Big Ramp to Nowhere

Stony Island. The big ramp to nowhere.

"Stay on target, stay on target" Aaron pop-cultured from the driver's seat.

"You're soaking in it"

There's too much junk in the air, we're steeped in it. Forget about the Communists, we're polluting our own damn fluids.

"Sex, drugs and rock and roll"

The miles clicked by.

Thickets of billboards flew up on the roadside.

'huge sex emporium' 'world's largest fireworks warehouse' 'thrills ahead'

Everything in our life is supersized.

Between here and there shuttle discrete chunks of culture, boxed and numbered, 18-wheels fast.

Maybe steaks do come from your grocer's freezer. I haven't seen otherwise.

"Roads? we don't need no stinking roads"

What we got instead were time machines. Kitsch and Kodak moments. You could see the high tide of culture passing us by, leaving behind inland seas, cut off from a vaster ocean, post-historic evaporation unfed by social waters: old gas stations, towns of the last centuries.

Layers of sediment cut into the roadside, bulldozers strip-mine dumps, recycling the present of a moment ago.

More miles added to the tally.

We used to be a nation of the driver. Summer road trips used to be the province of Dads. And principles.

Intense moments of the Nuclear Family bordering on fission.

Now, our cars are faster, bigger, presumably better. But we seem to travel less.

There was a time when we embraced the size of our country; saw the roads as true connections, physical things. We've become too abstract, reduced our world to symbols. Cut ourselves off. Become more provincial. Staked out our respective oases in the desert of the real.

There's nowhere to go. So, we get there faster.

Travelling so fast that we seem to stand still.

mile 22.

Then 26.

I blinked.

We're not where we thought we were. All this stuff looks alike: Illinois, Indiana, Michigan.

We're the robber barons of culture, complicit in the design.

We get pulled over for our troubles, given a roadmap to our next confusion.

"St. Joseph"

so aptly named; the whole trip's been one giant headache.

5 minutes to spare, we skid to a halt in the denouement of the Blues Brothers, pulling into the SOS.

In even less time, my paper's been stamped.

I'm 'official' again.

"you may move freely about the cabin"

All this, for that.

There and back again:

'it's not an adventure until you make it home.'

And there we were.