Interstate-10

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SAN FRANCISCO, CA-

Dear Life,

I hope this letter finds you well, happy, and infinitely less confusing and melodramatic than you were when I was writing it. Just to be on the safe side I think I’ll wait a few hours before sending this just to give you a chance to mellow out, you highly strung weirdo.

Yours, with infinite respect,

Zoë. (more…)

THE DEEP SOUTH-

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SARANAC LAKE, NY-

1. People Watch in an Airport

Envy sits a shoeshine chair in the Louisville airport in the form of an attractive woman wearing a brown sweater, short dirty-blonde punky pigtails, and a cowboy hat.

The childish air I read in this woman is not immaturity; rather, it is a focused fascination with the world in front of her.

She smiles in fits, hikes up the pant legs of her jeans, admires the
cowboy boots she’s presented to the shoe-shine man, and cocks her head (more…)

MCALLEN, TX-

Chelsea Clinton was in town, here in Texas, stumping for her mom, so I convinced my husband to go with me to see her. I’ve always felt a weird interest in her, I guess because she went through her awkward stage publicly at the same time as I was going through my own awkward stage. She might be a year younger than me, maybe two.

My husband and I went just to see her. We’re not really fervent Hill-dog supporters. There aren’t very many things we’re fervent about in politics, except that no one seems to be doing what we want.

Our big primary is in a little over a week, as I’m sure you’ve heard on CNN. Chelsea was here to give a two-minute speech downtown, trying to hold on to the last Clinton supporters around. (more…)

SAN ANTONIO, TX-

It’s 2008, and you’re a 27-year-old white American girl. You have a mid level professional job. You rent an apartment with amenities including but not limited to a pool, workout room and business center. You have your own credit history, your own car payment, your own vibrator.

You are more affluent and liberated than any woman in history.

Read Kay Hymowitz’s unflattering portrait of the twentysomething male here.

While it may be true that your male counterpart often fritters away his free time with basketball, gadgets and clubbing, replace ‘basketball’ with ’shopping’ and both sexes are mirror images of each other.

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LOS ANGELES, CA-

Like a Russian mobster tattoo
This is you forever inked into my flesh
Telling the story of us

That story’s name: Butterfly, Moon, Bed

Born of dream, motion, and light
That story tells how you took the stones from my heart
Lifted me into the sky

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THE QUEEN CITY, NC-

“Beneath the clothes we find a man. And beneath the man we find his nucleus.”

-Nacho, Nacho Libre

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GRAND BLANC, MI-

In a word, inequity. As capitalism continues running amok like a rabid dog, I simply cannot take one day longer without a plan for escape, my fingers caked with mud from the tunneling. While a Democrat may very well become president, he or she will inherit more problems than Bush inherited wealth. That only makes sense, for Bush certainly wouldn’t favor distributing the only thing of which he has an abundance, that being wealth. Still, months to go before I sleep and my awakening in a land that, at this time, I care not to disclose.

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PARKVILLE/BALTIMORE, MARYLAND -

“So many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.” - Alice in Wonderland

Being a pin-up model was a little like falling down the rabbit hole.

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HUNTSVILLE, UT-

Huntsville, Utah, is about an hour’s drive north of downtown Salt Lake.

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THE DEEP SOUTH-

10:10 pm

Fox’s Donut Den

Every good day begins and ends at the Donut Den. My music row buddy Bodi is here.

“Look at this,” he says clicking a clip on his iPod.

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THE QUEEN CITY, NC-

My neighbors like to party. They just moved in around a month ago. I saw their house being built. My dog used to shit where their house now stands. So did a few other dogs. There was nothing but woods. Tons of trees. Hawks and croaking frogs. Deer and raccoon tracks pressed in the dirt.

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PARIS, FRANCE-

I leave humbled.

Humble. It’s a word I never understood as a child. A word I don’t think I ever really understood until very recently. It’s a word, like bitter, that needs to be lived before it can truly be understood. (more…)

PARIS-

Happyness is a fifteen year-old girl.

She is the daughter of a woman named Janet, our housekeeper for the first two months we spent in Tanzania.

Happyness likes to read Danielle Steele novels.

She enjoys movies like “Barber Shop.”

She wears jeans and eats too much.

She might never have set foot out of Tanzania, but she could probably be dropped right into any suburban mall in America and feel right at home.

Over lunch a few weeks ago, with her mom and her younger sister Vicki, she did most of the talking with me and the lovely Isabelle, as of the three of them, she spoke by far the best English.

We ate in the courtyard restaurant of the Impala Hotel, a celebrated landmark in Arusha, one where Isabelle and I had eaten countless times.

By Arusha’s standards, it is a luxury hotel, one populated by the wealthier safari tourists.

Happyness had never set foot in the place. (more…)

LOS ANGELES, CA-

In Parts I & II of This Post:

I’d been asked by the school nurse to give my fifth grade boys the puberty talk. A couple problems, though: First, I’d never given anyone the puberty talk. Next, the nurse had asked that I refrain from discussing too much about sex while giving the talk.

Yeah right, I thought. That would be like trying to discuss the Theory of Relativity without ever mentioning E = MC 2.

Still, I felt I owed it to my students to do whatever I could to help usher them into manhood.

And so came the day when I showed them the puberty video. Some were amused. Most, however, were stunned to silence.

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ATLANTA, GA-

In college I worked one summer as a line cook in a 120-seat restaurant of a small hotel in Florida.

Although I had no formal training as a cook, I was able to bypass the usual progression from dishwasher to busboy to line cook, going straight into cooking because my friend Tony Spagnolo worked on the line.

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PARKVILLE/BALTIMORE, MARYLAND -

Atomic Cheesecake Studios is in Parkville, on the outer edge of Baltimore, and as we crest the hill that will take us to Stacey’s house, I suddenly wonder if we drove through a wrinkle in time and came out in 1959.

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SANDY, UT-

US 89 is a road that runs from Flagstaff, Arizona through Utah and Idaho before ending in Montana.

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THE DEEP SOUTH-

In Part One I recollected a day of pop culture musings in Music City, of Marilyn Manson Megachurches and a Britney/Conway Twitty remix of Gimme More. If Con Funk Shun had recorded Mr. Brownstone and The Cure did Smells Like Teen Spirit. The post was awhile back. You can read it here , if you’d like to catch up on the early hours…

5:45 p.m.

COUNTRY MUSIC HALL OF FAME

A gangly girl with her hair up and a pencil in the bun stops me in the hall. “Hey you’re a music guy, right?”

“Can you find someone in this town who isn’t?”

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