xtcian

7/21/02 You know, if you

7/21/02

You know, if you pick the right angle to go across it, New York is a big goddamn state. I learned this the honest way tonight, leaving from Columbia County at 7pm, determined to sleep in a different Commonwealth by night's end. So here I lie at the Ramada Inn in Erie, PA at 4am, unbowed by the deceptively wide girth of New York. Sure, people talk about "the City" and "upstate" and the "finger lakes," but there's a whole other chunk of New York where there aren't even gas stations. With the Land Rover running on kerosene fumes, I finally pulled into a tiny village with one drunk guy manning a press-key register - thank god they had Super Unleaded, since the Rover is a prissy car that can't take the hard stuff.

I think I got everything done I was supposed to do at the farm, which is a rarity for me. I even put up Japanese Beetle traps, which caught about 50 of the suckers in the first hour. I don't know how much of my small, disturbed readership has had truck with Japanese Beetles, but they suck. They'll destroy any flower they can get their metallic little hands on they're the entomological equivalent of the Borg.

We had a great weekend at the farm, just the three of us younger kids, strangely sans our romantic others. Michelle doesn't really have a romantic other, but I have faith that'll change sooner than later. She's off to take a 9-week first aid trek across America it was a huge deal to be asked, and is something that will mean a lot to her – but more importantly, it means she has no internet access and I can talk all the shit I want right on these pages, my friends.

Speaking of shit, there must be a business school equation that correlates "how decent your establishment wants to appear" vs. "how ugly you can make stuff so customers don't steal it." Bowling shoes are the most obvious example of something made so unattractive as to render them useless to anyone except the most ironic hipsters, but the bedspreads at national motel chains have to be a close second:

all this for $60/night beady-eyed devil-dog not included

James Lileks has a site that chronicles the worst motel postcards from every state (this one from Iowa is one of my favorites) but I'm pretty sure that the eight-steps-down-from-Ikea furnishing of any major hotel chain room is worse than anything from the 1960s. It's so bland, so sad, so criminally without joy, that I'm going to post a picture of the best flower in our garden just to give this room a little lift.

Tessa's dahlia had a coming-out party today (just like Tessa herself did in 1987 and 1994!)