"Living there, you'll be free / If you truly wish to be."
-- Willy Wonka
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Woke when we wanted to, then trained and cabbed it down to Navy Pier for Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory at Chicago Shakespeare, their late morning matinee. Charlie Buckett was less than extraordinaire, but Wonka and the supporting cast (complete with Umpa-Lumpa scene changer Matt, decked out in striped lab coat and zany glasses) were terrific. For eats, I tore two pieces from a loaf of Hawaiian bread for breakfast and we hit Mi Tierra off Belmont for margaritas and lunch specials. I made a long solo trip on the red line back to my car, got lost west of Lake Shore Drive, and eventually found I-55 South, and thus I-80 West...and thus Omaha.
Long drives feel shorter if you call them "long." Shorten the drive, and you jinx it all: two hours feels like four, eight feels like eighty. Your phone and your music are your portals, but you're held within trapdoors at 75 mph, struggling with a tricky right wheel and a seat that never quite accepts your ass. You're liable to get testy with yourself and any caller who tries to rescue you. It's like Melville said of sailors who fall overboard: you feel "awful lonesomeness" as the world heaves and rolls past, and it seems you've been left behind, slapped under glass, made to watch your life within and without yourself. The lone rover's appreciation for empty roads and carefully painted sunsets leaves you with each mile marker, each green tantalizing tag goading you one mile closer to a home that never seems nearer. The frustration is harsh, a callous to mind and soul.
Being tired doesn't help, either... It's like heading south, downwards on a map, like falling down an atlas to a road that isn't where it ought to be. But the descent must end, hitting a perpendicular line running parallel to your journey. Y-axis, X-axis, and a positive slope.
Things get better, is what I mean. The stars, for instance, would plunder your breath tonight, and sell it to mother night.
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Ajax spurted into welcome mode when I came down to the basement, where he and my sister were watching The Client, an underrated movie.
Plan: sleep until sleep becomes underrated. Then: hit Ctrl + Alt + Del, repack boxes long-distance, and feel a hug across the miles. Things get better. Positive slope.
2 comments:
Road trips depend on some things. Like what your mode of transportation was just before the car.
When a friend traveled around Europe he was always with people -- mostly on trains -- so it was grueling aloneness when he took a road trip a few years later: south from Illinois to Texas, then west and back.
I, however, tried an American train to Nevada and then to Buffalo, NY -- not such social rides -- before gathering my balls about me for a handful of recent road trips.
Road trips are where you think a lot, remember little, then feel a lift just by arriving.
Trains--real ones, not subway transit lines--have always attracted me, though I've never taken one very far. I had hoped to ride the rails from Ohio to Nebraska this time but I waited too long to book.
I could obviously never do a roadtrip blind, but I definitely couldn't do it deaf, either; were it not for some kicking tunes, I'd go crazy within three hours.
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