Is There Anybody In Here?

Groom, TX to Claremore, OK

Anyone who has ever run a marathon knows a couple of things about setting and reaching arbitrary self-imposed goals. First, it takes a kind of dedication that can be all-consuming, making the runner single minded about spending hours in mostly solitary training that build endurance and reduce injury. Second, the winner will be from Kenya; the rest of us will not come in first, aren’t going to make any money, won’t receive significant fame or recognition, and none of that matters. Third, nobody cares who runs a particular number. Of course friends and family support their runner, maybe partners run together, but at the end of the day if I fall off the face of the planet they fill my slot with an alternate and someone else runs the race. Fourth, when the race is run there’s that feeling of emptiness, like that time when the party’s over. Delivering a major work project or graduating from college or finally taking a safari in South Africa—they can all feel the same when it’s over. That hard work and dedication has amounted to something. Before long there’s something else to invest that surplus time and energy and emotion into, but for a little while there’s a void in the act of completion. What next?

As a species we’ve largely clobbered the practical problems of human survival. We know how to produce plenty of food for everyone, how to create massive and cost-effective communal shelters, how to move our bodies over great distances with unthinkable speed, how to mass-educate a population. We haven’t figured out how to overcome the distribution and logistical problems of cost effectively delivering said surplus to impoverished third-world regions, but that consumes the attention of a lot of very smart socially aware individuals; breakthroughs in that regard would seem a matter of time. For those of us in the better-off areas of the world we have the privilege, the luxury, of filling our time with activities like running marathons, working for promotions, and driving across the country. This is no shameful recognition that we don’t all share the same level of concern, each and every one. It’s that those of us with the luxury of abundance face a new question that was once exclusively the faced by a few elite nobles: what do we do with ourselves now? As Maslow might ask, how do we self-actualize now that we’ve been released from the servitude of mere survival?

Thoughts of marathons and missions and higher callings knock around in my head as I reengage the lonely freeway eastbound out of Amarillo at 1:30AM on this Friday night turned Saturday morning. With the benefit of caffeine and curiosity I’ve imposed a couple of arbitrary goals for myself, a mini-marathon for the evening: revisit the cross in Groom, TX and bear witness to the neon lights adorning the tower of the restored Conoco gas station in Shamrock, TX. I saw both of these on my first pass and have it on good authority that these are remarkable sights after dark. A runner gets it into her head that a marathon is a good idea and makes the effort to go for it. I’ve got it in mine that tearing across Texas in the dead of night is a brilliant plan and lock onto that target like a tail gunner.

The Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ (my hand to God that’s its full name) is a 19 story bone-white cross that stands just south of Interstate 40 in Groom. It’s lit at night and drivers can see it from fifteen miles away. They say that over ten million motorists pass the cross each year. Bill at the Grill from Lucille’s told me that he found himself driving I-40 one stormy night and the clouds parted, revealing the cross. He found it moving. Jason from The 806 told me he was once on his way out of Amarillo for good and upon running into the cross he exited, turned around, and headed right back home. These stories were a little tongue in cheek, to be sure, but it got me curious. I stopped at the cross on my way westbound to see what all the fuss was about. Now Route 66 is notorious for its giants: muffler men, Indian statues, dinosaurs, and whatnot. A 19 story cross kind of takes the cake. It’s probably no surprise that my inner Catholic schoolboy expected that the setting would be some sort of peaceful retreat, a roadside sanctuary from the turmoil of everyday life; a little Texas chapel re-writ Texas size. Hardly. Visiting midday a week ago I found half a dozen Harley hogs in what appeared to be a recovery ceremony following the Stations of the Cross that encircle the massive base of the cross. A crew of lively German tourists videotaping the whole affair and narrating for posterity. Two enrapt parents ignoring several teen and preteen kids all of whom appeared impatient to move onto some unspecified water amusement park, some kneading the sandy ground with the tips of their tennis shoes with others playing hide and seek around Pontius Pilate. And, to my surprise, three or four semi rigs idling in the parking lot. Even truckers have a spiritual life, I know; but this don’t seem a Flying J to me.

I come upon the cross around 2:00AM as it makes its presence known at first as an apparition, ghostly and luminescent as the reflective surface twinkles from a distance in the thick night atmosphere. The closer I get the more massive it towers and eventually I can’t make out the top as I pass from the interstate and exit to the roundabout side road that takes Cherry and I directly underneath the enormous horizontal crossbeam. I take several long exposure photos of the cross in the middle of the night, and now as then there are three trucks in low idle hunkered down for the night in the parking lot alongside the cross. The statuary around the cross is lit from beneath, creating a decidedly eerie feel that suits the chill of the night air. I position myself facing south to get a broad shot of the cross and nearby gift shop/fountain and recall setting up the same shot the week before where I kept waiting for traffic to clear. Increasingly frustrated that I couldn’t get a pause to capture some still spirit that didn’t actually exist there, I said to myself, “Why the hell won’t these semis let up and give me a clear shot?” Then it dawned on me that this was the perfect shot, just as it was, semis and all. This place was not some remote spiritual sanctuary. It was a congested roadside attraction _and_ a spiritual sanctuary. Both all at once. It was the Texas equivalent of ancient Nara Park in modern Japan. “How remarkable,” I found myself saying aloud. I don’t like that the cross has this overloaded function, but it’s not about me liking it: it’s about the cross speaking to those who hear it whenever they’re ready. Recovering Harley hogs or wandering youth fleeing Amarillo, for example.

I’m content with my middle of the night photos of the Stations of the Cross. There’s something satisfying in the symmetry, a complement to San Miguel Chapel’s Stations this afternoon (although time has stretch and shifted on me—that’s what the road does—and it seems more like days ago I was in Santa Fe). I put Cherry back on the highway and make Groom a mental milestone, a halfway mark on tonight’s travel marathon. Breaking the trip into milestones helps overcome the road hypnosis that keeps setting in every ten minutes or so. I’ve taken in enough coffee and soda to keep me awake, but not necessarily engaged. The monotonous roadscape transforms after midnight into a straight shot out to the inky void. Roadside billboards, oncoming traffic, scanning for the Big Dipper now that it’s moved off of my shoulder; all these keep me from retreating inward as the urge to sleep keeps sweeping my body, sending tingle signals along my arms and legs and begging me to call it a night. Halfway, I think. Discipline, like a marathon runner. Not gonna quit now that I’m halfway to my arbitrary self-imposed goal of making Shamrock tonight and witnessing the Conoco Tower all lit up in its glory.

It never occurred to me that they would turn the neon lights off overnight. In a town of 2,000 with a donation-funded minor landmark, saving some of that electricity might reveal a pragmatic wisdom. At 3:30AM when I finally make it to the middle of town I find the Conoco station dead quiet and quite completely dark. For a moment I expect myself to well up with rage and disappointment and frustration. After all, this had been the whole purpose of pushing through the night and staving off road hypnosis despite the urge to sleep. But I watch myself, check myself, and find that I’m not really upset at all. Like a runner crossing the finish to no cheering crowds and no flash photos, just a sense of achievement in having attained my arbitrary self-imposed goal. Despite the dim lighting and mild chill I pose Cherry, get out, take a few pictures, and moved onto the next goal before that feeling of the void of completion sets in: where can I find a cheap motel at this hour?

Fortunately Shamrock has a few motels and I find an Indian-run place on the edge of town. I wake an older gentleman who I find out is named Pat, again not the name I would have expected. I bluff that I’m willing to push all the way through to Oklahoma City if I can’t get a deal on a room, and as I walk halfway out the door Pat stops me. “When are you planning to leave in the morning?”

“9 o’clock,” I tell him, “I’ve got a long way to go. I just need a few hours rest and a shower.”
“Okay, fine,” he says, saving face and meeting my price. “Room 101.”
“If you don’t mind me asking,” I inquire letting tired curiosity overtake my fear of being offense, “nothing personal but I’ve been on the road quite a bit and noticed that a lot of motels are run by Indian families while some advertise ‘American Owned and Operated.’ Is this an issue in the motel business?”
“I think it matters to some people. Older white people. For whatever reason they don’t like…no, I should be more precise. They prefer American hotels and motels.”
“Prejudice?”
“Maybe something like that. A lot of people don’t care: clean room, friendly service, good price. But some people, let’s just say they would rather stay at American hotels and motels.”
“Of course I don’t care, but seeing the signs around here got me thinking.”
“I don’t think it will matter much longer,” he says. “It’s mostly for older white people. I’ve owned this place for twenty years and sometimes still these white people walk out. But they’re getting older and older.”

I thank Pat for the room, arrange an 8:00AM wakeup call and go to my room. It’s clean, a good price, and the service is friendly. I brush my teeth, take out my contacts (which are dry as sand at this point) and go straight to bed, imagining I had run all the way from Amarillo to Shamrock to cheering crowds lining the neon-lit Conoco Tower in the middle of the night.

I fall asleep quickly, basking in the warm glow of completion.

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Shamrock, TX

BRRRRNG! 8:02AM and the wakeup call jars me out of bed. I snooze another twenty minutes and take my time leaving. I don’t expect Pat to knock at 9 on the button to kick me out and clean the room. I’m surprisingly refreshed for having so little sleep and go through a typical stretch and exercise routine to come into my body. After a brief shower I set out in search of a classic mom and pop breakfast café and decide that today is Tulsa, OK or bust. {Goal: Take in the sunset and neon strip of old 66 in Tulsa. Relevance: Self-imposed, arbitrarily high. Agent: Me for now, until it suits my purpose to blame someone else. Outcome: I’d have to dick around quite a bit or get in an accident not to make Tulsa. Alternatives: Curse the darkness; turn on the light in a motel in Oklahoma City.} Since I’m on the edge of town I decide not to backtrack but move ahead to Texola, OK or farther down the road and see if I can find a place to eat there. My inner explorer desperately wants to take two-lane side roads instead of the I-40 alignment of Route 66, and today I’m glad my inner explorer is driving because while both towns are a bust for eateries, Texola turns up scenery far better than any relic roadside café.

According to the 2000 census, Texola has 47 residents, including some exotic people: 6.38% of whom are black and 8.51% of whom are Asian (there are three black people and four Asians). 23% of the population lives in poverty and the median income for females is $0. Texola is poor. I catch a sign on a decrepit feed building on the edge of town with block letters proclaiming, “There’s no other place/Like this place/Anywhere near this place/So this must be the place.” A little bit like Popeye’s Sweethaven. What’s amazing to me is that everything here is fallow. The buildings are collapsed, roof corrugates sag and hang on with all their might by one last rusting nail. It’s almost like tornados sweep through weekly and scatter debris across every overgrown field. Then I come upon the most peculiar reclamations I’ve ever seen. Ten feet from the road runs a wire fence blocking off the dirt driveway to an abandoned service station; the driveway is overgrown with field grass. But it won’t last, not with the three head of cattle grazing in the driveway just feet from the road. Now I know the wire fences that line rural highways are cattle fences; I don’t recall ever seeing cattle right up in the road, or such a natural reappropriation of land. Then I put myself in the farmer’s shoes: “Why hallo mah li’l uppity tourist buddy, if’n you ain’t like mah leavin’ them ol’ buildin’s standin’, why yer welcum t’ knock ‘em on over wicher bare hands. Lemme call Goober over to watch yawl work up a sweat thar.” I take a few pictures for posterity and keep a safe distance. Best not to look like a trespasser—it suddenly occurs to me (not true) that this is “shoot you for looking sideways at my property” country.

The Mother Road between Texola and Erick has been bypassed by the expressway. I pass a few moving vehicles (a pickup, a pickup, and an old boxy family sedan) and that’s it. Unless you live in this place this is no place to be, because there’s no other place like this godforsaken place anywhere near this place. Still, relics abound and reclamation seems more widespread here the desert. I find five strip motels that seem to have become infested by old car enthusiasts or crazy hoarders; I can’t tell which is which. The cars are not classics necessarily, just old junkers. They’re parked in the odd carports that separate the guest rooms and date the motels to the 1950s or so. The spirit of folk art that pervades Santa Fe finds its way out here, too. Coffee can plant pots painted dayglow shades and Blessed Virgin bathtub shrines give curb appeal to homes that seem to deserve no curb appeal whatsoever. Even the drabbest and most utilitarian dwellings can feel homey with the right touches, I suppose. And if I doesn’t bother the dweller it’s meaningless if it bothers me…if I’m not the one living there it’s not my concern.

Just as I start to rationalize how I might manage to make a life for myself in this part of the country a dusty ’68 Mustang catches my eye and I slam on my brakes. I want a picture of Cherry’s younger beat-up brother. He sits in the carport of a reclaimed motel strip next to a house posted “No Trespassing.” Not wanting to be shot this morning I call out. “Hello!?! Anyone at home?” A Rottweiler on a long chain barks and strains toward me as I cross the street, still on government road and cautious about approaching. “Hello?” I repeat.

A lady peers out the door, opens it and steps slowly toward me.
“I’m James,” I introduce myself from a distance. “I’m passing through in that [pointing to Cherry] and I’d like a picture of your car.”
She doesn’t answer but holds her hand over her eyes to block the sun. I take off my sunglasses. “If you don’t mind, that is,” I add. Still no answer as she approaches while a tall husky Harley hog appears from the back of the house.
“I saw our sign and I respect your property,” I point out, recalling my dad’s many hunting lessons. People can become their property. Property can feel like an extension of the person; whence the laws about trespassers, theft, and possession. Don’t assume, but ask. Nicely. “If I don’t have your permission I’ll move on…” I add.
“It’s right of you to ask,” she finally says. “Lotta people come through, take pictures or whatever and don’t ask. Take your time, do as you like. The dog won’t hurt, he’s all bark.” She offers a reassuring smile as she turns back toward the house; Harley hog shortens the dog’s leash to give me room to play, offers a thumbs up, and disappears around the back of the house again.

As I take my pictures I replay the sequence of events in my head. I was cruising down the road looking for something interesting when this Mustang caught my attention. As I went to investigate further a “No Trespassing” sign disrupted my attention and communicated the intentions of the property owner. I disrupted the property owner’s attention with my shouts and communicated my own intentions, to see if they truly violated those of the owner. We negotiated an agreement, so to speak, that let me pursue my interests without violating hers. She could have declined or asked for compensation or shot at me, but this exchange was simply a couple of people with shared tastes expressing themselves. An ordinary, everyday encounter. Attention disruption, mutual disclosure, attempt at communication, next encounter. Lather, rinse, repeat. Forever. This seems to me a regular pattern of social interaction: I go out into the world looking for something I find interesting, something gets my attention, I disclose something about myself in my commentary about it, and I continue in search of whatever else I find interesting. Very stimulus-response, but I don’t think that’s all there is to it. I’m not sure such responses are coherently interpreted as reflex or predisposed action. It seems like there’s something more expressive and interactive at play—more about discovering the interior makeup of another person than about watching with scientific schadenfreude while acquaintances cum guinea pigs find some stimuli irritating and others pleasing.

I get the feeling that every revenue-generating structure leading into Erick has been repurposed as storage for never-to-be-restored vehicles and low-cost inhabitation. Cars and assorted chasses strewn inhabit long ago abandoned gas stations; tires stand neatly stacked chest-high in half open garages; kitschy motel signs slouch on spindly shafts, whitewashed or left to rust. What’s left of Route 66 here is ugly and filthy. I shake unexpectedly in a fit of empathetic tension, trying to imagine living in such poverty, such disrepair and how I’d set about changing everything about this place. Then my imagined farmer reminds me, “If’n you ain’t like ‘em, why yer welcum t’ knock ‘em on over.” My heart has me half ready to get out of the car, stop whoever passes by and shake him. “Do you want to live like this? Do you enjoy this sweltering oppressive poverty?” I want to help whoever I can, empower them, educate them, fix them. And there’s the rub—moving out of poverty involves no simple program but it is guaranteed to fail when change is always and forever threatening. Poverty is steeped in a fear-driven pursuit of permanence, despite what an honest investigation of an area’s history might reveal about this impermanent world. Podunk, OK is not Calico, CA and is under no obligation to maintain vintage Route 66 structures for my driving entertainment. Nor is it obliged to embrace its own past and create its own future. Neither is any given town anywhere in the world, for that matter. If I don’t like the awful greasy pizza here, or the aggressive driving style there, or the irritating use of the nonword “irregardless” somewhere else…well, complaining about it is social disclosure, isn’t it.

Passing through Elk City (something familiar…oh wow, this is where that National Route 66 Museum and transportation movie was...that seems forever ago now) I realize I haven’t eaten so I find a nondescript sports bar with some Route 66 themed signs and catch a quick bite. The local teams must not have started whatever is in season since the television is tuned to CNN, and despite the lack of sound I catch sight of O.J. Simpson and Britney Spears in the entertainment news, the headline “Subprime Crisis: The Worst Not Yet Over,” and Condi Rice speaking to reporters. I’ve managed to go almost two weeks without having the media’s polarizing politicoeconotainment features disrupt my attention. I find I’m not in my motel room long enough to watch television (I write when I have such free time) and the radio in Cherry is a little flakey. Stations go in and out too quickly to catch more than a glimpse of a song, much less news reports. Instead I put my attention on the landscape and my surroundings, on the car, on my own mind; I focus my energy on running this arbitrary marathon. I’m not sure that I miss having my attention be directed by Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch and their ilk; I’m not sure I mind it all that much either. What I notice is that right now I have a hard time making the headlines seem relevant. O.J. and Britney fascinate me because they’re borderline personalities who don’t seem self-aware and they’re fun to watch in a Michael Scott “The Office” way, but that seems like nothing more than unscientific schadenfreude (at least when I irritate my acquaintances cum guinea pigs I can collect data about the results). They disrupt my attention when placed in front of me, and like a reflex I mock. But I’m not interested: I’m not emotionally involved. By contrast, my heart goes out to those families who will be foreclosed, but having figured out my credit score, what prime (and subprime) mean, and how ARMs work I’m not sure what to do. Sign a petition? Get indignant that people in the universe have learned to profit from the (often self-imposed and disinterested) ignorance of others in that very same universe? Write my senator a letter? How do I act on my social disclosure that “this is such a mess”?

As for Condi, Bush and the rest: one might think this was the first time in history politicians lied or cheated or manipulated the truth, as though despite all that history tells us, political scandals should not happen now and shall never happen again. It’s called politics: the acquisition and deployment of power with authority in support of group decision making. What kind of perfect omniscient God perspective is a politician supposed to possess to do things with which everyone agrees? Or with which I agree, for that matter. If I have an opinion about everything, chances are good that sooner or later I’ll cross paths with someone who doesn’t share my opinion. Accepting the difference of opinion or vilifying it, that’s my choice. For the record, I don’t like Bush and I don’t dislike Bush. I’ve put my emotional energy elsewhere. There have been better presidents, and there have been worse; there have been more cogent grounds for war, and there have been less. I sometimes get the impression from social commentators (in the media and in my circle of friends) that somehow people holding positions of responsibility should be somehow immune from the very human condition of having to make decisions under uncertainty, holding inconsistent beliefs, and exchanging favors to make deals. As though somehow politics were a meritocracy. It’s not called “meritocritics,” though; it’s politics. Of course I don’t have to like that that’s the way it works—it will do just fine without my approval.

The structure of politics, if not the content, is particularly fascinating to me because it seems like whenever anything interesting (i.e., newsworthy, rumor-worthy, meriting redaction) occurs that public opinion splits pro and con. The ratio may be unpredictable, but for virtually any issue I find an argument for and an argument against. It’s as if interesting things, precisely in their ability to capture the interest of someone, assert benefits at a cost. “We should bail out social security” contains the benefit of sustained retiree entitlements at the cost of additional dollars allocated to an already remarkable unfunded national debt. (The unfunded portion of the U.S. national debt stands at $59 trillion [read that again]. For those playing at home: that’s $197,000 for every American man, woman, and child alive today. Try extracting some of that from those ladies in Texola making $0 per year…no, right, they’re the beneficiaries; instead let’s extract double that from all those rich upper west-side New Yorkers. That’s an entirely plausible option.) Interesting actions create factions. Issue-oriented coalitions. Value-driven voters.

As I pick at my grilled chicken wrap and struggle to think of an example of an issue, a situation, or a circumstance that everyone could unambiguously agree to (I think, “Puppies are cute!” would be hard to refute, but I know Mieko happens to love cats and hates basically all dogs—just something about dogs), I’m reminded of Aesop’s fable about the father and son riding the donkey and the moral, “Please all and you please none.” More commonly phrased, “There’s no pleasing everyone.” Thank you Aesop for saving me some mental energy and making my point. If I do anything interesting, anything that attracts the attention of a diverse group of people, and I’m bound to get diverse views. For that matter, I’m bound to get diverse views from the same group—often the same person! Some folks have an uncanny talent for finding the flaws with every alternative. And God love ‘em for it. From a great distance.

By noon I’m making progress toward Oklahoma City, OK and take I-40 since the two-lane alignments have largely given way to service roads along the interstate anyway. I imagine being King of Oklahoma, because if I were king I would make puttering along in the left lane while blocking traffic punishable by vehicular confiscation, cavity strip search, electrode genital torture…I let my crazy, evil, hateful, wrong thought go as I recognize that the traffic patterns these Okies create inhibit the free experience of open road driving, and I give myself over with infinite resignation to the God of Traffic, who goes by the local name FHWA, to whom I pray that the sea of big rigs and motorcycle clusters and overloaded pickups might part and provide me a safe passage as my people (well, Cherry and I anyway) struggle to escape the encroaching armies of Boredom and Frustration. After a long period of worship and sacrifice (dozens of moths on the windshield) I start to doubt FHWA until I’m sent a sign: “Construction Ahead Merge Left.” As the flow of vehicles narrows, a great opening in the right lane appears as some idiot in a Dodge Caravan blocks the ocean of cars and I take the opportunity to floor it and cross the vast expanse before the congestion comes flooding in behind me. Freedom at long last! Released from the bonds of slowvery I rejoice and pay homage to FHWA, promising not to tell that tired joke about “two seasons in Chicago: winter and construction” anymore. Yet I find I must wander the deserted prairie for what seems like forty years (probably about forty minutes) before I reach the dustbowl version of the Promised Land: Oklahoma City.

As much as I hate to be that asshole in traffic who uses his horn to disrupt the attention of people who choose to disrupt the progression of other vehicles on the road, the fact is that I don’t really care what the local driving patterns actually are. The frustration I face is when I can find no apparent patterns. In Illinois the convention is pretty simple: pass on the left and get the fuck out of other people’s way. Wisconsin is much the same, except drivers get ticketed if they cruise the left lane and hold up traffic, according to a few troopers I’ve talked with. By contrast, in Minnesota there’s always some Ole or Lena in the left lane going three miles below the speed limit, because “dat’s da law, ya know?” I know, Ole, so I pass you on the right with a signal before a rear-view and blind spot glance and I give a courtesy wave to the person in traffic I might have cut off. I play nice even if you’re a left lane hording humorous stereotype. In other words, I don’t care what the expectations are because I’ll adapt. It’s the absence of expectations that gets tricky for me…because, by definition, I don’t know what to expect. So I play that game by making up the rules as I go. Of course, the law is the law. “Do not speed” would be from the same body of law that says “Do not lie to the American people when elected (or not elected as the case may be) to govern them.” I decide to play by the rule “I love you fellow motorist, now please get the hell out of my way.” I give it a few minutes to see how it goes.

It turns out I hate these fucking Okie drivers.

I have to confess my rather low expectations of Oklahoma City. Approaching from the west the city feels grimy and gritty, the freeway exchanges disorganized and poorly marked, and the gas stations near the exits overcrowded and chaotic. I decide to revisit the capitol building which I recall it being beautiful at dawn and I find an unexpected architectural surprise. Lincoln Boulevard comes across as though Palm Springs architects came to construct sets for a live-action version of The Jetsons. A massive condemned hotel, a row of vintage bank buildings, an old publishing office, and the like line the wide grassy boulevard leading to the capitol itself. This aggressively modernized Frank Lloyd Wright vibe suggests there was a development surge for a decade or two after the war, and as I come close to the capitol building I can see where all the Oklahoma area money came from: the capitol lawn sports its very own personal Phillips 66-branded oil well. There’s an oil well on the capitol lawn. A commercial-grade production oil well (or it was until it ran dry in the 1980s, what with that oil crisis stepping up production). Not a replica. Not a monument. A functioning fucking oil well. If they can’t raise crops from the ground they might as well milk it for whatever the market will buy, right?

An oil well in front of the state capitol. Welcome to Oklahoma.

The shock wears off soon enough and I pull Cherry into the parking lot to get a typical posed shot. As I pull her across two handicap parking spots a car pulls up alongside me and a nice family pour out, gabbing and goofing and videotaping their outing to the big city. “I’m not one to park quite so recklessly,” I joke as they approach, “but it’s for posterity. Would you mind?” I ask as I hand the father my camera and get a picture with Cherry of me in front of the capital. “Not at all!” he obliges in a decidedly country-fried twang and I ask about his trip. “This is our first time up to the capitol and I’ve lived in the southern part of Oklahoma all my life,” he shares. “Then maybe you can explain the oil well in front of the capitol?” I ask, and sure enough he fills me in. There were a number of wells erected in the 1930s all around the area when oil was struck in the area. “Remember the Beverly Hillbillies? That’s the idea. People found lots of oil around here and got the hell out.” I love his self-deprecating hillbilly label because I think he’s reclaimed it, taken the sting out, and takes pride wearing that label himself. With a thank you and the wish of safe travels we part company and I circle the parkway to take in a few more sights. But the state capitol on a warm Saturday afternoon holds few charms and I move on to make time to Tulsa.

It turns out the desolate city holds one more charm on its eastern outskirts that snares my interest: a wild retro gas station/truck stop/greasy spoon that’s like nothing I’ve seen on trip so far. It resembles so many other Route relics this one is abandoned, but it’s gone by the wayside somehow differently from the others. I take the first available exit and pass a Flying J that appears to have superseded the Conoco/Driver’s Diner that would seem to have been conveniently located along the freeway until the tollway exchanges made it more economical to shutter the operation and move business up the road. The Conoco didn’t disappear; it outgrew its shell and abandoned it for a bigger one up the shoreline. Shame, in that the sharp spiked roofline perfectly captures the rocketship architecture that so pervaded yesteryear’s optimistic design. The greasepaint lettering in the window read “C.C.’s Diner,” as though someone decided to make a go of running the place after the 24 hour truck stop moved on. I find myself hoping someone else decides to try it again.

Once again the landscape has shifted and I find myself among rolling grassy hills leading into the Ozarks that lie just beyond Tulsa. The scenery is pleasant enough but the turnpike leaves me disengaged, with its concrete median barriers and breakaway safety fences to remind me I’m not in open country. I turn my mind to meditating on meditation. Just for fun I try to remember my first meditation experience, and I can’t quite locate it in psychic storage. I vividly recall visiting the Zen Center in Minneapolis during high school on an open meditation night just to see what all the fuss was about. A dozen novice meditators were led into the main room of an old and Spartan Victorian house that the center operated. The head monk was a Midwesterner (are white people capable of transmission?!?) who guided us gently, carefully, compassionately through the evening. He lit a candle and dimmed the lights and directed us to think about nothing in particular, just sit and be. Note your own breathing if your mind races, he suggested. I stared heavy lidded at the wall for half an hour. My legs hurt and my ass grew numb and every fidget everyone made was amplified a thousand times. At the end we discussed as a group and one participant piped up, “You know, for a little bit I started to really get into it. Then I thought to myself, ‘I’m really getting into this!’ and congratulating myself. That just kind of blew it.”Ooh, me too! I thought. How do I fix that? How do I bring my mind under my control? I was ready for the big insight, the big trick to silence the thoughts because I had the same experience! What would it be? What would he say? That sometimes happens, the monk responded with an understanding smile and a quiet voice. That’s it? That’s your big insight? That’s your guidance for new meditators? What a scam.

Three years later I would hear those words, That sometimes happens, float gently yet crisply in my ear while I was frantic and reeling, blanking completely on molecular structures an hour into an organic chemistry final (whose grade would determine if I was eligible to declare chemistry as my major and thus seduce my high school chemistry teacher), struggling to surface those thoughts I had spent the past week installing with the help of nicotine and caffeine and awful industrial music. The monk didn’t correct the novice’s recognition or refine his observation because there was nothing, quite literally, to do about it. The self-mastery doesn’t entail prison-like control of workings of the mind; thought patterns arise and fade, yet the mind isn’t a machine to be programmed and thoughts aren’t some poor dog to be kicked. The mind works as it works. Pay attention to it, study it, respect it. Or don’t. Let the mind think lazy thoughts and do crazy things, since that sometimes happens anyway.

This self inquiry game may not be fun or easy so it helps to have someone to play along with. My friend Tyson has been an amazing teammate because somehow he mastered the art of the assist. He started doing it in high school when he got turned onto all things avant garde and brought me into a world where John Cage, LaMonte Young, and Phillip Glass transfigured music’s content and intentionally provoked a response from the audience. He showed me how an open mind could give a lot of room to things like free jazz, an improvised form music that comes off as noise to the uninitiated ear, which I found entirely unlistenable—at first. Some of us acquire a taste for it, like coffee or wasabi. He made “difficult music” his thing while carrying on philosophical and psychic inquiry in an effort to come to terms with his own being in the world. And he practiced Zen. Kind of. I have no idea how seriously he meditated but he was steeped in the koan literature and had managed to penetrate the cosmic absurdity of everyday life. As our careers took off we worked together for a while, on one of those marathon projects where the end never arrives and the finish line keeps moving farther and farther away. After spending almost a year on tough systems engineering problem in which the software we were building would not “scale,” or grow to handle twice as much work with twice the number of machines, I suddenly saw a pattern (not true) where we could restructure the whole scheme or any other to scale as large as I liked. It was like discovering a universal code for unlimited technical growth. I was wildly excited and I explained the line of reasoning to the team; afterward I confided in Tyson that just when I thought I had everything about this product figured out, blam I get this new flash of insight.

“How can that be?” I asked, “If you’ve gone as deep as deep gets, how is it possible to go any deeper?”
“That’s the trick to enlightenment,” he told me. “It’s recurring. It never stops. It goes as deep as it goes, and then goes even deeper.”

There are depths to enlightenment? Development never ends? How do I know when I’m done? How do I figure out how everything works so I never ever fail and make the world work exactly how I want it to? And how does this guy know so much about going deeper? Maybe a few well-placed and easily repeated words to the wise really is all it takes. I have no clue if Tyson had that insight or he was parroting some parable he picked up along the way but his gift of transmission was working in overdrive that afternoon because he restructured the world for me. That’s not an overstatement. If the product I was working on always held the prospect of deeper and broader improvements, then I’d never be done. My race to create the perfect, ultimate, final version was a race unwinnable. Software is funny that way, it cries for continual upgrades, enhancements, and maintenance or someone faster and smarter will come along and sell a better version. “Sorry, James, we like you and all but we just couldn’t wait for you to make it perfect. Good luck with that, though.” Like democracy displacing the monarchy where conditions are ripe, not because it’s perfect but because it’s leaner and meaner and a shade better—only software runs that program on a timescale of weeks rather than years. To run ever faster is to win the unending race. If building the perfect beast was no longer the destination because every beast needs continual rebuilding, then my race would be better run on the side streets and aqueducts and lakeside paths rather than the main artery cordoned off from traffic, I recognized. It would be a better fit for me to explore. Within six months I had transferred into a management rotation and left behind the product line and technical skills that had defined my career in pursuit of this unspecified, ambiguous goal of “learning the business.”

The pursuit of enlightenment via sales and marketing. It might come as a surprise to some people just how empathetic and ego-free one learns to be in the course of one-on-one selling. It’s a bit like therapy. Sales people face continual rejection and the good ones learn to assess value from the point of view of their customers. The epoch of plaid blazers and double discounts on piece-of-shit trade in cars are largely a thing of the past; serious technology consumers are savvy shoppers and they have plenty of alternatives to choose from. The talented salespeople I met were often recovering frat boys that could drink a few pitchers an hour and they knew how to step into their customer’s world, take a peek around, and offer them something useful. If they happened to be insincere, they were nevertheless effective at sales. If they happened to be sincere, they were effective at sales and were genuinely neat people.

This revealed a deeper truth: the benefit of different perspectives doesn’t need to be provided in some feel-good pursuit of “nice”; a persistent individual can extract the benefit of different perspectives. It helps to have a mission to accomplish, then there’s no harm doing homework to become a competent amateur to inform those apparently foolish questions about what seems common sense to those with experience. By disclosing my ignorance combined with true interest I open myself to the possibility of trading up my understanding. When I say “trade up,” I mean choosing a better option but at a higher cost. I paid the higher price of looking silly, miscommunicating, revealing my own lack of experience, and so on. Specifically, I would look for better, cheaper, more effective techniques for carrying out product marketing strategies, and I would do it by asking for the opinions of people working frontline. It helped me to know what the conflicting perspectives were so I might take them into account, usually with a grain of salt, and weigh the tradeoffs. Opinions disclose something about speakers—like how much they will hate me when I initiate this incentive program or that field promotion. Buying another’s insight involves investing time, energy, and interest while regulating ego defenses. Not a trivial task.

One way to play the self inquiry game as a team sport is to let people cover positions, mixing up the different strengths teammates have to support one another. That’s the premise of cross-functional workgroups, steering committees, and their ilk. My experience is that these groups just love to degenerate into personal attack forums for some reason. But not necessarily: experts in a field such as history regularly decline to comment on topics outside their field such as literature even when they may have well-informed ideas, partly to preserve expert status and partly not to disclose their own knowledge limits. It’s then straightforward to play a game of inquiry in which people versed in competing perspectives (including those with which the expert disagrees) facilitates a dialog where everyone trades up their level of understanding by making claims, introducing facts, disclosing opinions (as opinions, careful not to conflate them with facts), clarifying meanings, and so forth. For some people this is a whole lot less fun than conversation as battle where begrudging assent validates one’s own spurious beliefs; for some of us it’s a core tool to empathetically investigate the world. Pretend for a moment that there are three levels to competence: amateur, practitioner, and expert. In reality this is a continuous scale so these grouping are simply illustrative, but they make the point. Imagine then a group of people, A, B, and C with varying degrees of expertise in this or that subject area (I don't mind regarding someone slightly better versed than me an expert even if they're just book smart) who collectively embarks on an interdisciplinary investigation of the problems or theories or areas of concern in these topics.

	Topic X	Topic Y	Topic Z
Expert	A	B, C	A, C
Practitioner	B	-	-
Amateur	C	A	B

Consider Topic X where A is an expert, B is a practitioner (has working knowledge), and C is an amateur. It's likely be frustrating for everyone if the conversation locks in at any level: expert-level will tend to frustrate C given his struggle with the jargon, amateur-level will tend to bore A with its simplistic approach, and practitioner-level will seem unproductive to everyone since it's usually a transition level. In the course of collective inquiry, however, C can trade up by struggling through the jargon with the help of A and B; B can trade up by incorporating areas of expertise from Topic Y, for example; and A can trade up by verbalizing the expert insight and fishing for interdisciplinary insight from Topics Y and Z. Everybody trades up. The cost? Time, energy, miscommunication, jargon translation, and asking silly questions.

Why do this? Why waste precious moments of life considering ideas that don’t reinforce my own beliefs and risk exposing me to crazy, evil, hateful, wrong thoughts? The only reason I can think of is that there are times when I feel like exploring and appreciating our differences—maybe to consider a new perspective, become conversant in a subject, or pick up a chick at a bar. There are times when uttering those reassuring words, "I agree!" is simply not a priority; better to get that sense, "I disagree, but now I understand and I have no urge to reconcile our points of view." Whatever the reason, variety-seeking is itself variety-seeking: sometimes I’m up for a challenge and sometimes I want to be around a bunch of folks who think exactly like me. I’m just talking about how it works when I happen to be seeking variety. So instead of a politician, a theologian, and an environmental scientist coming together to entrench their respective positions about global climate change, the questions might be directed toward constructive awareness: What are the areas of agreement, if any? What are the areas of contention? What informs the debate? Is our rule of evidence going to be unequivocal proof, a statistically likely outcome, the public sentiment, history and tradition? If we embark on a program of X, what is the consequence? Who is affected? What does it cost? These questions seek not to reach harmony and agreement and peace but to reveal the assumptions, establish the decision criteria, and move the topic forward. Collective action to replace collective animosity.

This got to me a couple of years ago. Finding myself in the crossfire of one too many “I can’t believe Bush got us in this god-awful war and you don’t love Kerry”/”You’re an asshole for questioning our troops” exchanges I took a break from getting involved in any political discussions for a year or so to work out just what was at play and why discussions I found myself embroiled in debates about personal beliefs and ad-hominem attacks. I found a fairly regular pattern at work.

An adversarial approach to our differences of opinion is neither good nor bad, but “good for” or “bad for” some purpose. Advocating a hard-line platform is crucial for law, rhetoric, and certain forms of political debate where the object is to win a zero-sum game and separate the winners from the losers. I don’t mind playing these games at times since I’m not all that concerned with making people feel wonderful about their hidden agendas or delusional beliefs. Inquisitive conversation, by contrast, is less concerned with being nice and more concerned with being consequential, and when we cross into the sensitive, self-identity laden world of race, sex, religion, and politics a couple of interesting interactions and consequences can be observed over and over. For example, the halo effect is a psychological phenomenon where one or two aspects of a person are globalized to the whole person positively or negatively (sometimes called the devil effect). A nice smile can lead to the perception of “a really sincere gal,” creating a halo. A terse response to an email may suggest “a totally self-centered dickhead,” giving him horns. The earlier in the getting-to-know-you phase the more pronounced, but it happens even to friends. Most of us recognize that how we say something can overshadow what we actually say (“I never said I was angry!!!1!1!”) and this devil effect just makes it worse.

Another characteristic of the adversarial approach is egoic defense, where people under threat muster mental resources to protect themselves. Psychological researchers have conducted fascinating studies where subjects are asked to remember sequences of random numbers ten digits long. It’s tricky for most people. In one group the researchers induce a sense of ease and non-critical observation (“this doesn’t indicate how competent a person you are”). With the other group they induce a sense of threat and evaluative reporting (“this indicates your competence and we will report the results to your supervisor”). As you might expect, the threat and worry reduces the ability to remember these numeric sequences on average by 25% (not invariantly since some people handle stress better than others, but as with most psychological studies the results hold consistently on average). That’s a lot of mental energy dedicated to staving off attack. Egoic defense is often induced by intellectual violence, where the inquisitor invokes facts, theories, or scholarly research (much of which is debated within its own field) to threaten other participants in the discussion. Instead of saying, “Have you considered how that belief might be reconciled with this empirical observation?” it’s more along the lines of “Let me show you that you’re wrong, bitch, and that you have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Useful technique for win/lose games. Not so useful for building interpersonal relationship. My belief system (as well as the belief systems of a number people I’ve come to know intimately) is in a permanent state of growing and becoming and is guaranteed to exhibit internal inconsistencies as I consider alternatives, as well as disagree with evidence from the outside world. To the people who like to use intellectual violence as a method of building relationships I like to offer up a little self disclosure in response: “Thanks for pointing out this out to me in a way that makes me feel foolish and stupid, I appreciate that you’re interesting in restoring my mental order by belittling me. Now go fuck yourself with a screwdriver.” A response that I suspect satisfies the schadenfreude they derive from irritating other humans. What’s the insight? Behaving nicely (i.e., respectful, curious, and encouraging) has less to do with some absolute moral prescript and more to do with inducing a positive halo effect while reducing egoic defenses. Behaving nicely is a tool for extracting the benefit of other perspectives, should one ever be interested in such a benefit.

When I reengaged in political discussions I decided to impose on myself the arbitrary goal of refusing to play by win/lose rules. Nothing wrong with debate in and of itself, I do it all the time. Yet to see what would happen I declined enticements to pick sides, instead offering a canned response: “Please stop. Why are we having this discussion? Because if you need to rip me a new political asshole to make yourself feel better I’ll give you a head start: I vote straight-ticket Democrat and I fundamentally oppose every New Deal entitlement program ever instituted. Why don’t you disentangle that belief morass all by your lonesome while I go talk with some stranger who isn’t interested in different opinions exploiting differences of opinion in some jackass competition?” I might leave off the “jackass” part if I was being sucked in by a friend, but that’s the gist of the message.

This killed quite a few conversations and brought me to the brink of one or two bar fights. It also let me set aside ritual insults in favor of a better understanding and appreciation for a range of political perspectives that honest to God had never occurred to me. I traded up “Shame on Bush for abusing his office!” laments in favor of more interesting (to me) considerations such as, “How is it that the President has been able to act covertly and secretively without the media critically exposing this policy? How was 9/11 parlayed into a blank check to engage in militaristic misadventure? Is the office of President itself this powerful? Now that we’re in, how might we get out?” Of course I would still get pissed off and socially disclose my disapproval when I felt like it. It’s fun. It’s cathartic. And it’s completely counter-informative. Absolute positions set the bait for an adversarial response, depending on the company one keeps.

Speaking of absolute positions, a prominent anti-abortion billboard welcomes me to Tulsa just before I catch sight of the familiar brown highway signs putting me on the right track. Route 66 slices straight across Tulsa along the newer 11th Street main drag as well as the older Admiral Place alignment. I opt to run Cherry up and down 11th Street first, passing the University of Tulsa and a stretch of motels and Mother Road commemoratives (“Walker’s on Route 66” service station and the like) and by late afternoon set out in search of nightlife venues, reasoning that if I’m going to make the most of the evening I should get my bearings. We cross back and forth on the route, noting old signage and remnant service stations enjoying a second life use as snack shops, antique stores, and art markets. As I wear out my interest in central route I head downtown in pursuit of some action. It’s becomes clearer to me that Tulsa is not a bustling metropolis booming with development. Far too many shuttered businesses, abandoned apartment complexes, and unrented warehouses for a growing metro area. In L.A. or Chicago these would be gobbled up as condo conversions faster than I could blink. My coolest finds are the Coney Island, a hole in the wall restaurant that inhabits what appears to be the former rental office of a dilapidated stilt supported four-story hotel with a catwalk balcony surrounding the whole building, and the Mayo Motor Inn with its deco signage calling attention to a 1950s parking garage built to handle the postwar traffic boom for the Sullivan-style Mayo Hotel directly across the street.

I wish I could have visited Tulsa in its heyday before declining oil prices gutted its economy in the 1980s because looking past the disrepair it appears to have been quite a sight. Vintage buildings with gothic entablature and complex frontispieces mingle with modern minimal simplicity, suggesting a development explosion (akin perhaps to Oklahoma City’s growth after striking oil?); unlike Chicago where an architectural potpourri gives vitality the cityscape this town feels more like rust and abandonment on stretches of the old route. My tour around downtown’s confines yields a few striking photos but there is scarcely a soul out in the dusking light and the appeal of striking conversation with one of the street people I encounter is even less than my interest in wasting time in one of the tiny ethnic bars that dot the alleyways and office building crevices. I chalk up the lack of bustle to my misread about of downtown’s nightlife, and there’s just enough construction and one-way road complication that I decide to roll toward the university and see what the action is like there.

Heading east along 11th I catch a glimpse of the biggest, reddest sun hanging over the steeple of the United Methodist church downtown and as luck would have it I turn off straight into the driveway of McElroy’s, a nicely preserved deco-style auto center. I arrange a stunning shot of the sun going down over town, the steeple tower gracefully impaling the orange orb. Zipping in and out of traffic I catch a few scowls from drivers apparently unaccustomed to tourists making like fools and taking pictures of nothing in particular. I wonder if they realize how truly beautiful this place is right now and I find myself hoping for their benefit they witness the scene that surrounds them. The gritty exterior belies the optimistic spirit to be found in rusted motels and abandoned warehouses and rehabilitated storefronts—the hope, the possibilities, the sheer potential is gorgeous.

Dusk turns darker and I cruise along in search of an inviting meet market. The advice of a liquor store clerk (I tend to regard liquor store employees as scenesters but the crew in this place serve more keeps the winos sauced) takes me to Cherry Street where I’m told the locals get together with other locals to talk about all things local. A nice place to be when you want to surround yourself with people who think exactly like you. I spot some outdoor restaurants where couples or friends might pass an evening but nothing seems too inviting for a little recreational banter. I realize how arbitrary my self-imposed limit of remaining offline is…if I were the internet phone Blackberry wired type I’d Google “Tulsa nightlife” into my PDA and Bluetooth the digital coordinates to my GPS, or some Star Trek equivalent. Still, motoring down Cherry Street in Cherry with the radio giving off good vibrations despite static reception provides a satisfyingly nostalgic thrill. It recalls Madison (probably just about every other college town too), where the popular bars are good for a game of darts and a pitcher but if you really want to get your groove on you have to find the out of the way nightspots, the house parties, the real players. You have to know what’s going on to find out what’s going on. There’s no easy starting point or first principle or welcome mat. Asking the liquor store clerk never hurts, of course. Cherry Street loses its luster and I make my way down Admiral Place back to the main drag in search of a motel with free wifi since getting online to locate the cool venues seems most efficient. I’m no Luddite, after all.

Around 7:30PM I check out a few motels on the east side of the strip. I’m up for classic Route 66 lodging and look out for the prominent neon signs. Deceptively enticing neon signs. Stopping into (and immediately out of) a series of roach traps, each one growing skuzzier than the last, I finally make it to America’s Value Inn and Suites and think I’ve found something authentic based on the towering starburst light swirl that could have been stolen from the Vegas strip and planted here by the Rat Pack in an elaborate gag to waste a weekend. I find the parking lot sparse and a few inhabited cabin-style units in the back. It looks fine. At first. Then I see the shirtless smoker struggling to stand erect a few spaces down… the bulletproof glass and stain-proof Astroturf in the front office…the vaguely medicinal scent as I walk in…the broken ceiling fan wobbling a bit too low, ready to decapitate the lanky inattentive patron passing underneath…the angry, weathered Andy Rooney lookalike chewing out his bleary eyed traveling buddy in hushed but throaty shouts. Twenty-seven bucks, I figure, for a shower and a life-endangering experience. I step up to the cashier’s cage (literally) and ask about a room.

“You ever stayed here before?” she asks knowingly.
“Nope,” I reply, checking my back with a looming sense of lets-not-get-shivved. “Just passing through,” I add.
“Well you best look at the room ‘fore you take it,” she says, “’cause there ain’t no refunds once you pay.”
“Great, whaddya need from me?” I comply, handing her my driver’s license and thinking that she exaggerates to spare herself the hassle of my trivial complaint about missing soap or weak water pressure.

I take the key and inspect the room. She does not exaggerate.

I unlock the door and push it open with my shoulder since the bottom drags across the church-green carpet stained with difficult to remove fluids (undoubtedly human), revealing two cigarette-burned beds, plaster cracks I could use for closets, a lone window above eye level, and a bathroom that has most certainly never seen a cleaning rag. The bare bulb hanging from an open electrical cavity in the ceiling casts enough light to scare off some of the more timid bugs who scuttle under the bed and burrow into the wall cracks. The braver ones don’t move at all, having most likely acquired a taste for human flesh. If it weren’t for the loose bathroom floor tiles I being vaguely sticky as I walked across them I just might have stuck around for the sheer experience. But something tells me to get out of the room—I suspect it’s one of these predatory roaches that has evolved the capacity for speech.

“Thanks for the heads-up,” I tell the clerk as I collect my ID. “I think I’ll make tracks a little further past town tonight.”
“Thought you just might,” she acknowledges without so much as a glance away from her issue of Us Weekly.

On my way out the door I resign myself to getting out of Tulsa tonight and compute the distance to Joplin, MO, wondering if I’ll hold out that for long. Not far along down the route I turn into a truck stop for gas and pull up along a 1967 Volvo 1800-S (the car Roger Moore drove in “The Saint”) and beg the owner to let me take a few pictures. He laughs and agrees, and in the middle of my little photo session a squat old woman in an oversized T-shirt walks up to me and starts shouting.

“Hey, you! With the camera!” I think she’s hostile to the idea that I got her in the background, like maybe she’s lying low while the heat cools down. “You’re the guy who was standing in the road today. Taking pictures!”
“Yes that was me, down on 11th outside downtown.”
“You know I had no idea what you were so interested in when I passed you and then I looked in my side mirror and wouldn’t you know! What a sunset! I got out to take a few pictures myself,” she tells me. For a moment I’m almost speechless; I’d hoped the Tulsa natives would see Tulsa like I did, and she did. “Fantastic! I’m really glad to hear that! You get some good shots?” I ask as I pull mine up on the digital display.
“Dunno, my camera uses film.”
We chat a little more and I find out she’s known as “the crazy lady from Tulsa” when she travels, and I ask her, “Okay crazy lady from Tulsa, if I’m passing through town going east where’s the next little town I can stop for the night and find a room?”
“If’n I were you I’d head on over to Claremore,” she says. “If you want a nice drive, take Oklahoma-66. If you want to get there fast, take the turnpike.”

I take her advice and take the turnpike into Claremore. It looks like a nice enough town, but I’m less interested in exploring than getting a good night's sleep. I investigate the Claremore Motor Inn on the outside of town across from Will Rogers High School and am pleased to find a quaint, Western-themed (east) Indian-run motel. I chat for a while with the clerk on duty, a guy around my own age who is half-attending to a couple of young kids playing in the lobby.

“What’s the story with Will Rogers, by the way,” I make conversation. “Everything here is Will Rogers: Will Rogers turnpike, Will Rogers memorial highway, Will Rogers High School for God’s sake.”
“Yeah, I know. So he was born and raised here when this was Indian Territory. Part Cherokee I guess, and he did everything. He was an actor, a cowboy, a writer, a pilot…heck he would have been the next President if he lived. Kind of a big deal if you’re from around here.”
“Oh, I can see why,” I acknowledge. “I had no idea. He’s one of those heroes you must have heard about a lot growing up.”
“No, I’m not from here. Chicago, actually. My friends here are heading back up tomorrow,” he tells me and I laugh.
“Well, I’m from Chicago, most recently anyway. West loop,” I tell him.
“No kidding? I went to school at UIC.”
“I live a block from where you went to school. Small world,” I smile realizing just how true that is. Probing further I find he’s a business major who moved his family out of Chicago’s expensive boroughs in search of a business to run and a decent quality of life. Looks to me like he found it.

I make my way upstairs to a clean room that comes with friendly service for a very good price and call it a night, exhausted, pleased with the day’s progress, and not the least bit worried about man-eating bedbugs.

Next stop: So This Is What Hell Feels Like