before I left new mexico I was happy to notice that the shuttle took us along the rio grande, instead of cutting back behind the mountain as the other had done. My only problem was that, entering the shuttle, I had chosen the far back seat, and it was protected from the sun by a kind of screen that prevented me from seeing in clearly. same with the chihuahua license plates; I knew they were there, but I couldn’t read them, because I couldn’t see them clearly and in fact have trouble reading little license plates now, even when I can see them clearly.
the trip back was uneventful, relatively; dallas was a huge sprawling city but its airport didn’t have wi-fi so I graded papers almost the whole way, and drove back through the villes of southwest illinois in the middle of the night. thanksgiving at home was similarly uneventful; it was nice to be home, and have turkey, and have family and even a friend, who said she thought it would be tofurkey based on what she knew about my wife, but it wasn’t, it was the real thing, with plenty of leftovers which is the way it should be.
but the following day off we went to peoria where twins could be born any minute, and it started raining and stayed raining for almost the whole two days we were there. Sometimes it was a steady drizzle and sometimes it was pounding, but it kind of took over the place with its cold wet insistence. now we’re on the road back, at the windmills of use, and the rain has turned into overwhelmingly cloudy, cold grayness. we spent a lot of time swimming in the motel and I read the papers, which was nice, but the news was full of black friday shopping violence which was somewhat disturbing. apparently the stores are so desperate for customers that they’ll open in the middle of the night and work with these couponers to make sure hundreds of people appear at their doors in the middle of the night; apparently shoppers are so desperate for the exceptionally cheap discounts on such things as xbox, etc. that they wiil come out, and stampede, with pepper spray and pure shoulders, in order to get these deals; and the muggers are enjoying people with goods walking around parking lots in the middle of the night, because those guys are desperate also…it all sounded kind of sad, actually, like a country that’s lost its bearings.
the road from the motel to the tiny town where the new parents live goes through northern illinois countryside which is really very beautiful, but has lots of farms, ranches, mansions and developments in every direction. It cuts right through the town of kickapoo, and crosses kickapoo creek, which I’m pretty sure fed into the kickapoo river, and the low spots there I’m sure are called the kickapoo bottoms, so we had fun saying that the kickapoo bottoms were looking pretty soggy, and noticing how that rolled off the tongue. peoria in general is a hard-luck kind of town, with not a whole lot of good new jobs around, and people trading around the same dusty old antiques on the edge of the road there, though the folks in the mansions seemed to be doing well enough.
a little further down the road now, past springfield, I’ve noticed that the traffic is very heavy; we’ve seen more license plates in a couple hours than I saw in the whole trip before today, and altogether this trip may rival the last one, in which I had the benefit of seeing all those southwestern states, like AZ and NV. Up here I’m seeing mostly southern states; they’re all over the road, but what’s missing really is the eastern ones, who don’t get all the way out here this time of year or at all any more, for all I can figure. On this part of the road the big things to see are this enormous mansion, which is for sale, and which must have twenty rooms or more, but is right on the highway, and an old-car lot that has cars going back to the fifties and sixties which I drool over upon passing it. aside from that, it’s all flat illinois farmland, stubble cornfield and bean fields plowed over, and a gray sky above to cover everything. there are three colors in the fields: a bright green that is probably winter wheat, a stark black that is probably a bean field, and ground with stubble on it, brownish, probably corn fields.
people pushing and shoving, one even using pepper-spray, lining up in the middle of the night, bringing coupons from online that promise huge discounts, which will put thousands of people in a store but will only give a few hundred of them discounts, thus frustrating many and getting people to turn to violence after three to ten hours committed to a cheap deal goes bad. you wanted a deal? i'm not sure what advice to give.
home now, having gone through the villes, and even to an old farm on the hill outside murphysboro, to drop off dogs, and the kids are in bed and we settle into the calm of a winter night, though we all have school tomorrow. i don't know what my point is; i'm proud of granddaughters born and unborn, but worried about the world they are inheriting. the news was a twisted mess about what's happening in pakistan, egypt, los angeles & philadelphia, etc., but the story that stuck in my craw was one about these amish guys who went bad and broke into other amish folks' houses and cut their hair. didn't rob them, or kill them, but humiliated them badly by cutting what could have been a lifetime of hair. it made me wonder about the other crime folks commit in this society, and how much humiliation is a part of it: whether, if one were to remove the violence, this kind of criminal would simply be left with the prospect of humiliating people, yet not even really having to hurt them. it was an odd story, so odd that one wonders. out here in the "english" world, one wouldn't dream of doing crime without the proper firearms. i've reached a point, though, where i wouldn't do it in any case. i haven't been humiliated, denied work, made to feel inferior or incapable, pushed back, made consistently more and more angry; on the contrary, i have enough, even in rough times, and i wake up grateful, generally.
on the license plate front i ended up with 27, almost the same as my entire new mexico trip, and got CT toward the end being the only one from new england. on the new mexico trip the high point was the chihuahua one, being out of the country and all, but on this one i saw two that mystified me, and i never did place them. the first was on the way there and appeared to have a bear on it; i thought, at first, nwt, canada, which has had a bear for years, but on looking it up, i decided that wasn't it. the other was a multi-colored one in which a rich dark green was prominent, but i couldn't read that one either, it flew by pretty fast. in general, i like letting my wife drive; i see more; she's very observant of the speed limit, and, as a result, people tend to fly by us and i being on the outside have trouble reading their tags. this is especially true if they have a dealer's license-holder or if there's a shadow or no light. i lost more than a few of them and cursed my own impending elderly infirmities as i tried to guess and wondered if the license game would allow me to "know" what i saw. hawaii? nwt? guam? one flew by me that was a rich orange and i could have sworn it was an ancient oregon; it was on a van, and sometimes those large vehicles keep the old-style plates long after a state has converted en-masse to the light one with the trees on it. but i couldn't read the "oregon" clearly and never did quite count it, though i'd seen oregon trucks on both trips. not sure, even now, what i did see, but it'll have to go down as one of those unresolved things, you learn it eventually, or maybe you don't.
main point is, it's now the season of buying, and i'm not sure what kind of x-box kind of toy i'll need, i only hope i don't get pepper-sprayed in the process of retrieving it. i've tried to spread a general non-materialism throughout my family and my life, but to no avail, and i can see that the nation as a whole is getting worse, with black friday now rivaling valentines day as a major must-spend occasion. i can only imagine that the bright side is that, having parked in the last spot in the mall parking lot, one gets at least some exercise, to do the mall, unless one has contrived to get a handicapped flag, illegally, or goes to the trouble of staging a fake car-is-busted-must-leave-it-here-indefinitely kind of ruse, in order to get out of walking. i heard stories of massive foreclosure fraud, and disability fraud, and the widespread nature of the fraud is such that i begin to wonder what people consider "work," if there is such a thing, if people do "jobs" anymore, or even if there is a point in encouraging people to try to make an honest living. would the system be stacked against you? if so many people are watching television, even at work, what does that make those of us who don't have time? non-participants, i guess, in a sordid kind of culture. if it comes to this, maybe it's time to turn off the power, so that we have more of a separately generated, off-the-grid kind of system, where you can turn, non-commercially, for a little bit of peace. maybe the occupants will come up with it, or i can do it for them. it's time for a new concept. this black friday crap has gone far enough.
the trip back was uneventful, relatively; dallas was a huge sprawling city but its airport didn’t have wi-fi so I graded papers almost the whole way, and drove back through the villes of southwest illinois in the middle of the night. thanksgiving at home was similarly uneventful; it was nice to be home, and have turkey, and have family and even a friend, who said she thought it would be tofurkey based on what she knew about my wife, but it wasn’t, it was the real thing, with plenty of leftovers which is the way it should be.
but the following day off we went to peoria where twins could be born any minute, and it started raining and stayed raining for almost the whole two days we were there. Sometimes it was a steady drizzle and sometimes it was pounding, but it kind of took over the place with its cold wet insistence. now we’re on the road back, at the windmills of use, and the rain has turned into overwhelmingly cloudy, cold grayness. we spent a lot of time swimming in the motel and I read the papers, which was nice, but the news was full of black friday shopping violence which was somewhat disturbing. apparently the stores are so desperate for customers that they’ll open in the middle of the night and work with these couponers to make sure hundreds of people appear at their doors in the middle of the night; apparently shoppers are so desperate for the exceptionally cheap discounts on such things as xbox, etc. that they wiil come out, and stampede, with pepper spray and pure shoulders, in order to get these deals; and the muggers are enjoying people with goods walking around parking lots in the middle of the night, because those guys are desperate also…it all sounded kind of sad, actually, like a country that’s lost its bearings.
the road from the motel to the tiny town where the new parents live goes through northern illinois countryside which is really very beautiful, but has lots of farms, ranches, mansions and developments in every direction. It cuts right through the town of kickapoo, and crosses kickapoo creek, which I’m pretty sure fed into the kickapoo river, and the low spots there I’m sure are called the kickapoo bottoms, so we had fun saying that the kickapoo bottoms were looking pretty soggy, and noticing how that rolled off the tongue. peoria in general is a hard-luck kind of town, with not a whole lot of good new jobs around, and people trading around the same dusty old antiques on the edge of the road there, though the folks in the mansions seemed to be doing well enough.
a little further down the road now, past springfield, I’ve noticed that the traffic is very heavy; we’ve seen more license plates in a couple hours than I saw in the whole trip before today, and altogether this trip may rival the last one, in which I had the benefit of seeing all those southwestern states, like AZ and NV. Up here I’m seeing mostly southern states; they’re all over the road, but what’s missing really is the eastern ones, who don’t get all the way out here this time of year or at all any more, for all I can figure. On this part of the road the big things to see are this enormous mansion, which is for sale, and which must have twenty rooms or more, but is right on the highway, and an old-car lot that has cars going back to the fifties and sixties which I drool over upon passing it. aside from that, it’s all flat illinois farmland, stubble cornfield and bean fields plowed over, and a gray sky above to cover everything. there are three colors in the fields: a bright green that is probably winter wheat, a stark black that is probably a bean field, and ground with stubble on it, brownish, probably corn fields.
people pushing and shoving, one even using pepper-spray, lining up in the middle of the night, bringing coupons from online that promise huge discounts, which will put thousands of people in a store but will only give a few hundred of them discounts, thus frustrating many and getting people to turn to violence after three to ten hours committed to a cheap deal goes bad. you wanted a deal? i'm not sure what advice to give.
home now, having gone through the villes, and even to an old farm on the hill outside murphysboro, to drop off dogs, and the kids are in bed and we settle into the calm of a winter night, though we all have school tomorrow. i don't know what my point is; i'm proud of granddaughters born and unborn, but worried about the world they are inheriting. the news was a twisted mess about what's happening in pakistan, egypt, los angeles & philadelphia, etc., but the story that stuck in my craw was one about these amish guys who went bad and broke into other amish folks' houses and cut their hair. didn't rob them, or kill them, but humiliated them badly by cutting what could have been a lifetime of hair. it made me wonder about the other crime folks commit in this society, and how much humiliation is a part of it: whether, if one were to remove the violence, this kind of criminal would simply be left with the prospect of humiliating people, yet not even really having to hurt them. it was an odd story, so odd that one wonders. out here in the "english" world, one wouldn't dream of doing crime without the proper firearms. i've reached a point, though, where i wouldn't do it in any case. i haven't been humiliated, denied work, made to feel inferior or incapable, pushed back, made consistently more and more angry; on the contrary, i have enough, even in rough times, and i wake up grateful, generally.
on the license plate front i ended up with 27, almost the same as my entire new mexico trip, and got CT toward the end being the only one from new england. on the new mexico trip the high point was the chihuahua one, being out of the country and all, but on this one i saw two that mystified me, and i never did place them. the first was on the way there and appeared to have a bear on it; i thought, at first, nwt, canada, which has had a bear for years, but on looking it up, i decided that wasn't it. the other was a multi-colored one in which a rich dark green was prominent, but i couldn't read that one either, it flew by pretty fast. in general, i like letting my wife drive; i see more; she's very observant of the speed limit, and, as a result, people tend to fly by us and i being on the outside have trouble reading their tags. this is especially true if they have a dealer's license-holder or if there's a shadow or no light. i lost more than a few of them and cursed my own impending elderly infirmities as i tried to guess and wondered if the license game would allow me to "know" what i saw. hawaii? nwt? guam? one flew by me that was a rich orange and i could have sworn it was an ancient oregon; it was on a van, and sometimes those large vehicles keep the old-style plates long after a state has converted en-masse to the light one with the trees on it. but i couldn't read the "oregon" clearly and never did quite count it, though i'd seen oregon trucks on both trips. not sure, even now, what i did see, but it'll have to go down as one of those unresolved things, you learn it eventually, or maybe you don't.
main point is, it's now the season of buying, and i'm not sure what kind of x-box kind of toy i'll need, i only hope i don't get pepper-sprayed in the process of retrieving it. i've tried to spread a general non-materialism throughout my family and my life, but to no avail, and i can see that the nation as a whole is getting worse, with black friday now rivaling valentines day as a major must-spend occasion. i can only imagine that the bright side is that, having parked in the last spot in the mall parking lot, one gets at least some exercise, to do the mall, unless one has contrived to get a handicapped flag, illegally, or goes to the trouble of staging a fake car-is-busted-must-leave-it-here-indefinitely kind of ruse, in order to get out of walking. i heard stories of massive foreclosure fraud, and disability fraud, and the widespread nature of the fraud is such that i begin to wonder what people consider "work," if there is such a thing, if people do "jobs" anymore, or even if there is a point in encouraging people to try to make an honest living. would the system be stacked against you? if so many people are watching television, even at work, what does that make those of us who don't have time? non-participants, i guess, in a sordid kind of culture. if it comes to this, maybe it's time to turn off the power, so that we have more of a separately generated, off-the-grid kind of system, where you can turn, non-commercially, for a little bit of peace. maybe the occupants will come up with it, or i can do it for them. it's time for a new concept. this black friday crap has gone far enough.
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