I had so many ideas over the weekend for this page and then I forgot them.

I guess we could start with what's in my CD Player right now. Neil Young, Decade, and I can't get enough of "Down By the River." Literally, is there a better song than this??? Doubtful (at least this week). There's a guitar riff that comes in at 2:00 minutes into the song that blows my mind, and he plays it for about 3:00 minutes. I would really like to just get in a car and *drivedrivedrive* straight, diagonal, vertical, speeding or just trucking along - across the country with no destination in mind but with this song playing, volume on 11, windows open, top down (if a convertible), smoking a cigarette, taking in the landscape.

I'd really like to be going anywhere, anyplace to get myself out from behind this computer, and into the enormous world that lays beyond my limited field of vision. I'd take even the most basic adventure. Clearly my current music selection reflects this desire. What else is in my CD player? Joni Mitchell, Hits; High Fidelity Soundtrack, can't really explain that other than my fascination with Jack Black/Tenacious D, and Janis Joplin/Box Set/Disc 2. The last CD I bought was Belle & Sebastian (doesn't really fit in with the above, but I was overdue buying it).

This entry just made me think about my trip to South Dakota last summer and how it was so breathtakingly beautiful out there...with land extending so far that you strained your eyes to see to the end of the wide open space, until you reached the spectacular line where the *blueblueblue* sky bled into the dry, dusty brown earth... a sun so close and so bright in the near distance that it made the landscape appear like it was a technicolor production and it hurt to stare out the car window at what the world, or more specifically, this country, must have been like before we built it up into the commercial sellout that it is today. Before we became a Starbucks World; before the chain restuarants and the shopping malls and the car lots and the generic housing developments; when you could still find a Main Street USA and live in a house far from your neighbor and completely different in design and you walked into town to see people and buy your groceries at the General Store and your meat from the Butcher. It's a different time now, not that I would know, having been nursed as an infant on Sesame Street and later, the Brady Bunch. Our mom shopped at full-service grocery stores, but I have to give her credit for making some funky clothes for us. She really put it out there and hooked us up. She hated guns, so when my brother came in one day from playing outside and said he's wanted a gun that shot blanks so he could play Cowboys and Indians, she didn't say a word. She wanted him to be a part of the group of kids on our block, but felt strongly that guns shouldn't be presented as toys, so she found a way around it. She spent the next few days, sewing for hours and hours, and made my brother little cowboy pants using his jeans and applying fringe down the side, and sewed fringe on his shirt and made him a suede vest and a badge. She told him to go on out with the boys, that he didn't need a gun, because he was the SHERIFF and everybody knows you can't hurt the sheriff! I think she may have made him a little jump rope lasso, but now that I think about it, I don't think a lasso is a very safe toy to give a 6-year-old. This is really par for the course with my mom. Highly intelligent, no common sense.

Back to the road trip at hand. I'd really like to take a couple of months off and drive cross country.

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