010614 #bushmill And so we go. Away from that little town. The headlights slash across a sad-looking little park with a sagging merry-go-round under a cumulonimbus willow tree. It's weird because it's right across from the gas station. I mean RIGHT across. It's like light-years away, but only separated by one greasy little street. It's dark but light in the park, like a firefly, nothing like the McDonalds version of light they got over here at the Texaco. Watching it diminish in my vision as we head back up the frontage road and get back on the ramp, I get this really sad feeling, I don't know why. Like somebody must have gone there all the time when they were a little kid, when just trees were good enough, and they didn't know how much everything sucked, and they were little and safe and had parents, and they laughed and went around and around on that merry-go-round, and that was enough. And everything didn't smell like diesel and have crude shit written on it in the fake light, and they weren't grown up and didn't have to know everything and do everything, and somebody still cared. But that was a long time ago, and now car after car after car swept on past, through the night, and we were just another car, with some sweaty stranger squashed up against me, into the next day, full of radio signals and more gas stations, and potato chips and smoke-breathing factories on the horizon, gliding by with all their orange flashing lights and their own system of roads, and it makes you wonder who goes into those places, and what do they do in there, and can people actually go up on those walkways, and then that's gone too and there's something else weird and foreign and pointless and industrial to look at, a billboard, a stricken tree, a muddy creek. Where are we going anyway?