Friday, January 09, 2004
I am blogging this from a hotel room in Denver, while Mike is frantically searching for his Stephen King book for the 30 hour plus train ride tomorrow to San Francisco. Mike has a thing for Stephen King when we are traveling :) Denver has been nice, but I am having a bit of traveling fatigue: mostly because of the changes in climate... Anyway, here are some notes I made when we were on the train here from Chicago:
'On the train again: this time from Chicago to Denver. We managed to get a seat with a plug again, but it is too crammed behind the seat to use, and even Mike's attempts to force it by breaking the seat failed. So, no films for us :) Mike has gone to sleep and I am reading Henry and June and looking out the window. Even though there are patches of wilderness here, they seem to be just what was left in between two people's 'properties'. There are also all kinds of surreal industrial constructions everywhere: massive twisting chimneys, weird cylinders, buildings that seep smoke through the roof. And, of course, everywhere roads. You can't see the winding rivers or twining trees for the shit that people have put next to it.
'When we get farther out, the ugliness recedes a bit. There are these long lines of what must be elaborate telegraph poles, stretching far out into the horizon, over miles and miles of snow covered fields. They look like women standing on their heads, with their legs open and chained together at the ankles, knees and thighs. There is snow everywhere, and in the wind it is blowing like sand in a movie about the desert. There's something very Space 1999 about everything.
The sun is setting now, and making everything pretty and shimmering again. This part of America is so flat. It occurs to me as we go over the state line into Colorado, that I know really very little about America, actually. I have no idea where anything is except the very famous bits. Now I have visited them, I know that New Orleans is in Louisiana, Chicago is in Illinois and now that Denver is in Colorado. And it's next to some mountains called the Rockies. See, totally fucking ignorant :)
'The problem, or the interesting thing about the train is that so much of the time is spent in the dark. The sun sets on one kind of place and rises somewhere totally different.
'One thing about this trip: I don't think me and Mike have ever been so happy together. I am totally overwhelmed by how happy I am :)'