one to another, the middle of nowhere, arms always open to the sky.

"everything's barely more than shadows now. we're about to go through the mtns, and there's 99, coming in. 99's always fascinated me. i've never gone on it, only gone near it once when i was coming down on the train, once. always fascinated me how it splits off from the I-5, and now, just before the mtns, they come back together. it's like, in my mind, it's almost like highways have a life of their own, strange as that sounds."

it doesn't sound strange. we're humans. we anthropomorphize, mythologize, and animate everything we can. i feel the world spread out around me, i carry some space that is entirely me with me anywhere i go, no matter where i got, sometimes it doesn't seem so much that i'm moving, as that the earth is shifting around. but highways: blue and red ones, I-79 up from Charleston, through the central mountains, rises out of the Kanawha Valley into steep, green slopes, and eventually coasts along these several high ridges, and the close, almost claustrophobic press of the green appalachians suddenly opens up into this endless line of ever-receding green to blue to gray mountains and it's just like revelation. and the intersections along the way, the signs for US 19, or 77 to Canaan Valley, the big brown signs, the sweep of highway lights. impossible - someone's always moving, something's always connected, something's always CAUGHT UP in movement, moving.

"what fascinates me about the highway at night is the anonymity of it. all cars from a distance are reduced to lights: taillights red, headlights white. and the thing is you don't know where they're coming from, where they're going. and somehow at night you realize this more than you would in the day, when you're pissed off at the sedan that just cut you off, of the truck that just blocked off your sight. at night you can't see anyway. you just follow taillights. and there's a... certain hypnotic quality to the road. you start wondering, the car in front of you, why are they down here, are they on vacation? are they a family? are they running from something, are they going towards something? are they happy, are they sad, all these questions that go through your mind."

when my mom was in the hospital for forever - the second time more so than the first - we walked up and down the corridors, paused at the windows, stared out. CAMC Women and Children's hospital is hard against I-64, just where the road curves around Charleston and splits off for I-77 northbound but joins I-77 southbound to make the turnpike. Except, it's not the turnpike until it leaves Charleston and gets walled in by the high-walled, greeny hills bordering paint creek. anyway: the hospital is always right against the Elk river, so it is surrounded on three sides by highway and river, and on the forth by a feeder road that crosses the river. even the second time, mom walked really slowly. maybe it's the law for patients in a hospital: you become completely enervated. anyway, i'd stand there waiting for her, trying to come up with something else to say, staring at our reflections in the glass, and at the curving highway outside. loads of people flash by - where I-64 curves across the Kanawha and Elk rivers, veers about through charleston like a drunken paisley gone wrong - it's a busy road for this area, an impressive six lanes. they're expanding it all the way to teays valley - i can't imagine 12 lanes, i can't stand such roads, i think i'm going to crash, constantly - but i'd stare at the minute snippet of road and watch the cars, and imagine the people inside, bathed in the glow from their dashboards, completely unaware that i was in the hospital, standing at the window, staring at them as they went by. and thought of all the times i drove by there, constantly, without much thought for who might be staring out the window at me, and i just wanted to drive then, drive and drive.

"passing a miller brewery. for some reason these factories, mills and refineries, breweries, they always look like miniature cities to me in the dark, and i like it. i like all the amber lights, lit up. especially the refineries -- because they have all these grates, or whatever. structures, what are they called. reinforcements? no. what is it. think think think think think, what is the word again? scaffolding!"

i always think they look like more than cities. like improved, perfected cities, just the skeletal structure, none of the waste and mess, with the pinpoints of light outlining the shape of the bones. they remind me - not of cities - but of model cities, which i love. i want to shrink and be absorbed into some model railroad tableux, some vast space with trains that run constantly and a diner near the station and a feed and seed store and a running river with a sternwheeler and a hot air balloon drifting above it all, and all the lights, the perfect little lights, strung like cheap plastic jewels along the soft roads. i want to cut into them. i want to be there. i want - oh, that famous painting, the sleek bullet-shaped diner, at night, three people and coffee cups, smeared neon darkness without, stark light within. i want that. i want coffee and diners. i want distance.

coffee and diners and distance.