This is a long drive for someone with nothing to think about

Every time I come back to where I grew up, my friend's group has a show (if it's hip-hop, does group supplant band?) and I always some of those people who've known me for almost two decades now and others with whom I shared the unenviable task of trying to negotiate teenagerdom.
And inevitably it makes me feel sad. Yeah, sad, that three letter word, devoid of meaning in certain contexts and always connoting gray rainy cumulous clouds for me - I guess it's the tangible sense of how much is lost no matter where you are or what you're doing.
I traveled eight hundred miles in the past two days, past the Pintlar Range, the Tobacco Roots, the Sapphires, the Crazy Mountains, the Gallatins, the Beartooths, the Absarokees, the Black Hills, the Badlands, and the wide open blue skied praries on which I cut my existential teeth. I went from the mountains where I spent the last two years to my current home, where I spent a night and looked ponderously on lightning bugs. I don't mean to insinuate that I am Nature Boy Ric Flair, b/c thirteen of the last forty eight hours I've spent locked and loaded in the front seat of a fairly dangerous vehicle, the Ford Explorer Sport, with which I've murdered a grouse, a moose, and innumerable prarie dogs. Murder not being predicated on intent, though perhaps I should say homicide or animalslaughter instead.
Road food is fast food, which indiscriminately assails parts of my GI tract in ways I'm not sure I can adequately describe. There is no vomiting or diarrhea, just this dullened sense of things not right, chemical imbalance or what have you.
Traveling, I love, even though it continually reminds me of having started something new and left something behind. The starting usually means solitude - leaving a girl or a place or a routine that for whatever reason slanted to the particular pitch of my perspective, which having left it, takes on a glossy nostalgic sheen.
I may not know what I'm talking about - I left the camera again - one of my dear friend's husband, (and i do not use "dear" with lower-case or upper-case irony) gave me his old digital camera almost a year ago, only requiring me to get a new battery. I have yet to do that. The husband I also count as a dear friend, and it is strange how we accumulate people we care about haphazardly, almost without trying. By we I mean me. I always mean me by we, unless otherwise stated.
i am here in the house alone. the parents are off in VA, a state I have visited twice but have not yet fathomed. it is late. i am traveling again on Sunday. Incidentally, i bought an audio disc of On the Road, read by Matt Dillon. I am undecided - Kerouac doesn't always hold up against further inquiry, but it's hard (for me) not to be swayed by his depictions of acquaintances and unbidden collisions with all types of people. Anyway. Sleep well.

Various newspapers I have read

In London circa Sept. 2001 to Dec. 2001, I read the Guardian and the Times. The Guardian was full of the hyperventilating compassion and paternal concern of a certain brand of leftism, which at the time worked as a salve against the psychological blemishes that kept cropping up whenever I deigned to think about what falling buildings might mean in the larger scheme of things. The Times I read out of curiosity, to steep myself in Englishness to the extent that it was possible.

From November 2003 to November 2004, I read the NY Times, the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page, and three or four major dailies in whatever state I was researching at the time. I got paid to do this, which is not really an excuse when you think about it. I had a handle on upwards of 40 Congressional races, inasmuch as knowing the relevant issues, campaign finance numbers, polling data, the favorables/unfavorables, and so on amounts to having a handle on something. I began to suffer from ocular migraines, which gave me shimmering mystical visions and an excuse to put my head on my desk.

In the past year, I began to read a free publication entitled Farm and Rancher’s Weekly, mostly because it arrived in my PO box once a week and I receive very little mail. I like reading the advertisements for estate auctions (ranch families have loads of shit you won’t find in antique stores), the recipe in the farmer’s almanac, and articles on topics like mad cow’s disease, Japanese imports of Angus beef, Future Farmer’s of America livestock judging competitions, and crop rotation strategies.

Vamos a salir campeones, como en '86

There has been much discussion of the cultural valence of being a soccer fan swirling about. Cf. The New Republic blog, newspaper editorials, etc. Approximately 65% of the opinions put forth are bullshit. Those comments made by Aleksander Hemon, Chicago resident and author of two books indicative of the enduring health of both the short story and the novel, are not bullshit.

Amongst the New Republicans, among which Hemon is one, the tendency is to oscillate between pure soccer talk and soccer’s synecdochic relationship to culture, language, politics, and human nature (Cf. “SURPRISINGLY, I THINK I'VE FOUND A LINK BETWEEN THE SUEZ CANAL CONFLICT OF 1956 TO ENGLAND'S RIDICULOUS LOVE AFAIR WITH PETER CROUCH:”) “Bonn, Germany” by Jesse Zwick takes a stab at understanding the character of resurgent German nationalism through the lens of his young American Jewishness and soccer fandom.

I liked Argentina to take it all until they won 6-0, which is a bad omen even if it seems like a good one (seeming = not being). I am now flummoxe.d

Aude Sapere

You walk up a hill behind the town. You follow a road that switchbacks every three or four hundred yards, thins into a narrow pass, and eventually connects with faint marks of old trails that lead to the abandoned miles on which the town’s original inhabitants depended. Some have signs and high fences, prohibiting any exploration for the ostensibly curious or implicitly stupid. Others you peer into, or even enter if a horizontal entrance hole affords you the possibility. Spelunker you are not, but you do have a flashlight and why the hell else are you here if you’re not going to check it out.

Crumbling edifices are not particularly inviting; wood rots, soil shifts, and time does its thing to destabilize structural integrity. Still, what went on in there? If you have to kill the cat, it should be as interesting an exercise as possible. So you crouch and walk like a knuckle-dragging imbecile into the six feet of diffuse light that you wield. You find old tin cans and flayed rope, handles to displaced tools and pelvis bones of what could be a fox, cat, or dog, judging from the size. The space is permeated by dust and dank, underground smells, too. You pick up various rocks you find, as if you had the knowledge to discern between different types or could do something useful having applied that knowledge. You walk back outside, into the sunlight, as the sun doesn’t go down until 9:30 and there is more walking to be done and maybe you’ll strike gold at the next place, not literal gold but not fool’s gold either.