Compare:

When I was a little kid, I wanted to go places. I’d look at National Geographic, nature shows on TV, even Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine. I wanted to go to those places that seemed so nearby, so close that I could run my hands across the page.

And then I got older, and I eventually got a driver’s license. I’d take my mom’s car (bright red Toyota Tercel) and wander around in big loops and whorls around the city, at night. Alone.

I needed to drive like that. I’d drive around and listen to cassette tapes of Genesis and King Crimson. Hyper-intellectual music that seemed to come out of no identifiable culture. I was my own culture, my own little society, with my own theme music, and all this was made possible by a little plastic card with my name on it.

And then I ended up with my own car. I had to drive from Houston to Galveston at least once a week for a few months, so I ended up with a used Nissan Pulsar. Baby blue. My life in Japanese cars. We got it from my brother’s friend who worked at/managed/owned a used car dealership (I can’t remember which, and all are possible).

The trip to Galveston was to go see a therapist. I had spent some months in what was basically a Hospital For Wayward Teens, and that hospital was in Galveston (still is). And after I was out, I’d drive down there and be therapeutic with the therapists there, as a sort of follow-up.

Truthfully, the drive was always better for me than the therapy. Being hospitalized was good for me because it was structured. Being on the road for three hours every week was also good for me, for exactly the same reason. The therapy was never all that useful.

I’d change the route from time to time. Sometimes loop 610, sometimes highway 6, sometimes into downtown Houston… One time, coming back, I crossed the Bolivar ferry and made the wide swing around the bay. I remember not having a map, but thinking, “It’s the Texas Gulf Coast. There will be a road going north to I-10 suitable for a semi-truck.” And there was.

Which is all prelude to driving across the North Cascades Highway on a whim.

It’s not really that important, in many ways. I could drive around the loops of Seattle for a few hours and reset my soul enough. It’s just that if you’re going to waste gas and contribute to global warming, perhaps you should see the glaciers you’re helping to melt.

Driving is my therapy, my personal equivalent of the stereotypical autistic rocking and hand-flapping. It’s what I do to get out of my mind and press the aforementioned reset button on my soul.

I want to talk about the details of the places. In fact, I’d love to know them to tell them. I’d love to spend years finding out every detail of everything you can see while driving the North Cascades Highway. I’d love to know the history of each plot of land. I’d love to be able to name all the peaks in the mountains, or to have walked through all the glacial valleys. I’d like to be able to rattle off all the big flood years and know the statistics for earliest and latest pass openings. I can tell you that the road, in its paved form, is younger than I am, and that the most beautiful parts of it are unprotected, except as National Forest (Okanagan NF, on the east side). I can tell you that the highway just below the Skagit Gorge dam washed out two years ago, and has been repaired with a really amazing earthworks that I should have taken a picture of.

But these things aren’t really that interesting. Except maybe the earthworks thing. But I yearn to be an expert, to soak up questions so I can soak up the answers. And it’s really rather tiring.

This is the mind I have to lose.

Earlier in life, I would drive around and just tell myself stuff I knew, as if I were teaching it to myself. I would do this for a while, and then I’d sing along with some tapes or something, and then I’d do it again. And I’d do it over and over, and finally, I’d be worn out. And that was the goal all along, though I never really thought of it that way at the time.

I still do that. It’s a kind of game at this point. I choose a topic on which I haven’t lectured for a while, and make sure to discourse down every tangent possible. Between I-5 and Concrete (that’s the name of the town), it was all politics. Not a rare topic by any means, but something that was churning around close to the surface.

Just after Concrete, there’s Rockport, and just after Rockport is Cascade Farm. Cascade Farm is first an organic farm and grocery producer, but secondly a rest stop and road-side store. I got a chocolate ice cream cone. Unbelievable. Like it was just milked out of a frozen cow. Apparently, the milkshakes are good, too. I could make up some shit about how I’ve vowed never to take a picture of the place so that you’ll just have to go see, but really, by the time you’re eating an ice cream cone, you don’t want to handle a camera.

So. Eating ice cream while driving a winding road, having run out of steam on the political discourse, I was beginning to lose my mind. Ice cream good.

No, really good. Reeeeeeally good.

More later.

(I also want to link you to Great Lake Swimmers, who create the genre ‘ambient folk.’)

OK, so on Friday the forcast was bad, but on Saturday it was better. So I went and drove the North Cascades Highway.

I didn’t see any snow donuts, unfortunately.

The weather was good enough at the top of Washington pass:

More pictures forthcoming.

Movies tonight: ‘Mac and Me,’ and ‘Dark Portals: The Chronicles of Vidocq.’

So ‘Mac and Me’ is that ultra-cheezy mid-’80s piece of crap I linked to before, with the dance number at the McDonald’s. It’s a paeon to corporate sponsorship and product placement, and is unbelievably bad. It has one good moment when the aliens walk into a grocery store, but the rest is really terrible. On its own terms, not worth watching.

But from a sociology-of-movies perspective, just fascinating. It’s the sort of thing that allows you to see how there are maybe three people in Hollywood with taste, and they’re the only people standing between what remains of our culture and total domination by advertising.

It also supports my thesis that some movies exist simply to keep special effects artists in beer money. The special effects are kinda cool, and there’s something wonderful about full-body full-frontal naked alien costumes in a kid’s movie. I mean, it’s creepy and odd and laughable. They don’t have genitals, but it’s just plain wrong. What makes it wonderful is that they’re not computer-generated. You know they were on set, looking like that, and I like that.

Anyway. I’ve talked about this too much, except to point out that the Earth family that befriends the aliens drives a Vanagon, which gets blown up at the end. Rawk! Nevertheless, it’s ninety minutes I’ll never have back.

‘Dark Portals: The Chronicles of Vidocq’ is a hyperkinetic, over-saturated, shot-on-digital, low-budget, overdone detective story set in revolution-era France, and it’s good entertainment. More gore than some might like, but unlike many dark, gory films, the gore isn’t the point. Someone has murdered two noblemen by causing lightning to strike them, so it’s up to detective Vidocq to solve the case.

I guessed the bad guy immediately, but they managed to make me waver, so I guess that counts for something. The point here, though, is not to guess who’s the baddie. The point is to be whisked along on a ride through Paris in the early 1800s, to visit the whorehouses, the opium dens, the orgies of the aristocrats, and the dark satanic rituals that give everlasting life. The revolution comes along none to soon, see?

Rent it, enjoy it, and forget it exists.

LoadingReadyRun hits a homer.

So to speak.

Wait, do baseball metaphors work with Canadians?

Some terrorists planted a bomb in Austin.

Did you hear about it on the news?

The North Cascades Highway is open. Seeya in a couple of days.

(Check out the snow donuts.)

Update: Weather forecasts say I’ll wait until next week. The campsites should be empty then, too.

I just had my mind completely blown by ‘Children of Men.’

It’s an endurance event. About three-quarters of the way through, I realized that this was the very first movie I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen a lot) that I really actually *needed* to not end on a downer. Because I realized it could. The whole thing’s so perfect, even a jaded cynic like me got invested in it.

Very highly recommended. Very, very.

Preach, preacher!

Second, I defy anyone to go back and read the April and May, 2003 tongue-wagging, mindless American press accounts of Jessica Lynch’s epic firefight against the Enemy; the severe gun shot and stabbing wounds she suffered; the torture to which she was subjected while in the Iraqi hospital; and the daring, gun-blazing rescue of her by our Special Forces, and then try to claim that we have a functioning, healthy political press in this country that serves as a check on government deceit and corruption. It is impossible for any minimally honest person to make that claim in light of those stories.

Update: Bill Moyers’ Buying The War. Very much worth watching.

“There is a very practical reason – each and every charge relates to Vice President Cheney’s conduct or misconduct in office,” [Kucinich] said. But he added, “It is very important that we start with Mr. Cheney because if we were to start with the President, Mr. Cheney would then become president.

He also noted, “We’d have to go through the constitutional agony of impeaching two presidents consecutively.”

Source.

The articles of impeachment are available now. I’d quote them, but they’re bitmap PDFs. Go read for yourself. Basically, it has to do with lying about Iraq’s WMD threat.