Friday, September 30, 2005

South Dakota, here I come!

I'm finally getting excited about my long awaited road trip. I'm heading out to South Dakota to visit Mt. Rushmore, Crazy Horse Monument, the Badlands, a decomissioned Minute Man missle silo that is now a national park, Jewel and Wind caves, and of course, Wall Drug. I'll be staying at a variety of KOAs (Kamp Ground of America). Here are the technical details:

Saturday, October 1
Finish one final thing for work and leave Arlington as early as bloody possible. Drive 582 miles to Indianapolis in 11 hours. Check in to the Indianapolis KOA where I'll be admiring their "long, level pull through, and beautiful shade trees."
Contact phone - 800-562-0531

Sunday, October 2
Leave Indianapolis, drive 640 miles to the Albert Lea/Austin KOA which is midway between Minneapolis and Des Moines. This should take about 10.5 hours. If it's still light out, I might take a swing at the driving range.
Contact phone - 800-562-5196

Monday, October 3
Stop by the Spam Museum in nearby Austin. Get my fill and head out to my final destination, the Badlands/White River KOA in southwest South Dakota. Only 455 miles and 7.5 hours today.
Contact phone - 800-562-3897

Tuesday, October 4 - Friday, October 7
Make the rounds of Mt. Rushmore, the Badlands, Crazy Horse, Jewel and Wind caves, the Minute Man Missle Silo, and Wall Drug.
Contact phone - 800-562-3897

Saturday, October 8
Say fairwell to South Dakota and head south east to the Kansas City East KOA. 667 miles and 11 hours. If there's time, stop in at Harry Truman's house. I'm sure he's expecting guests.
Contact phone - 800-562-7507

Sunday, October 9
Drive east, passing through St. Louis. Stop and take pictures. If I'm feeling ambitious, take a trip up the arch. Continue east to the Cincinnati South KOA. 567 miles, 10.5 hours
Contact phone - 800-562-9151

Monday, October 10
553 miles and 10 hours to home. Ready to be there, not making any stops, head straight on till morning.

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

9/20 Dream - Trying something different

Part I - The Encounter

I'm in a resturant with A., and one of her male co-workers shows up and joins us. Even though there is nothing outwardly obvious about them, I suddenly know that they have been having an affair. I demand that the guy leave, which he does. Then I excuse myself, and make my way rapidly to a friends place, because I know I need to talk this out with someone.

Part II - The Journey

My friend's place is on the 17th floor of an apartment/condo building. I get on the elevator with a bunch of other people, and we all select the floor we're looking for. Mine is the first one, so up we go. The elevator is shooting up _really_ fast, almost too fast for me. The walls are all glass, so I can see how fast and how high we are going. I alternately close and open my eyes and hope for the ride to end quickly. Finally we get to my floor, and I get off.

Part III - The Friend

I'm in an open patio/atrium. There are apartments on both sides of the atrium. There is a party going on here, and it's obvious that this is the high rent district. There are ornate decorations and plantings, sculptures and fountains. I finally find my friend's apartment at the end of the atrium, behind a bank of sculptures and fountains. I ring the bell and his wife answers the door and invites me in. They have a new bathtub in the foyer that they're waiting to have installed, and my friend's wife makes a big show of showing it off to me. We go into the apartment, and despite knowing that this is the high rent district, I know that my friend's place is more "normal" than the other high rollers. We talk and I wake up.

Saturday, September 17, 2005

9/16 Dream - A Drama in Five Parts

Part I - The Race

I'm running through a college campus, with a definate end point in mind, but not sure of what that is or where I'm going. I find myself running through the crowds, from one locked door or gate to another. When I come to the first locked gate, I realize I have a key in my hand, so I try it in the gate, and the gate opens. I run through many gates this way, once or twice finding the key does not work, so I back track and run to the next gate.

Finally I get to a building, and run down an external set of stairs to a door just below ground level. This building is a dorm, and the key fits the door. I go inside, and two guys come in behind me. I'm in a short hallway, the walls are kind of grungy with a faded blue paint, and the doors are dorm room doors with numbers on them. There are at least 10 doors, 5 on each side, and I have no idea which one to try. I also don't want to give myself away to the two guys who followed me in, because I know I don't belong in this dorm, but I don't want them to know that. I walk down the hall, and come to the last door which is the bathroom. Making like I belong there, I duck into the bathroom, hoping that the two guys will go into their rooms, and them I can come out and figure out which door to go into. I enter the bathroom, but to my chargrin, one of the guys comes in behind me. Making like I just finished what I was doing, I go back out, and find the hallway empty. I take a look at the key I have, and realize that it has a room number on it. "Pretty stupid - any fool who finds this key can break into the owner's room" I think, but luckily I'm the fool who found the key. I quickly find the correct door, and just as I'm turning the door knob the other guy comes out of the bathroom and asks me what I'm doing. He says I don't belong here. I mutter something about being the owner's brother, and slip into the room, closing the door behind me.

Part II - The Struggle

I know where I am! This is A's dorm room! The room snaps back and forth between two different scenes. The first is that the room is empty, and I start poking around, looking under the bed and in her desk and shelves to see who she is and what she's become. The second scene, however, is that I'm with a partner/team member from some special forces group, and there's a bunch of bad guys in the room. There are two drums of something bad, and I'm trying to figure out what's in the drums so we can stop them. I have my camera, and am taking as many pictures as I can, of the bad people, and of the drum. Trying to document it all. As I'm doing this, the bad people are dragging the drums out of the room. It's all chaos; the room is too small for this many people; we can't move around, the bed is in the way, I'm on the wrong side of the room, and eventually they get out the door and away, but not before I'm able to get a pretty clear picture of the drum label. It's some sort of chemical - I know I'll have to take the picture to one an analyst, becuase it dosen't make any sense to me.

Just then I look up, and out the window (we're at ground level), and see A. pull up in an old station wagon. Then she comes into the room.

Part III - The Battle Begins

Now we're out in the lobby, in a scene that jumps back and forth from the lobby to just outside the building, but in a World War I kind of hell, with bombs going off, the enemy just over the hill, smoke, no grass, only mud. I'm working on fending off the attacks as they come. The preferrred method of attack seems to be throwing hand grenades at us. Fortunately, I'm able to grab them and throw them back before they go off. Eventually one makes it way to us, I throw it back, but then they throw it back to me. It becomes a "game" of hot potato, with me throwing it over the hill, it coming back, me throwing it to the guys to my left, them panicing and throwing it back. Then I realize that it's just a drink coaster, and a pretty nice one at that, so I hold it up to the guys to my left, laughing, as if to say, look at what I get!, and keep it. The guys to the left seem upset that they didn't realize it was a coaster, and that they could have kept it.

Part IV - The Romantic Interlude

Finally the battle is over, and we all go back to A's room. Initially it's just A and myself. She's lying on the bed, and I'm sitting with her. It's a really nice reunion - she has her knees up, and they're leaning on me. My arm is resting on her knees. We're all smiles and warm talk. We talk about everything that has happened, and nothing at all. We lean in, and just as we're kissing, the rest of the group comes into the room. There are looks around the room that say, well about damn time!

Part V - The End

But we decide we need to go back out and scavange for supplies. I take my partner from earlier, and we head out. The outside is a waste land. Much destruction, mud, smoke. We find that the bad guys have left some barrels of gasoline where they had been stationed. In come cases they had rigged the barrels to explode, and they already had. But in other cases, we can siphon off some of the gas to take back with us. We wander down the hill, and come to a building with a porch on the front. On the porch is one of the remaining bad guys, and he's threatening us. So I shoot him. But then we realize that there is a young mother with three small children who just saw me shoot this guy. So I have to execute them as well. I shoot the mother first, and then the three children, each one once in the head.

Peace in motion

Friday, September 16, 2005

Happy Birthday K.

Today is K's birthday. While wandering around our local farmer's market a few weeks ago, I found a guy selling vintage New Yorker covers, going back many years. Knowing that K. loves the New Yorker, I took a look to see if he had the cover for the year K was born. Well, not only did he have that year, he had the entire issue for the day she was born! What a find. I just wish I had these kind of good ideas back when K and I were together. So I stopped by her place tonight to drop it off, and she apparently really liked it.

But damn she's looking good, and to hear that one of her old male friends was coming by tonight for dinner and to help her setup her bed, it just punched a hole straight through me. It dosen't help that this is a guy who has shared many of the same experiences she has, and that I could never really understand. My mind just goes off into fifty different scenarios, none of which I like. I know this is all my thing, but still. Fuck me.

Blue skies


We had some nice weather a few days ago. I could use some more.

Happy puppy

Friday, September 09, 2005

double blah

barely hanging on today. the warm fuzzy of numbness is tempting me.

Thursday, September 01, 2005

Hide and seek

It occurs to me that I've been hiding lately. Keeping to myself, bunkering down at home, generally wanting to cocoon myself at home and not some out for 40 days and 40 nights, as it were. Let the apocalyptic flood come, but I'll be safe in my ark. Speaking of being safe in an ark, I was very pleased to learn today that my friend's wife's family, who likes in Ocean Springs MI weathered the hurricane safely. Apparently they still have their house and their well being, which is truly a blessing. That picture they show of the bridge that was wiped out going into is only a few miles away from their house, so very lucky indeed. Speaking of lucky, K is out of town this weekend, so I have our (hers now) smaller dog, Nacho, for the weekend. I had let both Baxter and Nacho out this morning while I took a shower, but when I came back downstairs to let them in, they were not there. Somehow the gate had come open, and they wandered out. Panic quickly setting in, I began to run up and down the street shouting their names. Eventually I began to circle the block, doing a full loop before I ended up on the street behind our house, and there they were, busily investigating the trail of a raccoon. The guy who lives in the house two houses back found them in his yard, and had kept them corralled there while he tried to get ahold of either me or animal control. I introduced myself, but in the relief of the moment I've forgotten his name already. My heartfelt thanks goes out to him however, as I was concocting all sorts of doomsday scenarios of what could have happened to Baxter and Nacho, none of them good. This reminds me of the time, as a child, that my friend (from above) and I ran away from my parents house because my mom was serving milk for lunch, instead of koolaide that we knew we could get at his house. Our plan was to walk to his house, several miles away, and across a fairly busy road. We actually made it about 2/3 of the way there, which is probably about 2 miles, before my mom finally found us. I can only now begin to imagine what was going through her head at the time. Ready or not, here I come!