Writing

Happy Friday.  I originally used this post as an opportunity to vent about hating school, but after re-reading it at the end of the semester, it just sounds...angry.  C'mon now, Abs, there's no need for all that!  Here's some stuff to make you happy readers:





Oh, the good times.

Dear Profs - sorry about my weirdness this semester!  Enjoy your breaks!


~A

Out in the Desert

The trip from New Orleans to Southern Arizona was the longest I've ever traveled without seeing a friend; just under a week - oh! like The Ring.  Except right before the hairy dead girl crawled out of the well to kill me, I found myself at Daina's in Tucson.  She has a lot of hair, but did not try to kill me until the last day.

What I did:

• Took pictures alone in the desert.
• Noticed cell phone didn't work much.
• Forgot to drink water - yikes.
• Noticed WiFi didn't work much.
• Talked to myself alone in the desert.

Yup, it starts to make you crazy.  A week doesn't seem like a long time, right?  Most of us could use a week away from it all.  We usually never get that week.  Thank God for strangers and aliens! 

I was going bonkers, the same thoughts bouncing around in my head, the same songs playing over and over.  Eventually, I had to let go of all the craziness, and ended up having a really good time.  If you want to know the truth, I'm more independent today from just that one week alone.  

I did no ghost hunting this week, so please understand the only ghosts you will encounter until Tucson are mine (bo-ring!)...although there were a few good meals, and like I said, the aliens.  Stay tuned!  

The Truth is Out There.

~A

Get Me The Hell Out Of Texas

The sun had set by the time I got to the Holiday Inn Express in Abilene, TX (a small jellyfish).  I ate something freeze-dried like couscous in a cup with Austin cheese and crackers, wrote this blog entry about Cape May- please see TX rant towards the end - and slept soundly.  There's something serene about being in the Southwest, and I was not spooked in any way, shape, or form. The hotel was too busy for that, anyway.  Who knew Abilene was so popular?

     Next morning, I woke up to dry sinuses and blogged about the loneliness of being on the road, traveling further from home all the time.  Guess I was spooked by my own ghosts, after such a long drive and drastic scenery change the previous day.  That loneliness was only exacerbated by a hotel packed full of people in Abilene for some sort of reunion.  Looking phenomenal in my PJs, I went downstairs to have some continental breakfast, and was barely able to steal some coffee in the mob scene.

I got the coffee - woot!

The Southwest is for loners, however.  It's cowboy country...quiet and (literally) deserted.  And how do people breathe around here, anyway?  Plenty of open space, but your nose will close up like a clam in distress, in the dry air.  I couldn't breathe through my nostrils until Kansas...and at that point, who wanted to smell the Ramada Inn?  Yuck.

Onward.

There was not much on the way to Roswell, New Mexico...maybe 5 cars on U.S. 380, a few towns that all looked like the one above.  Some didn't have gasoline, but all had Frappuchino.  At one point I really thought hard about the fact that if my rental car stopped, I could be dead out here before anybody found me.  Yikes!  


~A

Destination Austin

After making it past Houston...

...where I did not stop, due to this thing about getting lost in large, unfamiliar cities when without a purpose, I cut up TX-71 to Austin.  Has anyone ever noticed, incidentally, that there's a highway ring around all the major cities in this country?  Check out a map.  Each one looks like a jellyfish, with an arterial around it, and a bunch of major highways going in and out in different directions.  From space it must look like giant Portuguese Man o' Wars have taken over the country.  (Well it looks like that on Google Maps.)  I loved watching my progress on the GPS around the jellyfish, in all the major cities I did not stop.  Sometimes when there's so much available to do and eat...one just wants to pass by, and quickly get to a quiet suburb for some Wendy's.  Weird.

Austin

     Sad story, Austin - a place I did want to stop and eat.  Unable to find these supposed street vendors, I instead drove around in a circular fashion looking for one Mexican restaurant that Google swore up & down existed, which I can assure you does not exist.  The neighborhoods looked fresh, though.  I also could not find the DOUGH Pizzeria Napoletana because it is, apparently, in San Antonio (perhaps good I did not know this at the time, or else might have easily turned south for the extra 1.5 hr drive to get some "authentic" Naples pizza).

     In a sorry state at this point, and nearing starvation, I stopped at a local grocery store and bought Laughing Cow cheese, crackers, and a bottled Starbucks Frappuchino (another tradition in the making...seriously, every single gas station in the U.S. has Frappuchino, one can't not buy it).  So, that was my big Texas meal...pretty ironic, considering Tex Mex is probably my favorite food.  It was really, really hard leaving Austin with nothing but cheese, crackers and coffee.  With four more hours of driving to go....story of life, on the road.

The trip up U.S. 183 to Abilene was actually quite peaceful and pretty.  I was a lone car on the road, passing through the heart of Texas, and it looked very authentic!  Farms, Longhorns, a bunch of creepy trees that look like they've been struck by lightening...yup, TX was pretty cool.

One day, Austin...we shall meet again, and you will know my appetite.


~A

American Mars

Sorry Brian Kearney, I had to steal the title from you.  If it's any consolation, that is the perfect way to describe the Southwest....because we're headed to Texas, people!  Happy Monday!!

My Fear and Loathing Look

This drive from Baton Rouge, LA to Abilene, TX was originally supposed to start in Shreveport and plow through Dallas and Fort Worth (Northern TX), via I-20 in 6 hours - i.e., planned a lot shorter.  But *I* wanted to see Austin, having been informed by Anthony Bourdain that the street food there is to die for, and therefore decided to take the southern route I-10 through Dallas, then cut up to Abilene via US-183.  This took a whopping 12 hours, which I did in one day...not such a blast, and no ghost hunting, whatsoever.  But I'm glad I took the long way for the following reasons:


1.  The scenery change was like nothing I've seen anywhere else in the country.  You go from swampland to desert in about two hours, hugging the Gulf.


2.  That's all I've got, actually.


Reasons I would have liked to go the original route:


1. Six hours.


2. Shreveport is vampire-central in the Southern Vampire Mysteries (a.k.a., the books True Blood are loosely based on).


Check out this progression of scenery:

...pretty crazy, huh?  


~A

Baton Rouge, or the Unplanned Detour

I left New Orleans in a similar manner to the way I arrived; during the night, and in a state of confusion.  After having what can now be looked back on as a stupid fight with B (and, I might add, missing her famous jambalaya), I packed up and drove off at approximately 4am, a day earlier than expected.  

Then more stupidity ensued, in thinking the 6 hour drive to Shreveport (next stop on the itinerary) would be no problem whatsoever - having been awake a mere 22 hours.  I made it 40 min passed Baton Rouge, then phoned a friend in New York (who was surely ecstatic to get the call), asking that this person hold off on work to a) find me a hotel and b) find me a cheaper hotel.  

Then I stopped in some dark nameless Louisiana town to get gasoline and try not to get murdered.  I called the cheaper hotel to ask that they a) book me a room with a AAA discount and b) let me check in at 6am, as opposed to the usual 4pm.  Out of unreasonable demands for the day, I backtracked to Baton Rouge, thus making a crucial change in the itinerary.  But these are little surprises that make living memorable.

Baton Rouge....what can I say about it?  Nothing relevant!  I saw the inside of a hotel for 29 hours, going out only for a pickup of water and Papa John's.  It was such a glorious detour though.  There's something about being completely alone in the anonymity of a random hotel, in a random place...it reminds you of how self-sustaining one is, that "security" in the form of things, people and places is a facade.  Do you know what I mean, who your best friend is truly?

I look back on my stay in Baton Rouge as a lovely, unplanned respite.  Also, the beginning of a Best Western Belgium Waffle tradition that would be so over by Ohio.

Have a great weekend, people...


~A

♪♫ Life in the Quarter ♫

The French Quarter is a good time.  Case in point:

Good food, good music, and history.  At night, we saw Saturn through some guy's large telescope, drank jager out of a plastic cup on Bourbon St, and got a tarot card reading outside St. Louis Cathedral.  Good times.


~A

The Storm

Happy Hump Day!  I'm going to depress you mid-week with the knowledge that New Orleans has never fully recovered from Hurricane Katrina.  Some of you, and by "you" I might mean my Human Resource class adjunct at Marist, have been saying "it was a storm, it wasn't racial, get over it."  Well, don't be a bigot.

Beth obligingly drove me around the Bywater (her old neighborhood) and the Ninth Ward until I was about to pass out from dehydration - literally - and told me all she could, from an educated viewpoint/experience, about The Storm.

Please check out this highly educational interactive demonstration of the flood progress.  Do it!

There are more educated and more qualified people that have tried to explain all the failings that went into this disaster, so I'm not going there.  Needless to say, it's an experience driving around a neighborhood years later, seeing flood marks, the infamous X's still on the houses, old foundations.  

...B's friend (above) did something to help.

Things that stood out for me:

• Accounts of the Superdome...or in other words, "hell on Earth"
• Descriptions of the flood's force into homes
• "Katrina-Crazy" as a cute term used to describe a serious disorder
• Rotting food in refrigerators
• The descent into a survival-culture that happened as New Orleans waited for help that didn't arrive, and what ramifications that has had on it's society.

Also...how my friend watches the rising Mississippi and worries about the disctricts that will be evacuated.  

~A

P.S. This is a haunted house.

Awe-Some!