Flying north out of Texas, a rain storm and a consistent tail wind. I got lost in Oklahoma City, because the I-35 exit ramp was closed. I had to bypass on US 44 or 77 or whatever it was.

I made it to Blackwell, OK, where I decided to get a motel room, just a few miles from the mostly meaningless goal of making it over the Kansas border in a day’s travel.

The guy in the motel office: “Do you have triple-A?” “No…” “Well, you do tonight.”

He was early twenties, pierced lip, scruffy goatee. He asked me for my address, without asking for the city; zip code only. I told him, and he said, “Seattle or Wedgewood?” “Both. Wedgewood is in Seattle.” He then told me about a friend of his who had ‘escaped’ Oklahoma (his word), and how he had tried twice to get as far as Texas, only to be sucked back in by his family.

I guess hospitality services isn’t as plum a job as one might think… But I have to say that any place in Oklahoma that would let a guy with a pierced lip have a customer service job has to be more progressive than one might think.

Next day: Zooming forth through Kansas. Kansas is large and flat. The gentle rolling hills of the southeastern part of the state give way to a mind-numbing two-dimensional expanse the further west you go. You’re an ant crawling across a football field, fourth down and four hundred miles.

And then, despite your apprehension of this moment, it’s still a sudden shock: You’re on the edge of the plains. Before you is a valley, draining down into eastern Colorado. The sunset is pink and gold, and the storm to the south (National Weather Service warning: Golf-ball-sized hail) is a wall of purple. The hills disappear below into haze and faraway rain.

A watertower on a distant hilltop, lit golden against a salmon sky. A flock of birds, a hawk surfing the hills. Even the semi-trucks passing me like I was standing still seem somehow poetic.

I pull into the last rest area before Denver. There are bands of teenagers coming and going; I have to wonder what’s going on behind the scenes here. I catch a short, fitful nap. I’ve developed heartburn. Must have eaten too much McDonald’s. Every burp, and in fact, every exhalation, feels as though it could be fatal. A guy in a pickup truck parked next to my van eyes me with a strange mixture of longing and trepidation. Teenagers laugh and get in their cars to escape the beginnings of the rain…

Moving on, I get to the E-470 tollway, which is quite possibly the most convenient tollway ever to exist, ever, if you’re trying to get from I-70 by the Denver airport to parts north, such as Lafayette. However, in the stretch I drove, there are four toll plazas, $2 apiece. Zooming at 70mph around metro Denver is nice, but $8? I guess it was worth it.

Ok, so the van’s all put back together (mostly), and I’m set to hit the road.

But I won’t be heading west, because it turns out some folks I know in Boulder (actually Lafayette, but no one knows where that is) are throwing their yearly party this weekend. This party is the fulcrum of my social year, so it’s my destination.

This interrupts my plans to head straight west, and might cut New Mexico out of the trip. I’ll have to decide how far south I want to back track, after this weekend. I’m still planning on making it to Death Valley and the eastern Sierras, so likelihood is high that I’ll backtrack, especially since some of the people at the party will be returning to Albuquerque and Socorro, and we can all convoy on I-25. Yee haw! Or maybe I’ll revisit an idea I had to head south on the back highways, and cross as many passes of the continental divide as possible without backtracking or duplicating. No doubt there’d be pretty stuff to photograph on such a trip.

I went to the bank yesterday to do some business at the ATM. I put my card in, punched in the PIN, did the stuff, and then told it to give me my card back.

It didn’t.

Or, at least, it tried. The card was stuck in the slot, barely accessible. Like it was sticking its tongue out at me. The machine was beeping for me to take it, and I couldn’t. I tried to use a pen and another card to wedge it out, but before long… Gulp. It swallowed my card back in.

I can see the wisdom of this… If you simply forget your card at the ATM, it’s better for it to be inside the machine than available to whomever comes along and grabs it.

I got home and called the bank. It was too late to call the branch, so I talked to a very polite bearer of bad news over the 800 number. You see, it turns out that cards like mine usually get shredded by the machine, and the only solution is to invalidate the card and get a new one.

I can, apparently, get a temporary card from the branch, but I can only use it at the ATM, and not as a check card. I have to carry cash with me, in other words, while traveling.

At the moment, I’m treading water waiting for that branch to open so I can go ask them about it. If the machine didn’t shred the card, I might still be able to use it, and problem solved. At the very least, they owe me free traveler’s checks.

I’m very hard on myself. Of any criticism a person could heap on me, I’ve beat them to it. Stand in line, take a number, you critics!

I’ve developed a theory about it, too. I call it the Theory Of Motivation. Being critical of myself, and generally carrying around a non-normal amount of self-loathing, enables me to get things done. Most people don’t think of self-criticism as enabling, but in my case it’s required in many instances.

I find myself having to hate myself in order to motivate my autistic neurology into taking action. Sort of like a drill seargant threatening the new recruits into shape. And I have to do this a lot. It’s ongoing.

And, also in my oh-so-ultra-special case, I can see it for what it is. It’s simply a state of being, though not a pleasant one. I mourn the fact that I sometimes have to go there, but mainly I can approach it with some detachment. I feel the hurt and it eventually metabolizes into activity.

This is very complex, and not something most people would undersand, I think. Most people don’t see the value of being hard on themselves, and if I weren’t autistic, the Theory Of Motivation wouldn’t have much value for me, either. But because I exist in a state of autistic in-between-ness, where I often get stuck in behavioral and intellectual loops, something has to provide the impetus to break out of those loops. It turns out a certain kind of pain is a motivator. Feeling good just reinforces being stuck as a pleasant experience.

I end up with a dilemma: Which kind of misery do I want? If I’m stuck and feeling good, or at least not feeling bad, then I’m frustrated with being stuck. If I’m stuck and feeling bad, then I’m feeling bad, but at least that version of bad motivates autistic-me as much as intellectual-me.

I think a lot of people go through this kind of thing, without being aware of it. I think that people sometimes feel terrible as a way to get what they ultimately want. And I have to wonder if those people have chosen the best thing to want, if they’re going to put themselves through that in order to get it. Especially if they’re not aware that’s what they’re doing.

RamenDragonElok asks: Who’s Kate Bush?

If you ever heard Peter Gabriel’s ‘Don’t Give Up’ duet, that’s Kate Bush.

Think of any female pop star, and you’re thinking of someone who’s derivative of either Kate Bush or Joni Mitchell.

You can hear snippets of her latest album, ‘Aerial,’ right here. Unfortunately, it doesn’t include anything from the second CD of the set, which I think is the better of the two.

It also turns out that EMI records has re-issued most of her catalogue in gatefold LP-facsimile packaging. If only they were remastered, too…

Went and saw ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’ I’m not sure if I’m disappointed or not… Is it about global warming or is it about Al Gore? It’s about both, of course, but I’d hoped it would be about one or the other. George H. W. Bush called Gore ‘Mr. Ozone,’ and though it was mean-spirited, it hit because it was kinda true. And Gore’s life has been 100% about global warming issues since 2000. So a movie about Gore would be a movie about global warming.

I had seen most of the stuff he presents, but then I’m interested in that stuff. The answers and solutions in the movie come down to doing what we already know we have to do, and stoking the political will to make it happen. And it’s interesting how compelling that information is when it comes from a giant screen in front of you, as opposed to, say, some ‘blog you read. The giant face of Al Gore commanding you to reduce your carbon emissions is a very diffent experience from reading a quote from some expert in a newspaper.

In other news:

The van… Well, I don’t want to talk about it.

I found a kind of interesting game called Darwinia, with which I wasted some time. It doesn’t run very well on my decrepid laptop, but it’s still fun. It’s being distributed in the US by Ambrosia Software.

I’ve been enjoying Dresden Dolls, a two-piece outfit that answers the question: What would the White Stripes sound like if Kate Bush were a transgendered cabaret singer in Vienna in 1931? I predict everyone will be wearing lighting-bolt-shaped eyebrows in the near future…

I’ve also been enjoying The Flaming Lips‘ ‘The Soft Bulletin,’ which has to be one of the all-time great rock albums. I also got ‘At War With The Mystics,’ which is their latest. It is to ’70s prog-rock what Dukes of Stratosphear was to ’60s bubblegum and psychedelia. Which is to say, an album-length spoof/homage. If you like the Mellotron, then you’ll love this. If you go to their web site, click on ‘Audio,’ and then choose ‘Pompeii Am Gotterdammerung’ and you’ll see what I mean. The ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah’ song provides a footing in the present day, but but the rest gets old kind of quick, even though it’s fun. ‘Soft Bulletin,’ on the other hand, provides the best listening set on endless repeat.

The Senate rejected the arbitrary, stupid, cynical, bigoted, gay-marriage-banning constitutional amendment.

As others have pointed out: This leaves marriage undefended! PREPARE TO BE BOARDED, BREEDERS! AAAAARGH!!

My parents will have been married for 50 years in September. My uncle was never married, though he spent almost as long in a committed relationship. Does either of these relationships detract from the other?

What he said.

Most of you have probably seen this, but I’m going to link to it for some of my readers who don’t spend their whole day hitting the reload button on boingboing.

‘Left Behind: Eternal Forces‘ is a role-playing shoot-em-up game where you’re a Christian who can either save or kill non-Christians in a post-rapture New York City. It’s based on the bizarrely popular ‘Left Behind’ series of books.

Yes, in this game, it’s part of your Christian role to kill non-Christians with military weapons. This would simply be tasteless, but since it’s being developed by some very powerful and well-funded Dominionists, it’s pretty creepy.

LATimes:

The game’s heroes belong to a group of fighters called the Tribulation Force, people whose husbands, wives or children disappeared in the Rapture. This is the moment referred to in the title when, some Christians believe, God calls the faithful to Heaven, leaving the rest behind to face seven years of tribulation.

The game is set in New York City, where the Tribulation Force clashes with the Antichrist’s Global Community Peacekeepers in a tale that makes the United Nations a tool for Satan. Each side attempts to recruit lost souls in the battle for the city. “Eternal Forces” is a so-called real-time strategy game — players act as battlefield generals for their virtual armies, deciding where to place units and when to order attacks or retreats.

In the game, Tribulation squads unleash the usual arsenal against the Antichrist: guns, tanks, helicopters. But soldiers lose some of their spirituality every time they kill an opponent and must be bolstered through prayer. The failure to nurture good guys causes their spirit points to drop, leaving them vulnerable to recruitment by the other side.