Amarillo's on my mind...

Hello from Amarillo, everybody...
Well, I made it out of the desert. Nobody set anybody on fire this time, yet we were delayed 2 hours in Albuquerque because the BUS caught fire. Luckilly, it did so before we boarded, but I don't think anybody fell into too deep a sleep on the overnight jag to the cattle country of the Panhandle. I know I didn't. That's why I decided to stay a day and night here, in Amarillo, another town I really, really, like. All the towns along the old Route 66 get to me. They are alive with ghosts, with one vision of America over another, until you really can't tell when you are, and your own memories grow arms and legs and carry you to the past.

I walked along the Route 66 corridor in town, now called 6th Ave, and marveled at the old timey fillin' stations, mechanic shops and cafes. Of course, most of them are abandoned, the signs rusted and hanging on one hook in the bustering prairie wind. Some have resigned themselves to housing tattoo parlors, bars, antique shops and bail bondsman offices. But for the most part, its a shell of an earlier time, and my memories ushered me into that time, which was already fading when I was very young, but I do remember it, when those fillin' stations were still fillin' stations and there was a choice of "leaded" or "unleaded" gasoline, and a high school kid pumped it into your car for you, cleaned your windshield and ushered you down the highway to whatever you're chasing or running from. Maybe if you went inside to get a bottle of Coca Cola you would smell the combination of cigarettes, after shave and motor oil on the manager of the place. He smiled a big smile under his super oiled and parted hair while lighting his 80th cigarette of the day.

I'm not a fan of the "good old days"...I don't even think the "good old days" ever existed, and I didn't grow up or even visit Amarillo until I was in my teens. Yet, it is Texas and Its reminding me of times long passed, and very clearly doing so. I'm also very tired and really feeling the 6 weeks that I've been on the bus, so that could be adding to the strole down memory lane, but I also feel at home here, more than I have anywhere else on the trip. Texas is a crazy and compromised place right now, in fact you can see the fires of hell to the left and Jesus sharpening his sword on the right, but Texas is my home. I feel I understand it more than I do anywhere else. Things, as crazy as they seem, make sense to me here, and my memories are so, so fond. I don't know where this is going, I'm kinda ramblin', but hell, its Texas, one can ramble here. Maybe I'm ramblin' home.

As I walked passed the brick road streets named after different states in the union, the sun sunk lower to the horizon as I floated higher out of my childhood. I saw the once fortress like fillin' stations, with those huge glass plane windows, and brick arched verandas, for what they were in today's vision of America, hollowed out shells. Carcasses, a skull and ribcage in a desert, no longer a thriving animal on a plentiful grassland. Its hard to beleive we thought that grassland would last forever.

On the side streets of the Mother Road, dodging the ghosts of Steinbeck and Kerouac, were a few drifters here and there. They were just kinda roaming around, no particular place to go, it seemed. They seem distant to me, like they are trying to find their America, but got lost. Or, they stopped trying to find it. Maybe they just decided to get off that western trip...maybe they could see that the gas stations were going out of business. Maybe they could see that mythical journeys on mythical highways were going the way of the dinosaurs, and outlet stores and very unimaginative interstates just weren't for them. Its a cold night tonight in Amarillo, but its colder out there, where people don't pick up drifters and drive them through their dreams anymore.

I head north tomorrow, through Oklahoma, Missouri and into Chicago for a few days to hang out with good friends. They are part of my past, but just like everything else, very much apart of my present.

Take care...

Todd