Why Glass Cleaner's Expensive In Western PA

Drove RTT to Uncle Lew’s. He’ll be dividing the remainder of the summer between Edinboro, PA – a small, sleepy college town off Lake Erie – and Hidden Valley Camp in Montour Falls, NY. He was very excited to be leaving the circus. I must say, I was too. It really bugged me that I could no longer remember names, could no longer focus on the unique history of each place – what made “them” think this would be a good place for a settlement? – variation on the only question that’s ever seemed to me worth asking: why is this here?

“Towns only have three names on the circus,” Ben told me with a certain dour satisfaction. “Yesterday’s Town. Today’s Town. Tomorrow’s Town.”

I wanted to slap him.

Trip one-way was 1000 miles. Little red Veedub chugged like a champ.

Shoulda been a truck driver. I love road trips. Took back roads whenever possible, still made great time. My idée fix was the frontier, how it had mutated over a hundred years. What’s the difference between Iowa and Indiana after all? Why a civil war, and a hundred years of pushing west. (Very Garcia Lorca.) Towns and small cities show it best, their architecture frozen at the last boom. That boom varies – sometimes it’s the 1880’s, sometimes the turn of the twentieth century, sometimes the 1920’s. But never after the 1920’s. The 1920’s marks the end of pushing the frontier forward. After the 1920’s when people wanted to better themselves they moved to the big city. I’m not sure that move was entirely for the best.

Caught snippits of Michael Jackson coverage on the radio. Story was like a juggernaut and I say this as someone who actually enjoys Jackson’s music. Talk about your sick, self-loathing fucks – and now he’s Jesus, a pedophilic, surgery and Depromine-addicted Jesus. The story just grew and grew fanned by the 24/7 news cycle. Ryan O’Neal must be very pissed that Jackson chose to expire on Farrah’s special day.

Also listened to Books On Tape – Elliott Gould reading Farewell My Lovely. Raymond Chandler is one of those people I wish I’d overlapped chronologically with – from that first tarantula-on-angel-cake metaphor (Miss Haversham alert!) through Marlowe’s hallucinations in the dope fiend doctor’s “sanatorium” to the Othello reference at the very end, I kept thinking, Wow! Wow. What a mind.

First day in Edinboro I hunted down a coffee house and the one I found was the most amazing coffee house I’d ever been in. It appeared to be somebody’s living room! An attractive woman in her forties had to be summoned from the back of the house by her sulky beautiful teenage daughter to fix my double latte. I was the only customer. Another beautiful teenager – male – sat at an adjoining table working on a complicated electronic circuit board. There was a third child too, a beautiful two and a half year old, one of those precocious midgets with a full command of English language syntax but the preoccupations (of course!) of a two and a half year old so that when its mother put it down for a nap – the crib was about ten feet away from my table – it engaged its mother in civilized repartee –

“But why should I take a nap?”

“’Cause you’re sleepy, silly.”

“But I don’t feel sleepy.”

“But you are. You wiggle-squirmed all night long.”

“I feel wet.”

“Then you need to be changed. Why don’t you use the potty?”

“I don’t feel like it yet. Some day soon I will feel like it though.”

“Can’t be too soon for me!”

“Maybe tomorrow!”

“Good!”

“But maybe not tomorrow.”

“Awwww…”

Western Pennsylvania is so incredibly lush and beautiful when you breath on a mirror you leave a green mist.