Blast from the Past

I went rumbling around an old My Documents archive looking for something else and found this bit of business I must have come up with after my last cross country drive, what was that...10 years ago? This was my last journal entry which never made the journal. It would all really make sense if you were me and maybe a little high. Anyway it's a bit of a rant about Canada of all things:


My Canadian Experience. All I remember is scraggly ass trees for thousands of miles on a two lane highway playing tag with logging trucks. And I had no Canadian money and was at first too shy and then too stubborn to stop at any restaurant try to use my American. So I was hungry and in a daze anyway from all that driving in the mountains, stopped by snow, and this June. I guess I went in with an attitude, but my greeting couldn't have been any friendlier. The border person was this really stunning looking African Canadian (I wonder how that would be up there, maybe its just Canadian, or maybe African American as in NORTH American, as if there would be even that degree of fellowship, of Continental brotherhood within even that ancient race (as Faulkner might have said), because with the Anglo side of the equation feelings seem middling to cool. (And they do seem to produce the best comics. Its all that repressed anger. Ha Ha a little joke by me) Anyway she was quite pleasant in every which way, very polite, very professional but suspicious of me. She made me take off my sunglasses (my clip on sunglasses which makes it a much less dazzling move) and wanted to know if I was carrying a gun. I smiled (winningly I hoped) and said no. She was probably ticking me off a list; hunter, salesman, tourist, something nefarious, strange but obviously harmless guy...once she got there she stopped and I was in. It started of so well and immediately it all turned rather bleak. The weather was misty and gray, I came upon a paper mill, smelling foul, the stink in my car for hours (well, ok I'm exaggerating for effect, there were trees and pretty parts right here even in this part of Canada even in June, driving through Great Lake gray) and the only motels I saw were really old fashioned ranch style types, to me they looked musty inside but that may be because if it looked like that in America, specifically in a place called Emporium, Pennsylvania more specifically at The Buttonwood Motel there, it would smell really musty and still have vibrator beds. I was too American, too spoiled. I drove on and on hoping against hope for a Super8. Finally found a Marriott in Marathon.

And there it mysteriously ends.