The sadness and joy of being home again

Having been dropped off VERY early Tuesday  by the Road2DC crew, I am once more home in Omaha.

And as nice as it is to sleep in my own bed and being able to spark up a cigarette along with my Exxon Valdez sized mug of strong coffee and sit back and enjoy a reliable cup of bandwidth and scratch the dog behind his ears; I feel somehow smaller and discontented.

With the drone of EWTN on my Grandmother’ television in the background and my dog licking my ankles I sit here and try and put my experiences and thoughts in order on what by rights should be a large event in a persons life.  I apologize ahead of time if this meanders or bounces between the overly intimate and the coldly analytical; but the only way that I know how to do this at present is to just crack open the door and let my consciousness stream out.

Join me after the jump if you will and I think I will cross post this on the big K in hopes of keeping my donut ability, and on Road2DC to help flesh out our little travelogue.

Mind the furniture as we take a walk around the inside of my mind.

Over the course of the trip I found out gently that my command of my own memory is not as total as it once was, and may have never been; a realization that I was not overly fond of since it means I have offended many over time without meaning to and possibly mislead others in that same time when they needed accurate information.  And although no maliciousness was present in either event the fault is still mine for any harm that may have come from it.

I say this up front by way of apology to those affected and to let you the reader know that there are other opinions of the events that are equally if not more valid then my own, and possibly more reliable.  As such I recommend reading all diaries of the event from the other participants to get a complete picture.

There is a wonderful sense of freedom that comes with traveling with near total strangers that is quite liberating!  In a way you can be more of yourself then you can around people that you have known for many years and quite intimately because you have less to lose in the doing; and that allows for some frank and honest exchanges of information and ideas that can lead to truly transformational thought.

Such was my experience. 

Our initial meeting at the Denny’s had the required round of pleasantries as each of showed the others that we were not scary people (I did contemplate showing up with an axe and a rack of budlight as a joke but thought better of it), and to establish a base line structure of interaction to relieve the tensions inherent in such meetings.  And after finishing our meals and having established that we were people of good will and humor we boarded the mighty Hyundai(was pleasantly surprised by the vehicle) and set off for the next member of the expedition.

And before we had reached Des Moines had started on our first in depth and serious discussion on the Israeli-Palestinian issue.  A discussion without rancor, without bile and whose outcome was generally agreeable to all involved including the pro-Israel hawk (me), and the pro-Palestinian pacifist; our conclusion is that in order to solve the issue once and for all we must trap the two negotiators in a mini-van and send them on a cross country journey with stops only for trips to the potty and munchies.

And much was the rest of the time spent in our travels to pick up Gotagrip, after that no seriousness was to be had, and it only grew worse when we discovered a parallel universe in Ohio trying to link up with Pico….

Did you know that Bob Evan’s restaurants and BP stations come in pairs along the interstate?

Neither did any of us.

After consuming our breakfast, a breakfast that had a sausage that kept bubbling up in my burps across four states doing battle with the dead ender elements of the previous Denny’ regime much to my consternation and regret; we once more hit the road.

You know all of those signs along the interstate saying that the upcoming rest stops have “free wireless access”?  They lie like a bad toupee.  Yes they have a wireless system, but do they have access to the internet?

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Try as we might we could not find an accessible access point along I-80 to post from, and believe me Jlynne and I tried every chance that was available. 

Speaking of rest stops… Iowa’ are decent clean places with no major flaws as are the ones in Illinois.  The one in Michigan was quite attractive but generally no better fitted out then Iowa or Illinois and I don’t recall one in Indiana, but given the way the rest of the state looked from the freeway I would not hold out much hope for them.  Pennsylvania and Eastern Ohio had the best, with Eastern Ohio winning hands down with their micro mall as rest stop palaces with multiple restaurants, AT&T broadband (and nobody with an AT&T account), Starbucks and attached gas stations.  Pennsylvania was nearly as nice but they were far to few and far to far between to win that competition.

But the hands down undisputed champion of veritable hellhole along the road was the rest areas in Western Ohio built in a late Soviet era style replete with obligatory broken privacy guard on the end urinal.

But anyway back to the real meat of the matter:  The trip.

We had by the time we finally found and retrieve Pico settled into a gentle and pleasant routine of light coma punctuated with sporadic bursts of sleep deprived giddiness; trust me the more you hear the joke about how many ears does John Wayne have the funnier it gets.

The closer to our destination that we got though the more our conversation was salted with talk of what was ahead and hopes and fears of how it would all go down; not enough to totally kill the buzz but enough to keep us relatively sober considering how easily we could have all descended into drooling giggle machines.

At this point I should offer an apology for the amount of swearing that I did on the trip; usually I tend to mirror the level of profanity around me but in this instance I had my head up my butt and I lapsed into laziness.  I hopefully did not offend to many to much.

I think I will update this in a bit and put what I have up for right now.  Look for the edit in a bit, I have to get something to eat and try and get my thoughts organized a bit more.  Sure I could have done that all offline and put up something polished and complete but I want this to be a bit more raw and honest without having passed through a filter of composition.

EDIT:  After having something to eat that was not fried, made of Wilbur or both (one of my brothers excellent but slightly larger then a child’s head cinnamon rolls), and catching up with my Grandmother and brother (who was a total zombie last night/this morning) and a wee nap; I am ready to continue.

Arriving in the capital of the free world in drizzly darkness, drunk from lack of sleep and wired in anticipation and joy at our arrival; we thought “what about signs” and pulled into wallie world to pick up supplies.

Stocked up on art board and flags and the various instruments of free speech needed to initiate our small counter offensive and against Bush’s truly offensive Presidency; we set out for the Holiday Inn.

So…there we are across the street from the Department of Education adorned with cute little one room school house door enclosures painted with “No child left behind” and right next to FEMA.

The snark just wrote itself at that point and my one great regret of the trip is that it was not possible to on the way out of town to grab one of the orange FEMA parking cones.

I had arrangements to stay with a person in Chevy Chase MD, but it was so late and we were so smoked from the days driving and famished that it was decided that I would just crash in the room.  We dropped off our stuff freshened up and somehow, I am not exactly sure at this point and my recollection is clouded, linked up with Lithiumcola and srkp23 who joined us for dinner in the hotels bar.

Alright a couple of small points here:

1.  Why does the capital of the free world roll up it’ freaking sidewalks at 10 PM?!

2.  When did $12 become a fair price for a hamburger?

After the meal and some dutifully applied social lubricants to celebrate, we adjourned to the patio for some lively conversation before trudging off to our rooms and some much need sleep.  Well we should have been sleeping but there were signs to be made and more conversation to be had…and then the sleep with visions of impeachment dancing through at least my head…

No time for breakfast in the morning, but there is always time and room for coffee and I was dispatched to fetch it.  During the trip to the local starbucks and praise be to a benevolent universe that it was just around the corner.. I ran into a very nice woman from North Carolina who was a minister who gave me the “No more Bushit” stickers you see on some of the signs.  She had kept them around since the days of Pappy Bush, and she was waiting for the rest of her crew from the South to meet her down in the lobby before heading off to the demonstration.

Speaking of strangers that you meet while traveling….

On the way we picked up a trucker in distress somewhere in Iowa who needed a ride back to his truck, we were happy to oblige.  He asked the obvious question about what we were doing and where we were going….

So I told him, probably should have thought about that a bit more but my mouth just opened and I did not have the filter engaged.  Jlynne said that the look on his face in the mirror when he heard it was worth the going out of our way to drop him at his truck.  And the conversation that we had with him was worth it to me; you see I am multilingual, I speak “Bubba” and was able to reach him by saying we want Bush gone because he is making the country look bad and his strategy is embarrassing the US military.  Something that he agreed with when put in those terms.

He let us know when we asked him what the other truckers thought of the war and the whole shebang that the consensus was that we need to be out of Iraq and that they were tired of this President and his policies.  And then he volunteered his passion for sustainable green policies that are coming into logging….

Redstate America is no longer a solid block people, the time is ripe to turn the tide and restore the republic!  Allies await us out there all we have to do is ask for their support with words they understand.  If you frame it they will come.

But back to our original program already in progress…..

I am not going to go into my version of the blow by blow of the actual march since OPOL has a brilliant photo essay up dealing with it that hits the major points of the nuts and bolts of it.  What I will do is give some of my impressions of the event:

We need another organization capable of the same kind of logistical lifting that ANSWER performs presently, and we need it desperately.  ANSWER’ major flaw in my opinion is message discipline they forget that no matter how brilliant a politician may be individually when you speak to them collectively as is the case with a demonstration; you give them only ONE word or concept to concentrate on because as a collective they are idiots.

The freeper crowd was substantial at their rally point; but it evaporated quickly when it came time to actually DO something like stand at a barricade!  CTliberal and I peeled off from the march to hit one of the vendors to get something to drink since we were both dying of thirst.  As a result we got separated from our fellow Kossacks.

In trying to rejoin them we had to walk along the sidewalk of the parade route so that we could look out into it trying to spot our people.  And quite by accident we suddenly found ourselves behind the barricade WITH the freepers.  Their lines were lucky to be two persons deep at the barricades and behind them the cops assigned to babysit them outnumbered the freep reserve by at least 2-1, they were in short a hollow shell.  Only one person noticed the two of us wandering through; CT carrying her sign and me in my CWA for Gore campaign shirt, the both of us gawking at the site before us as if on safari or visiting the monkey cage at the local zoo.  The only one of them with the observational skills to see that they had been infiltrated was a rather unpleasant woman who called CT an extremely crude name.  Before I could respond to it though CT with a display of lightning snarkfu skills neatly disemboweled and decapitated her with one blow (and considering where this persons head was at all it took was the one shot to do both)!  And we were able to peacefully leave her sputtering and impotent ignorance in our wake.

The city itself is grand and epic and moved me in ways that I had not felt since 911, and reminded me of things when I was a child…. and it is so run down and shabby around the edges.  It is as if some great civilization built this city and it’s monuments to their achievements and vanished from the Earth leaving a successor civilization to inhabit the buildings; one that did not nor could not understand how to maintain them and have slowly been allowing them to descend into rack and ruin.

And that angered and shamed me.

The one truly great thing that I took away from the experience besides new friends was the realization that I was not alone, a neanderthal I may be in many ways in comparison to those around me on the left; but I was not alone that day.