Notebook Made While Driving 18 Hours from Illinois to Rhode Island, Labor Day Weekend 2002, in One Go, Stopping to Gas Only and to Urinate My Pee

Departing after teaching English 247, 2:30 PM, bright sky, HWY 74 east.

Those poor raccoons.

From that rock song I learned “every rose has its thorns.”

The Ford Expedition is an abomination. Great day teaching at ISU today except for the one kid hunched at his desk: the sand-dollars of sleep hanging under his eyes kept clacking in the small breezes of his mouth weather. I woke him and explained that eye-sleep constitutes a type of guano.

Jazz is pervert music. Maurice Scharton died two days ago, crashed thru car windscreen. I did not know him many people spoke of his pigtail.

From that rock song I learned Ooh Shadoobay.

Inexplicable erection between Dayton and Columbus. Very hard, very very hard.

Buicks. These cars are for white elder couples. The Buick design-engineers of the late 1980s modeled their conveyances upon Ethan Allen furniture. The model straining to pass my efficient Toyota resembles a teak coffee table. That Ohio Buick is occupied by people who appear to be Christians. They have very loose skin. A coffee table on wheels driven by a pair of coasters.

1. “When your brother is shot out of the cannon, is he conscious the whole time?”

2. “I hope so.”

Shoulder smeared with the meat-frosting of an antelope. Up inside the antelope one sees blood and feces and chemicals frozen under the horns. One sees bubbles in the eyes, the flight of the brown-red eggs. I see all of this while passing the ripped carcass at 70 miles an hour. At this speed my vehicle will achieve 46 miles per gallon. At 62 miles an hour I achieve 50 miles per gallon if I don’t use the air conditioner.

We will know what is inside Jerry Lewis if we continue on this road. The road we are presently on is Hwy 80 East Jerry I am coming.

I remember her breasts. Staring at her breasts was like spending 2 nights inside a kazoo.

East of Akron, out of tedium, I begin to sing “Slowly balding, slowly balding, slowly balding,

The vaginas of your women are balding,

the penises of your men are balding,

Your wife is stretching out. Shrungen, balden, stretchle wife. Your whole family is really bald and stretched out now. Soon your children bald will go off to college balden, shrungen, stretchle. Bald, slowly slowly bald. Balding slowly. Slowly shrung. Ooh shadoobay.” The sun sets beneath Akron.

When driving long distances a person enters a kind of snakedance psychosis and I really do feel at this point like I have been rewired with the ligaments of a baboon. In the twilight, bird almost hits windshield, cartwheels off in the slipstream. It is a matter of natural record that a stork can deliver its own enema. Your mother’s meatloaf looked like stonehenge that night. She set it right down there between the butter plate and the jam tray, the meatloaf so hard and cold a baby fog settled over the dinnerware. The stonehenge meatloaf lay there in minuscule immensity. There was embarrassed silence for your mother. I stood up with deliberation and undid my buckle, I bent over and wishing to please your mother, placed a small wedge of meatloaf between the cheeks of my buttocks. I smiled and said, “This tastes very good.” Somehow this caused an uproar.

Comfort Inn my toosh. Country Rd 533 Brookville. “I got a peaceful easy feeling.” What if The Lord hid your soul in the fundament of a hen and you chose to recover it after finding out which hen contained it? How would you proceed? Or say your soul is lodged in a goat lip and you have identified the goat in question. Do you call a chaplain or a person of animal lip knowledge. Now that I am employed I hope I can avoid the direct attention of psychiatrists. Big cliffs 709 miles from Bloomington/Normal.

Pulling over in Clarion Pennsylvania to sleep, tilt seat back fall asleep seat belt on, wake 4:30 AM Eastern time, pee and drive. Clarion is one half the distance between Normal and Providence.

My advice is demonstrate incompetence in every ancillary job you undertake. Demonstrate this incompetence in every subsidiary feature of your personality, leaving a reserve mastery in the heart of your gifts. People who are strategically ineffective in this manner are left alone to do their work. If you are incompetent in the right way, no one will wish to improve upon you. Truly independent beings are incompetent by design. For instance now I am in New York and the geese are collectively independent: here are some now and they are refusing to fly in W’s and V’s. They are flying in P’s and O’s.

The succeeding is my response to a fellow driver in mid Connecticut. Earnest Driver I am putting the end of a wrench in your navel, am putting the concomitant pain of a duck in each of your heels, a half a duck’s pain to either heel, a full duck’s pain to the pair of your feet. Into your knees I lodge the ache of a goose, into your hips I fix the soreness of an emu, into your chest I plant the suffering of an ostrich, and at the top of your head, in your ditch of reason, I button the anxiety of an hummingbird, just a fleck of misery there to goad.

Your obvious bosoms reach outward. Many prows and ships come to us like your breasts, by two’s. Many ships do however come by three’s and four’s. The point being your obvious bosoms reach outward substantially bearing the cargo of your nipples. I have put my drafts and versions on your bosoms, but the wind blew them off. I eschewed the top of your head as a place to put my versions as there is a heavy weather out of your mouth. I adore you. This rattletrap of a dock adores you, and the old hard fish under this rigid dock adores you. I the rigid dock am sailing to rendezvous with the entire fleet of your body parts, each part bearing its cargo of boobies. And I am the dock am bearing my rigidity, my rigid wood, my immense creosote members, my masculine pylons and stiffened beams. I adore you you adore you. Life is to be dealt with over and over.

On top of your baby, I put a flat baby. The flat baby is sorrowful and smells of old wings. I am trying to extinguish your baby with a flat baby. Suffering is conservative. Endurance is progressive. Life is to be dealt with over and over. Ooh shadoobay.

D, I shall garland you with the epigraphs of far away books. And failing that, kiss you.