I think it's pretty clear why I'm so enamored with him. Oh, no, I was pretending not to be, wasn't I? Oops.
I was clearly feeling unfulfilled with my schedule lacking any fake dates -- will probably go on more of them, in a terrible and futile attempt to seduce this gravy yacht before I have to leave.
Here's a picture of me and the redonk house I'm staying in. I'll put up more pics of the inside and stuff (including the Grammy sitting on top of the fridge with garden gnome statues around it) later.
Tomorrow I'm going with my boss to her apartment in Manhattan to kick off my amazing ten day vaca in NYC, so undoubtedly there will be multiple gushy posts to come about how great everything is and how everything I know about the city is straight from Baby-Sitters Club books. Thanks, Stacey! Undoubtedly all my knowledge is circa 1991 and I will end up looking like a total rube...
More fairy tale days. Went to first CS party at a very nice bar on the Hudson River. I was kind of nervous about it and thinking of not going, because WP roomie (who needs a better nickname) was going to be the only one I'd know. Then he messaged me asking for a ride (it's not on my way) and I agreed because, well, I love him.
Okay, no, not like that... although it was hard to keep that in mind when he turned up my radio, said "Oh, do you like your Glenn Miller?" in that accent, and started a "Chattanooga Choo-Choo" singalong.
More on the party later, but suffice it to say that I can't believe I just spent 5 hours hanging out with almost exclusively 30-something aged foreign guys... and enjoyed it. Everyone else was much more talkative than I was, but I didn't mind listening to these dudes' crazy stories about surfing, gambling, schooling, and living ridiculous lives around the world. I'm glad I went even though I was scared, just because it was something new to experience, and turned out okay.
Who am I and what have I done with the old me? More importantly, can I swing it so that she never has to come back?
Update on my unexpectedly fabulous life -- how long have I been waiting to say that particular phrase?
Moved into director's house and it is some plush digs, I'll tell ya. House-sitter girl isn't there yet so I have the whole three floors to myself for now. My basement area is even better than I could've wished -- full bathroom, laundry, private entrance, tv that I can almost work and the full DVD collection of the Thin Man films. It's a mile from where I work but situated next to a nature preserve, so there's a big garden complete with wandering deer.
Previous to this, I stayed over at my boss's (the director's daughter) awesome house for a night, in her perfect neighborhood with her perfect family. Friday nights they have dinner and games with their close neighbors and let the kids hang out -- it's a domestic situation straight from tv. I mean, I'm sure it's the people and relationships that make her life so great, but it certainly couldn't hurt to have that much money.
Although I know moving to Kisco was the best thing to do, I will admit to openly crying when I left WP (though not in front of the dude). It seems so weird, but those three days were some of the best I can remember. Living with a sweet, educated man from the UK in a great apartment in the city -- for awhile there, I was living 14 year old me's dream. It was like a 50s tv marriage: get up in the morning, have our porridge together and listen to NPR, go our separate ways, come home at night and read the papers and talk, then off to separate beds. Do it all over again the next day. It was perfect, and even more so because we weren't actually married and I wasn't in love with him : what do I care if you see me when I first wake up? Look stupid when I can't add or parallel park? Don't mind if I do!
Tomorrow, I'm allegedly visiting my friend at her grandma's house in the city at Brighton Beach. It's going to be one big Russian Jewish adventure if I can just navigate the train and 3 or so subways to get there!
Now that I have definite and non-creepy digs, OK friend plans on visiting for an extended stay of glorious debauchery, which will necessarily include taking her to a Tragedy show -- every Tuesday night in Brooklyn, that's where I'll be.
This Thursday kicks off ten rent-free days in Manhattan...
I must be dead. I am dead and this is heaven. This seems entirely believable because I remember all the hell I passed on the way!
If this winning streak keeps up, I am never coming home.
The roomie situation was good enough -- a guy I didn't know two days ago is now the brother I never had and a great friend. But today, one of my bosses offered to let me stay in the director's home in the town where we work. The director works from Germany during the summer (yeah...), so the only occupant is the house-sitter upstairs. This move would eliminate my commute, parking costs, rent costs, everything. Plus, staying in a semi-famous person's home: 'nuff said. I'll be sad to leave roomie, but hopefully he'll welcome me back in mid-August when the director needs her house back.
I don't have to worry about where I'm sleeping this week, I actually bought everything I needed at a store and didn't think about the money, I accepted someone's hospitality without being embarrassed that I couldn't provide for myself... is this what it's like to be middle-class?
Ever wish you could freeze frame a moment in your day, and look at it and say "this is not my life"?
I've always liked this quote, and have used it often to express disdain and horror of things happening around and to me, including in a college application essay. But today it has a different meaning, because so many good things have been happening recently that I can't believe it is my life we're talking about here.
Roomie sitch continues to be excellent and non-awkward. Moved some things in, and getting set up in the spare bedroom as soon as I can find a substitute for this futon currently housed in the living room. I've been successful thus far at not being messy or annoying or really even noticeable as a roommate, which is pretty much what I'm going for. Leaving work is no longer the terrible experience it was when I was seriously dreading being home. Now leaving work is just sad because I had to leave all the cool stuff behind til the next day!
Okay, I have a terrible story, and I'm going to put it right here. My boss was getting some original notebooks out of the archives to send out to be photographed, and I started paging through the ones in the box on her desk. Having already come across some Woody-penned items, I was able to not get all fangirly at the site of poems he wrote or pictures he drew in these books. But still, I really wanted to see. Casually paging through his diary for 1946, I picked a day at random and read the entry, still amazed that I got this sweet gig and get to see this awesome things every week. Then I read the entry again. It was a short, four line poem... and it was straight-up pornographic.
Oh how I laughed.
At least there wasn't a picture. WG was apparently quite the correspondent with the ladies, some of whom felt compelled to burn the salacious letters to keep them out of the hands of family or husbands. And, well... there it was.
Anyway, back to the actual topic of today, my boss is leaving town for the week of the 4th and is entrusting me with her cat and Manhattan apartment for an entire ten days. It's almost too good to be true -- free stay in Manhattan , private lodging, and convenient base for everything in NYC? Yes, please.
All these wonderful people started to make me think that perhaps I had been to quick to judge the people of NY and the North... but then I realized something: they're all foreigners. Roomie is from Ireland, boss is Canadian -- this is not a representative sample we're drawing from.
Nevertheless, these occurrences and others of lesser significance have all contributed to my feeling as though this has to be someone else's life I'm living right now... and to my hope that we never trade back!
Dreams do come true, in the form of a tall, Irish, Ph.D.-holding man.
No, not those dreams -- those are never coming true, to be honest -- but the dreams of an affordable yet tolerable living situation.
I fled the house of hippie horrors this morning, leaving LL's pipe smoke and last words "Do you want to trade those carrots for some lettuce?" in the dust behind me. Went to work, explained what had happened, and it was like they just found out my house was destroyed by a hurricane. One of my bosses offered me her house when I told her I was currently between places. But no, I had lined it up with a guy on couchsurfing, which has turned out to be the best decision I ever made.
I liked White Plains immediately when I drove in, because it's so normal. Nice parts, rundown parts, people of every color instead of just white dudes with arm length dreadlocks, a downtown that is sufficiently city-ish.
I saw a Wal-mart with a parking garage on top today. I am officially at the end of the universe.
I got to the guy's apartment and we talk for a bit. It had the potential to go awkward but, as we learned in various car rides across the Illionois plains, the key is to just keep talking. Eventually we go out to get dinner and find out where to hide my car overnight. There's no free overnight parking in the entire town of WP (what?), so we went to the next town (conveniently located a 20 minute walk from the apartment) and parked it at a baseball field. We come back home and hang out for awhile, and before going to bed he mentions that I could rent his extra room for the same as what I'd be paying at my prospective new place in Newburgh.
PROS: much closer to work, normal roomie, great apartment, nice town, shockingly cheap rent (he works for a huge computer something company and makes bookoo bucks which he apparently doesn't know what to do with)
CONS: ... I guess sometimes it gets a little hot in here, I can't figure out how to turn the shower off
The last one was a really scary experience. Here I was, after enjoying my first real shower in who knows how long and sanitizing all these terrible and possibly infected bug bites, flipping out in the bathroom because no combination of the three knobs would make the water turn off. I could make it blistering hot, I could make it freezing cold, I could make the faucet come on instead -- but never just off. I started getting dressed for the inevitable embarrassing event of waking my host and showing him what heinous acts I had committed, when finally I turned it off, in a move never to be replicated, I'm sure.
And now I'm sitting here clean, fed, not creeped out, about to get a good night's rest in a bug and chicken-free zone.
Well, I'm sitting here wondering/ would a matchbox hold my clothes?
Carl had it right! I've been secretly packing, putting an extra bag in the car every time I go out there, just to hasten my departure tomorrow morning. LL informs me that he has someone taking my place Wednesday, so maybe I'll even get my unused rent and security deposit back -- no harm, no foul, right? All he said was that he'll "settle" with me, which could mean anything from cash renumeration to pistols at dawn, but I'll take whatever it is gladly and get out of town. He certainly owes me something: I only lived there about a week and conserved the bejesus out of that water.
I never drank the tap water at the house because it always tasted vaguely bloody, which says to me it's either full of iron or, alternatively, that the LL killed someone and threw the body down the well. Probably the last tenant. Okay, I'm pretty sure he's not a murderer -- I borrowed I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from the library, so I've been seeing rapists and criminals everywhere. I also mowed my fair share of the lawn, as specified in the epic length lease agreement I foolishly signed, and didn't do a terrible job, no matter what this dude said. Considering that a) I'd never done it before, and b) I'm a 115 pound girl, what did he think was going to happen? I was pretty proud of myself before he started harping -- I was always kind of scared of lawn mowers and dreading the day I'd have to use one and watch it cut my foot off.
The overlap between tenants and hired help is fairly large with this guy -- this morning I heard him reject an applicant for the cottage next door based on the fact that this kid was disabled and wouldn't be able to shovel snow or help LL lift stuff -- pretty sure that's discrimination and makes him look like an asshat.
Have not seen the new place, but there's no way it could be worse than this one, with its crappy old appliances and aura of being uncleaned since the Nixon administration. Not that I have anything against antique appliances -- my grandparents have been using the same toaster since their wedding in 1947 -- but when rust sets in and one or more latches or parts are connected with twist-ties, it's time to push that thing off the bluff, my friend.
I'm hiding from the LL in town today -- quelle surprise -- but actually told him I was at work, so I've been paranoid about running into him all morning. It's unlikely at best; he makes the twelve or so mile trip into town about twice a week, tops, for supplies (what is this, Little House on the Prairie? C'mon) but I anxiously peer over my shoulder when I'm on the sidewalk lest his old junkbucket come tooling up the hill behind me and I have to swan dive into the shrubbery. I sought refuge with a Stephen King book inside the Starbucks this morning, because there is no way in hell LL would ever patronize such a bourgeois establishment. Don't you know big chains like this are ruining our environment and destroying local independent coffee growers? Yes, I do -- now please stop telling me. And back out of the shop before you burst into flames.
It's a little better inside the library. I'm sufficiently comfortable thinking he'd never venture back to the large print Nora Roberts aisle, or if he did, that I'd see him coming. There's currently an unseen person lurking off to my right, but I can tell by its right arm that it isn't LL. He doesn't wear a watch -- he doesn't need to -- because to him it is always 7:47 on planet Z-Tron, and that's the only time that matters.
God I'm mean.
I don't have any pictures today either, unfortunately, which is a shame because yesterday had some good ones, aka Kelder's Farm and Gnome Chomsky. I'll have to lug the big comp out and put them up later this week. Didn't find either of the boxes but went on a nice wild goose chase through Kerhonkson -- at least now I can say I've been to Holy Trinity Ukranian Catholic Church? Kerhonkson is so Ukranian that there's a whole Ukranian club, complete with suspicious members who stared me down from the private driveway. Letterboxing, why do you take me to these places?
One more night in G'er, followed by a lifetime of celebration that I am no longer there. Huzzah!
Wow -- the Mohonk Mountain House did not disappoint. It's like the Biltmore with tennis courts. Ridiculously pricey, of course. I was okay with the number of elderly people I saw tooling around but the kids provoked more than a little plebeian resentment -- Vandy kids of the future, probably. Apparently it's so exclusive they habitually charge people $20 just to roll up and see the place. What?! I didn't find this out til I got home and told across-the-hall roomie where I'd been. He was totally taken aback that I'd managed to penetrate the hotel's airtight defenses of a lone guardhouse at the foot of the mountain.
What? How'd you get in with out having to pay?
I... I just kept rolling.
Pictures apparently obtained at great personal risk coming soon.
Also went letterboxing on the rail trail -- two out of four boxes in about two hours. Not bad, plus met a talkative walker who wanted to tell me all about the decline in the area's bat population. Unfortunately underestimated the power of mosquitoes in cool weather -- totally covered in bites and probably look like I have some strange sort of jungle skin virus.
Today has actually been pretty good. LL cornered me at breakfast with news that he thinks he can get someone else for the room immediately, and asked when I could be out. I told him Tuesday morning, which is a day before I see the new place. I can bridge the gap with couchsurfing and when the lady asks when I want to move in, maybe she won't be too creeped out when I tell her I have everything in my car. I'm not too worried about it, which is typical of situations that actually I should be concerned about. But I have a locking car that is at least as big as my room now (although awkwardly partitioned), with the added bonus that it does not include a LL who smokes on the porch and leaves the door open, or tells me I'm parking my car incorrectly or driving to work wrong on a daily basis.
Whoa, I meant to tell you about the good parts of today. The library didn't open til one, so I killed some hours at the Water Street Market, an antique shop/ pretentious eatery type of area in NP. The big antique store had all kinds of good stuff, including a ceramic teapot in the shape of the White Tower that I really wanted. But the price and practicality of keeping something like that unbroken through this moving sitch and the trip back home prevented me from getting it. As with most antique stores, there were clip-on earrings, but most tended toward the old-ladyish. But I found a cool pair that are tiny golden bells with actual moving clappers -- I think they're hilarious and I can't wait to wear them around and look like a fool!
Letterboxing attempt part deux was a failure. Couldn't find any and the onslaught of rabid mosquitoes prevented me from trying too terribly hard. Went back to the Market and had a freakin' delicious sandwich at "The Cheese Plate" that I may have weirded the cashier out about just because I was sooo enthusiastic about real food. The lunch I packed this morning is chilling (or more realistically, cooking) in the car for dinner after I see the world's biggest garden gnome in Kerhonkson, NY.
Holy Moses -- this moving business is a logistical nightmare. But one I am undertaking with a song in my heart. I'm talking to a nice old lady in a town about 20 miles away (plus closer to work) about renting her spare room. She's a 70 year old retired widow, vaguely Italian, a grandmother, and best of all, totally normal. I'm checking the place out Wednesday and blowing the fascist popsicle stand I currently call home as soon as possible. Take my remaining rent, take my security deposit, just give me my sanity back.
Learned from the other tenant that there actually is a free-range chicken farm under my window, the products of which the landlord will try to sell you at any available opportunity. LL's going on a trip at the end of the month and wants us to take care of the chickens in his absence. He asked the other tenant, but then considered I might be a better choice because I don't habitually sleep til noon and then disappear (true: I habitually sleep til the libraries open and then disappear). LL hasn't actually said anything to be about it yet, but at this point I feel my only response could be something to the tune of "liiiiiiiiiiiike hell".
I found a guy on Couchsurfing who's willing to let me crash at his place in White Plains (20 miles from work) this Tues. and possibly Wed. I'm sure it's legit -- he's vouched for on the site and has hosted plenty of surfers -- but I've never met anyone through CS before and will def not be telling anyone at home what I'm up to. My only worry is that I'll run out of things to say to this dude and he'll have second thoughts about letting me steal his conveniently located futon.
I looked on CS when I got here to see if I could meet up with anyone and make some friends locally. One guy looked like a good bet until I read his couch info: "I live in a yurt on an herb farm." In theory, this sounds interesting. In reality, I am in a different America and unsure of how to navigate. A yurt -- is this real?!
It's the first bright sunny day in awhile (and over 80 degrees -- wow!), so the whole town has turned out in shorts and sandals for what they mistakenly believe is hot summer weather. When the library closes I'm heading down to the rail trail to do some letterboxing and maybe on to some boxes at the truly ridiculous hotel called the Mohonk Mountain House.
Pictures if I don't die! Although probably there would be pictures if I do as well.
Camped out in the library for the day with a box of Wheat Thins, trolling Craigslist for a new place to stay. Next time I go into work, I'm gonna ask if I can crash on their couch or throw up a tent on the roof. Yeah -- it's that bad.
In less depressing news, my two day unpaid internship has magically morphed into a three day miracle -- two doing regular intern-y stuff and one paid day helping out the director of WG Publications, the business part of the Foundation. It's nothing too exciting or brag-worthy -- updating databases, research, the ongoing hunt for lost songs -- but it comes with above minimum wage pay, reimbursed parking, and even some gas money for the hour and a half commute. Frankly, I'm over the moon about it. Less time to think and fewer money worries is a win-win.
Panicking about money and feeling lonely are pretty much the betes noires of my existence. If it were only one, things would be fine; but they tend to align and make me want to stab my eyes out with a can opener or jump into the Walkill River.
The part that gets me is that much of this could have been avoided. Before I left, I loaned a close family member five hundred dollars, which most likely I'll never see again, because she was on her way to the food bank and I couldn't stand to think about her in such dire straits. I also put the final nail in the coffin of a fake relationship, which at least would have been something to hope for, by sliding a confession note through an open car window, to which I have received zero response and now have to panic about either a) looking like a fool or b) my amorous intentions becoming known to a stranger in some parking lot or roadside unseen.
I haven't told many people the aforementioned stories, but I'm fairly certain that hardly anyone reads this, and those that do were forewarned about the loose conglomeration of desperate events I call my life. But, hope springs eternal (does it?): currently negotiating with a middle-aged man in a nearby town to share his cheap 1BR apartment. Yep, one bedroom. Stay tuned for future crises.
First day of interning and, I have to say, it's a pretty sweet gig. I started cataloging the collection of Woody's sheet music and originals of his stuff transcribed by his wife, including a bunch of never-seen or heard songs, in the tradition of the Billy Bragg/Wilco collaboration "Mermaid Avenue" that we love so much. Some have music and lyrics, some just music. This stuff's been hidden back in the archives forever, so we're some of the only ones to have gone through it. The archivist, aka my boss, can't read music, so I get a little nerdy thrill out of being the only person alive who knows how "Beat Hitler Blues" goes.
The commute is about an hour and half on rural routes and highways that quite literally have deer running across them. Add that to the abnormally high speed limits and you begin to understand my bewilderment that anyone drives around here and lives to tell about it.
Landlord hasn't killed me for compost yet, though it may just be because he hasn't seen me. When the New Paltz library closes, I go over to the one in town which is open til 8 and had no qualms about giving me a card based solely on my assertion that I lived nearby.
Right now I'm sucking up the free wifi and coffee samples at the Border's in Westchester County, allegedly one of the richest counties in America. It shows.
I'll try to upload pictures of my room soon. At night and in the early morning it reminds me a lot of my room when I was a kid (the color scheme can only heighten this effect), so occasionally I'll wake up, think I'm ten years old again, and panic. After a few moments, I come back to reality and breathe a sigh of relief. Then I remember where I actually am and panic, this time with arm-flailing, rending of garments, the whole nine yards.
I exaggerate, but only because I don't know how else to express just how surreal this situation is. Someday I'll make it into a cartoon and/or book and no one will believe it's not fiction.
As promised, here are some pictures of New Paltz, a college town of roughly 12,000 people about 15 miles from where I live. The more I see it, the more I like it. I would've lived here, but the rent is about twice what I'm currently paying.
I'm feeling a little more upbeat today, ever since I figured out how to use the stove at home. Of course you light it with a match -- what was I thinking?
Anyway, have stumbled upon a foolproof policy to keep the landlord at bay: speak quickly and with a lot of hick. Rambling non-stop in a vaguely southern accent ensures that he will neither understand the major part of what I'm saying nor ask any questions. This also seems like the best thing to do when confronted with my accidental infractions of any policy regarding recycling or what can go down the kitchen sink.
But I digress. Here are the pictures. They explain everything much better than I ever could, including what may be the key to the North's foreignness -- it was settled by people other than the Scots or Irish.
I forgot to mention how almost every town, river, or landmark ends in "kill" here; we passed Fishkill, Peekskill, and Walkill, not to mention the Schuylkill River.
And they say the South is violent.
View from the library down Chestnut St. to the mountains.
At this point, I had some serious England deja vu. NP is laid out like a European town and built for walking.
In the village part, there's a group of original and/or just old houses and a church. None of which appear in this post. Maybe later.
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The strangest things are the small ones, like the differences in plants and wildlife. As in, plants can actually grow here in summer because it never tops 85 degrees. I stopped at a gas station on the way back from dropping my dad at the airport, and in the abandoned lot across the street, there were otters running around.
Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore...
Independently confirmed: rural NY is like a foreign country. A foreign country where seventy degree summers are normal and everyone looks like they've just wandered out of the wilderness. It's a strange bastion of liberalism full of old dudes with long hair and college girls preaching on the evils of the farm system. I always wondered what it would be like to live in a blue state, and now I know: it's weird. In short, I am a stranger in a strange land with five days a week of time to fill.
Okay, enough about that. I'm sure I'll have lots of stories about this and similar topics, since it appears my landlord is running a free-range chicken farm under my window. But let's talk about the house, with all names and identifying information changed so none of this can be found and used as grounds for my eviction.
It's basically a small two-story house on a rural route dating from about 1930, which coincidentally is also when the owner (my landlord / downstairs roommate) last renovated. The fridge closes with a rusted latch -- I shit you not. I mean, it has a handle and everything, but this is clearly a pre-Kennedy fridge. Getting hot water requires descending the uneven cellar stairs to the water heater and clicking the flame on, but you have to remember to turn it off once you think you've heated enough water, lest you burn the whole place down. Similar rules for anything requiring electricity or water in the house. The owner is what may best be described as an aging hippie, but that hardly scratches the surface. I think I told you my dad's response to seeing this guy's picture, and I have to admit that upon meeting him, my first feeling was indeed regret that I had not brought a gun.
Wow, this sounds terrible... let me backpedal so I look like less of a beotch. The guy is perfectly harmless and certainly doing us all a favor by renting to students at such an unimaginably cheap rate. The only downside is his constant presence and tendency to sit on the front lawn in a half-collapsed lawn chair staring at nothing. And he's talky, but only about things you don't want to talk about. I basically creep around the house like a ninja rehearsing comments about the weather to use if he happens to surprise me.
Mine and the other tenant's rooms are upstairs, and I think they must've been kids' rooms. His looks blue from what I've seen from the doorway, and mine can only be described as the fallout of an explosion at the Necco factory: bright pink and yellow. I'll put up pictures later if I can, but they could hardly do it justice. The downstairs is interesting as well, in that it too is frozen in time. I don't know just what time, exactly, but I do know it is probably one best forgotten.
The idyllic mountain landscape of the area is somewhat complicated by the fact that it's covered in prisons, albeit picturesque ones. To get home, I either have to turn onto an extremely holey dirt road (at which point my dad started singing the "Green Acres" theme on the way to move in), or take the longer paved route through the prison grounds where multiple posted signs announce "NY CORRECTIONAL FACILITY -- DO NOT STOP".
I probably won't buy into the internet at home. There's a public library (where I am currently) in the next real town, and I think I'll need to make this a pretty frequent destination if I plan on keeping my sanity afloat for any span of time.
I really didn't start this blog for complaints, though in that aspect it's a pretty good reflection of my attitude in real life. Next time I swear I'll have something more cheerful to say about the town, or my internship, or going to the city this weekend. Til then.
Right now I'm sitting in a hotel room in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania half-watching Man With No Name after about twelve hours of driving and four hours of sleep. Getting into G'ner tomorrow about noon to scope out this sketchballer landlord (upon seeing his photo my dad suggested I invest in some "small arms training") and my new digs in his attic.
Anyway, the far more interesting part of this day was the drive and the weird stuff along the way. Knoxville was the first and only major city we passed, and so far VA, WV, MD, and PA have been one long stretch of unremarkable rurality with varying degrees of hilliness and occasionally outright mountains. On a good patch, you'd have maybe one deer carcass every five miles; on a bad one, half a deer carcass every other mile, interspersed with a surprising number of exploded possums. Also passed innumerable caverns and caves and a Pentecostal Holiness church, which means only one thing in the state of West Virginia: snake handlers. WV is the only state to not have a law against snake handling. Despite being from the town that brought Pentecostal snake handling to the southern mountains, I have unfortunately never witnessed a Sign Followers service, for various reasons explained in my sophomore HIST 200 mini-thesis that cemented my status as hillbilly of the department. Sadly, it was only Saturday morning and I doubt they would've whipped out any serpents or mixed up some strychnine just to impress me.
From the man made scenery of I-81 North, I've learned two important things: one, that every town needs a giant cross made out of hollow pipes and steel beams, and two, that it is possible in the South to emblazon the outside of your store or home with signs that say both "GUNS!" and "JESUS IS LORD", without a trace of irony.
This is either WV or VA... at some point, trying to distinguish between them became useless. If you can't see it or don't want to, it's basically 30 seconds of grainy footage of the hills shot from the window of the car, apparently through a screen of wax paper.
We stopped in Hagerstown, MD for dinner, which is where serious disorientation set in. Technically, Maryland is still the South, as defined by its U.S. Census region, its position below the Mason-Dixon line, the fact that every single person from the age of 18-85 in that Shoney's had at least one visible tattoo, and the abundance of homemade signs along the highway advertising for a cage fight that night. But they don't sound Southern. Hearing southernisms like "ornery" and "favor" (to mean "looks like") spoken with northern accents pretty much kicked off the pilot episode of Twilight Zone: Dixie Edition that I think is going to rerun until we get into New York state.
I like Pennsylvania a lot so far -- the buildings are old and beautiful, 81 N runs through pretty farmland, and, best of all, the Amish drive cars. Well, maybe just the one. We passed another car speeding out of Maryland with PA tags and I saw that the guy driving it was decked out in checkered shirt, suspenders, flat hat, and full-on beard. He was either Amish or a member of The Westbound Rangers that missed the exit to Nashville. Could go either way, but as my dad commented, "There's nothing worse than a speeding Amish in a Honda!"
The adventure continues tomorrow with checking out the Archives in Mt. Kisco and moving in. If the past few days are any indication of the rest of the summer, things can only get weirder from here.
