THE ROAD ODE BLOATED TOAD JAMOBOREE

We drove all day and much of the night, from El Paso to Tyler, Texas, arriving 2:00 a.m. at Don's friends home--bleary-eyed he greeted us, and bleery-eyed we responded. Got five hours sleep next to a private (modest, I suppose) lake, pet a feral cat, had coffee and showers, went and had breakfast at Fuller's on Highway 69, then headed east on the 20 and on to Louisiana. Did the Shreveport bypass and dropped south on 49 to Alexandria, then the 1 to Baton Rouge, via who fucking knows, then back north to St. Francisville and a wonderful dinner, company and chatter-chatter-chatter. Anntichrist S. Coulter appeared to us via satellite death-star hookup, and regaled us with tales of god-awful tourist pissing and puking their lives all over New Orleans, the old New Orleans, the one that had not been betrayed into the brackish pools of negligence and lassaiz-faire annihilation.

I had brought along Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, played it, then drove the eponymous highway. Everyone should get a chance to drive an eponymous highway.

Tomorrow we deliver all of our donated foods, linens, towels and toiletries, etc. From there we hope to get directed to the appropriate animal/human rescue organizations, so that our return trip can ferry the lost, disposessed and otherwise Barbara Bush ass-cramp society members who seek but to survive in a difficult and mismanaged nation.

During this journey, I have had many political thoughts, and some casual musings and sleep-deprived ocular visitations, but mostly just the gas pedal and road atlas-peering . I have decided that Texas should be granted asylum and allowed all of the attention it craves: celebrate its preeminence, its chunky fat ass all over the popular id, its weird self-satisfied conversation with itself. I saw an enormous billboard sign off of the 20 (somewhere near Fort Worth) that advertised an a.m talk radio station: in font bigger than our national debt it proclaimed "LIBERALS HATE US!" It all came home to me: "they" need an enemy, otherwise no one would listen to them. The poor souls who buy into that crap are lead around like livestock, all the while believing they are original thinkers and great patriots.

Let me tell you something: there are not huge billboards in Los Angeles proclaiming REACTIONARY CRACKERS HATE US, no such billboards will ever exist, because we don't need enemies, we need friends. We are not in a war with our differences, we are in a war with our similarities. I am looking, as my bleary eyes cry for sleep, for a populist southerner to channel Little Richard and Reverend Ike and Ralph Nader (on a good day) and get these poor, isolated children of the mystery of being to sense and understand that the life of the heart, of the human being does not fit into some corporate format, that there is value to being a human being that lumbers beyond slogans, that "liberals" love the promise of America more than they may every accept. Karl Rove kills Jesus every day of his life and millions just don't get it.

New Orleans was the baby tossed away with the proberbial bathwater: some of us noticed.

Peace!

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p.s. tomorrow we deliver our donated goods to the food bank!

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"god is an intelligible sphere whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere"

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