I arrived at Chimney Rock about 150 years too late.
First, because its spire—today about 300 feet above the surrounding plains—was once much higher and more grandiose, but has been steadily chipped away over time by erosion and lightning strikes. Doesn’t even look like a chimney any more.
And second, because the original Indian name for Chimney Rock was apparently “Elk Penis.” Wicked. Continue reading Day 2: Driving the Oregon Trail
I woke with the sun on Monday morning, as campers tend to do. It was cold and extremely damp: water droplets clung to the inside of my tent, and when I shuffled slightly, I got a very chilly early-morning shower from the ceiling. “GAH I’M AWAKE!”
Stepping carefully out onto the grass, I found myself camped next to the Platte River—when did THAT get there? Thick fog rose off of it like smoke from a fire (err, sorry, Austin). As I packed the car, I heard animal sounds I couldn’t quite place, and then a perfect V of Canadian geese flew overhead. It was a glorious morning. Continue reading Day 2: Corn + Trains = Nebraska
Thanks to the lock-picking adventure from the night before, I gave myself an extra hour of sleep, waking at 6:30 Sunday morning and feeding the dog before I jumped in the car with my worldly possessions and sleepily pointed my car north on I-35. The break-in from the night before produced a permanent wind noise sound from the edges of my passenger door. So that’ll be fun to get used to.
I swung through Temple and said goodbye to Dad & family before church started, then punched it up the Lord’s Highway to Dallas, where I stopped to see Sonali and Ashis’s new baby Akhil.
After paying my respects and, oddly enough, raiding Sonali’s pantry for spices—it’s the only thing that livens up backpacking food—I drove a bit further north and waited patiently in a half-hour drive-through line just for an In-N-Out Burger. The verdict is “delicious;” maybe not worth that wait, but at least I’ve popped my In-N-Out cherry.
…That sounded grosser than I meant it to. Continue reading Day 1: Baby, Burger, Ball of Twine.
In my defense, I got five hours of sleep Friday night—thanks a lot, Out of Bounds, with your awesome parties.
I was up bright and early Saturday morning, packing every damn thing I need for this trip, organizing all the way down to which pocket of the backpack I was putting things in (right, left, rear, top). Made a last-minute visit to Target for some remaining checklist items—camera tripod, Altoids, needle and thread. Met a friend for some goodbye pizza. Picked up some borrowed camera gizmos from Matt. And then watched UT win its season opener in typically-sloppy fashion with some good friends. (Well, they were watching; I was packaging oatmeal and couscous and dried blueberries into individually-sized Ziplocs.)
Finally as the hour grew late, things began coming together. I weighed my entire pack and it wasn’t too far over my target weight. I asked my friends’ collective help in carting everything off the dining table and into the car—maps, toilet paper, Hardy Boys mysteries. I got the clothes I needed for Sunday out of the bag. It was time for bed. I shut the trunk lid.
…I had locked my keys in the trunk.
Really.
I had that moment of genuine intellectual confusion—wait, people don’t REALLY lock their keys in their own trunks, do they?—and then realized that against all the laws of physics and reason, yes, I’d done exactly that. There was no spare key, but there was a passel of sympathetic friends, including my buddy Dave, visiting from Tennessee. Hey guess what? In the Special Forces, Dave learned how to break into cars!
So using some improvised tools from Brent and Amalia’s garage, after 40 minutes of effort, we jimmied our way into the Neon, and I wriggled through the trunk and grabbed my keys. Crisis over.
So that put me in bed an hour ahead of time, and got me pondering whether this was the official glitch for the trip, or the first of many. Guess I was about to find out.
As I finally drifted off to sleep at 1 AM, I had one final horrific realization:
My car doesn’t have cruise control.
It’s been a hell of a year for me, and for others. And so the timing couldn’t be better for me to take a long-dreamed-of road trip to see Glacier National Park, Yellowstone, the Oregon Trail, and a dozen other beautiful parts of the Great Wide Open in the middle of the country that I’ve always wanted to see.
I first had the idea for the trip about two years ago, and it’s slowly come together since then. Bright and early on Sunday, September 4th, I’m hitting the road; I’ll return 18 days later, with around 5000 added miles on my odometer and hopefully a better sense of myself.
Click “Where’d Kevin Go?” above if you want to know more about the trip. Or watch this space to follow my preparations for it. I promise not to get eaten by a bear.
I’m a bit sad I missed yesterday’s show from El Rushbo, which surely included the juiciest nuggets in response to Obama’s State of the Union address. Instead he kicks off today’s show by ingratiating himself to me, describing using his iPad to watch the movie “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.” Two points for Rush!
In the news: last week’s unemployment numbers rose sharply, continuing our slower-than-desired economic recovery. According to the AP, the crazy Snowpocalypse weather in the east contributed to the figure; according to Rush, there’s no evidence that this was the case, and the AP—liberal as ever, if you ask Rush—inserted that possible explanation to ingratiate itself to the Obama administration. I guess we’d need to check with the government analyst whom the story quotes, but Rush is simply wrong in saying that the story just made up the Snowpocalypse connection. “There’s no mention of snow anywhere in the report citing this week’s figures,” says Rush. He’s right, there isn’t; notice there’s no mention of anything. It’s just a bunch of numbers without analysis. That’s how these reports are.
Rush doesn’t let up, though. “Was there ever snow during the Bush years? Did we ever hear unemployment numbers blamed on snow during the Bush years?” Well, yeah, probably, but it’s much more compelling to blame it all on Obama. And it’s a clever rhetorical question that’s impossible to respond to without some serious news-scouring.
Then it’s poll-review time.
Continue reading Rush Limbaugh, Day 5
I think taking a day off between Rush sessions is good for my health. Need time to recuperate, so that tone of voice isn’t echoing in my brain all night as I try to sleep.
I joined a few minutes late, and I have to admit that the first thing I heard Rush say made me chuckle and nod my head: “Politics is just showbiz for the ugly.”
Not to worry, though, he got annoying quick. Rush mentions “a so-called poll—” here he effects an annoying mock laugh— “from the USA Today saying that Americans want Democrats and Republicans to work together.”
Wow, two days in a row. Is this a consistent pattern with Rush? He seems to have a genuine hypocrisy about which poll numbers he believes are credible. “We know at the end of the day [the Democrats] are going to govern against the will of the American people.”
This hour’s target: New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Rush plays, twice, a quote from Friedman concerning the Chinese president’s visit to Washington: “There’s only one thing worse than one-party autocracy—the Chinese system—and that’s one-party democracy.” Friedman’s larger point is that a majority-rule party finds things hard to accomplish if the minority party is constantly “sticking a spoke in its wheels,” whereas the rulers of an autocracy have the potential to execute their “vision.”
Oh boy. The House is planning to fruitlessly repeal the health-care reform law today, so you know Rush is going to dive into that big debate. Ya know, things like whether it “kills jobs” (it might, but it probably won’t). Given that I spent quite a bit of time investigating health-care reform, I’m sure I’ll find plenty to grit my teeth about this week.
But first! Rush returns to the “call for civility” theme from last week, and with more force than ever: this time he calls it “censorship.” Yes, censorship.
I’ve heard this before; when Glenn Beck’s ratings and sponsors started dropping after one too many wacky comment, he compared his situation with censorship. And heck, just today Sarah Palin described negative reaction to her now-infamous “blood libel” Facebook video as an attempt to “destroy the message and the messenger.”
Speaking of that video, Rush does seem to enjoy cherry-picking his poll numbers, doesn’t he? All last week I heard him cite multiple polls about Americans rejecting the notion that rhetoric contributed to the Tucson shootings. I didn’t comment on it, since I didn’t have time to check the numbers myself. But now, Rush cites another pair of polls: first, that 78% of Americans approve of how Obama handled Tucson; second, that only 30% of Americans approve of Sarah Palin on the same question. “I don’t, believe, either, number,” he announces, in his trademark slowed-for-emphasis tone.
Continue reading Rush Limbaugh, Day 3
Rush’s overall theme this week, not surprisingly, is defending himself against the notion that inflammatory rhetoric such as his was somehow tied to Loughner’s actions. Indeed there isn’t any direct evidence that Loughner watched a lot of Glenn Beck and then loaded his Glock; to turn the tables, there’s more evidence that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were directly influenced by violent video games before shooting up Columbine High School. In each case, those more inclined to defend the media under assault (Rush Limbaugh, Wolfenstein 3D) were quick to direct the responsibility toward, ya know, the persons who committed the crime.
Rush comments on President Obama’s remarks during the Arizona memorial on Wednesday night. He accuses Obama of double-speak in saying that poor rhetoric didn’t cause this tragedy, but then encouraging all listeners to improve their rhetoric. “He’s got plenty of incendiary rhetoric on his side,” opines Rush. “One deranged gunman—not American society, not American culture—was responsible for this.” Rush doesn’t seem to think that Obama’s words were directed to both left and right, nor does he grasp that Obama’s point isn’t the least bit hypocritical.
Continue reading Rush Limbaugh, Days 1-2
Had a political discussion with Mary Beth the other night, in the context of the Arizona shooting, and the extent to which vitriolic talk from the right wing helped to enable it. Though I’m not one to blame the Sarah Palin set for pushing Jared Loughner over the edge—the shooter seems to be certifiably crazy enough on his own, thank you—I do think the whole incident is a great excuse to review the level of discourse in the media and figure out if it helps to enable those on the fringe. Barring that, we can take the chance to evaluate whether the tone of such rhetoric helps or hurts society as a whole.
Of course the conversation landed on Rush Limbaugh, who dwells just far enough on this side of crazy that Mary Beth doesn’t mind listening to him in the car. (Point of reference: she agrees with me that Glenn Beck is a bloomin’ idiot.) I, meanwhile, can’t listen to him for more than 20 seconds without executing a perfect facepalm, which is unsafe while operating a moving vehicle.
Naturally Mary Beth said I can’t really judge Rush Limbaugh unless I’ve really listened to him with an open mind. At this point I got really drunk or something, blacked out, and when I regained consciousness I found myself having committed to listening to Rush Limbaugh for at least a week’s worth of shows, for at least an hour per day. Continue reading Kevin listens to Rush Limbaugh
