Double Flee A

road trip

Today JV (not that she isn't lovely, but I think at some point I'd like to start to refer to her as a person and not a state of being) I are going to drive to Green Bay to visit an old friend of mine who is in the hospital. Then we will turn around and come back. It should be a good trip. We're taking him some raspberries.

Ok, I wrote that at about nine thirty this morning, and now it's 11:51 pm and we just got back. Newman's doing pretty well and it is good to see him in one piece. He had his badass laptop in the ambulance with him on the way from Madison (where they did a buttload of intense surgery) back to Green Bay, and there was a CD that they had made for him in Madison, explaining his procedures with state of the art digital photography, so Newman got the EMT to hand it to him and he ripped it. Now he has a copy of his medical record, pretty much, up to the point he left Madison. The stuff they can do with imaging these days is pretty impressive. I have now been on a tour of Newman's body. He is pretty bionic at this point, with metal in some bones and pins and whatnot all over the place. He kicked mine and JV's butt at trivial pursuit and we left. I left him all the books I said earlier I would save one: Heidegger's being and time. It turns out that would be a little heavy considering the occasion.

From the road:
J and I had lunch at Abby's somewhere east of Chippewa falls. They had this cherry cream cheese pie that was excellent. The decor was very patriotic. I don't think it was just because of president's day, either. One waitress, I'm not kidding, was wearing an american flag bib, held on by three pins, each of which was an American flag, and the top of those three pins held on a ribbon like you'd see as a magnet on the back of a car, but smaller, in red, white, and blue. That's walking around with five american flags on. That's crazy. As we were checking out she was standing there rolling silverware, and I told her she'd better not spill anything on her or she'd be commiting an act of treason. This got a giggle from her and the manager, who are obviously experts at polite laughter. The placemat had three writings on it, a flag, and two bald eagles. The three things written were the lyrics to America the beautiful, the lyrics to the national anthem, and the pledge of allegiance. There was a stack of these placemats a foot thick, so I don't think it was just today that this was the theme. Interestingly, under the lyrics to America the beautiful, it said "by Irving Berlin 1918, edited 1938", and under the lyrics to the national anthem it said "by Francis Scott Key, 1814". But by the pledge of allegiance, it didn't say it was by any particular author or anything. It's fine with me if there's not an author attributed to that pledge; you can't attribute "I love my little rooster" to any one person, either, but not listing an editor? That's tantanmount to revisionist history. See, in 1954, Congress, after a campaign by the Knights of Columbus, added the words, 'under God,' to the Pledge. The Pledge was now both a patriotic oath and a public prayer. Before 1954, we were a bunch of godless monkey-men who only had two world wars under our belts. Just think how terrible it would have been if we didn't have it planted in our heads that god and america are inseperable from an early age. Shudder. Anyway, I think it's a sign of bias not to list that as an official edit right there on the patriotic placemat. This bias is like a shadow of an invisible thing. You can't see it, but you see signs of it everywhere you look. It's the America that's taking over from the one I like, the way something else took over Minneapolis. The grittiness disappeared and was replaced by "good clean fun" E-block, which isn't good or fun, and other sprawling mall-like venues. I live in the city because I like being an adult and doing what I want at my own risk. Making the whole world safe for twelve-year old girls by putting a rent-a-cop every five feet ruins the experience of even being in public. Uninteresting. Bleary. Same. I want to blow it up. It would be better as rubble.

Considering what's happened to us on other trips, this one was perfect; we got snowed in the day we were going to Vegas last January, and then the day before Thanksgiving we got snowed into Normal IL, in what was, come to think of it, actually the worst weather I have ever witnessed firsthand.

posted by dale @ 1:28 AM