Bullets Along the Itinerary
In lieu of a real post this week, I’ll offer highlights from the past few days, which has involved attempting to keep up with class assignments while embarking on a work-related road trip.
1. Evidence of the fact that I’ve reached the end of my rope in said class: the narrative we were to have written about what happens at certain times of day when a jet streak crosses a dry line took the form of rhymed verse à la Dr. Seuss, with illustrations and characters included for dialogue purposes in the same weird-whimsical spirit. I may have earned my ticket out of class with this one—but I should at least get effort points for maintaining meter while rhyming “hodograph,” “radiational cooling,” “Coriolis,” and a number of other terms with surrounding words.
2. The Iowa 80 Truckstop just outside Walcott is evidence that we’re just plain doomed. Over 200 acres and 100,000 square feet of cheap and pointless crap: proof that Americans will unquestioningly ingest everything on offer and demand even more. I don’t believe I’ve ever walked away from a bathroom stop in such a combined state of fear, disgust, and depression. We’re stuffing the earth full of carbon dioxide for this???!? For thousands of plastic key rings and decorative license plates and ceramic bears and giant drink cups and belligerent t-shirts and piles and piles of food that will surely kill you if eaten more than once a year?
(3. However, having pulled over in a state rest area down the line, we did get to witness a fantastic storm passing through—one that later, I heard, threw down some tornadoes and a good bit of large hail.)
4. In the state university found in our destination city, there were no computer terminals (and of course, no more card catalogues) available just to look up a book. Even to do that, you had to sign on with an account. Thankfully, I headed down to one of the used bookstores and found Charles Martin’s examination of Catullus for a dollar. None of the poet's mad stylings or brilliant blustering made it into my homework, but I was tempted to head back and shout some choice verse in the library’s direction. The possibility of arrest, though, kept me silent.
And that, very briefly, is that. I hope to get my mind—and my regular posting—back up and running once class is well and truly over at the end of May. Until (hopefully) next week, then, I’ll leave you with a perennial puzzle, courtesy of my new bargain book:
“I hate and I love. And if you should ask how I can do / both, // I couldn’t say; but I feel it, and it shivers me.”1
1. Fragment from Charles Martin, Catullus (Yale University Press, 1992), 56.↩