The Road

Been plenty stressed out about the big move to New Mexico, which happens for real tomorrow. So I'm up at 5 am going over my route for the ten jillionth time. It is an excellent route, so I thought I'd share.

The overall schema takes me from Maryland to New Mexico via Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and, sadly, Texas - just the tip though. I insisted on skipping the West Texas bullshit that the usual route would have you put up with: hills and high winds, for a full fucking day. And this way I get to see what all the excitement's about in Oklahoma...!

The stops, also, are perfectly spaced, bolstering the already apparent perfection of my Plan (I'm referring to the plan: "Go to New Mexico; be with girlfriend; duh" - not my previous plan with all its fancy academic trappings and upstanding ambitions).

10 hours to Nashville, with its big neon guitar; 10 hours to Oklahoma City, tasteless joke, or awesome botanical gardens; 10 hours to Las Tumbleweeds. Further: stops in between, to rest my engine (my car's literal engine; I'm a machine that's going to be running on coffee, peanut butter, and speed metal), occur at Knoxville (skip Virginia, thank you), Memphis, Little Rock, Amarillo, and Albuquerque. Pretty awesome, right?

I have a stack of CDs that ought to make for 30 hours, at least, several flashlights, small tools (light weapons?), and badass shades.

I might not have private internet in New Mexico, but I know this won't be the last time we meet, dear reader: look to your heart, and my blog vanishes, for my blog was simply the mirrored beating of your secret heart and it was you yourself that laid it bare and I am but the crystal in the eyes of darkness.

What?

See you on Facebook.

Iced

Marx, Engels, Grimm, and Grimm

While trudging through a flimsy used copy of Grimm fairy tales that I got in Amsterdam a million years ago, it occurred to me the brothers were almost contemporaries of Marx and Engels. It looks like more of a scholar than myself will have to do the requisite digging in some musty Bohemian archive, but I'm tempted:

A dialectical materialist analysis of the celebrated folktales, jotted down in some tattered notebook by a sleepless Marx? A lively correspondence, a debate, about their political significance in mid-19th century Germany? Some fan mail from a young and eager Engels, stowed away and ignored in some publisher's ancient archives? A chance meeting on the streets of Hamburg?? A COUPLE OF BEERS??? A HEATED POLITICAL DEBATE AND FALLING OUT, ALL IN OLD NORSE?????

Tell me there's something out there. Look!



You guys should totally hang out!

"What?" and "New Mexico blog life"

What? I have a blog. Welcome back everyone, if you were surprised to see "Spaniel for Two" blast to the top of Wiley's blog list and burst into your eyes, where have you been? You knew one day it would rise again like Lazarus defeating the Phoenix.

This concludes Part I.

Yesterday was my going away party, so many people showed up! It was good of you all to tell Wiley you were there to celebrate his graduation, since the party was at his house. Thanks Wiley!

Psych, congratulations Doctor Wiley, you climbed the veriest peak of academe like Ratatoskr the squirrel gaining the highest branches of the world tree Yggdrasil, to spread what nutshelled messages over Midgard as will only be known when the final sun sets on the eve of Ragnarok.

I'll see you at band practice.

And then I have to go to New Mexico, where as though burying my old Mid Atlantic self I will plant my one surviving cactus and cultivate many more, like the prickly new selves I'll invent to parcel out my sanity like the rationed desert water supply. Needless to say, I'm stoked.