Farewell and goodnight to two-thousand-eleven.
We’ll toast your ascent into Calendar Heaven.

Hello and good morning, two-thousand-and-twelve.
We have bottles to empty and books to unshelve.

Goodbye and good riddance, December the last.
The best Christmas present: you’re now in the past.

How joyful to see January the one’th.
Though I figure this year will fly by in a month.

Well, Xmas happened on schedule and I have emerged on the other side of it. Have you?

Today is Back To Work Tuesday for us unfortunate cogs who don’t get the whole holiday week off. To celebrate, this evening here in Hamilton we get a dose of snow disguised as rain. The season’s first snowfall and it’s nothing but a low-energy mitten-soaker, adding some extra blah to the slough of deadness between holiday weekends. (A Special Weather Statement for our area cautions that there may be a flash-freeze overnight, which bodes darkly for tomorrow morning’s unfortunate-cog commute. Speaking of deadness.)

In Measure for Measure, Lucio describes Angelo as: a man whose blood is very snow-broth. Yeah. Snow-broth. A slightly silly Shakespearean way to say ice water, but it strikes me as the correct name for the stuff that falls out of the sky in this sort of not-quite-freezing winter weather. Tonight’s snow-broth spends a few hours raining straight down, without wind, a steady shower, all business, thudding wetly on the window panes and glazing the sidewalks in an insipid slush reduction, accumulating zero.

I get the above photos when I go out walking to return a library book and to get a closer look at the downtown holiday lights before they’re taken down. I stop by the big Xmas tree in front of City Hall and circle the other big Xmas tree in Gore Park and pace back and forth under the canopies of the park’s strung-up tree-branch lights. Weather spatters my glasses and camera lens, saturates my hat. The snowy air and rainy pavements make all the lights’ glows bleed in a pretty and melancholy way, though I suppose they were already doing the pretty-and-melancholy thing well enough on their own these past two days, being holiday lights still up after the holiday’s over and gone, lingering, looking all post-jolly, after-merry, ex-festive, etc.

W.H. Auden, “The Sea and the Mirror”:

Well, who in his own backyard
Has not opened his heart to the smiling
Secret he cannot quote?
Which goes to show that the Bard
Was sober when he wrote
That this world of fact we love
Is unsubstantial stuff:
All the rest is silence
On the other side of the wall;
And the silence ripeness,
And the ripeness all.

Paul Chowder, the narrator of Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist, talking about bygone-era periodicals like The Century that made a habit of publishing lots of poems in each issue, but as little more than decoration:

The long nonfiction piece comes to an end, and it’s about being a stevedore in Baltimore, something like that. And then at the bottom of the page is this poem in two columns, with six stanzas, and each stanza has indentations, and the conventionality and vapidity of it will stun you. “The shades of summer’s bosky hue, o’erlie thy modest floobie doo.”

(Pause while I snicker uncontrollably for a few minutes. — Also, Baker’s jokey imitation couplet makes me think of Holmes’s “Æstivation” … i.e. a parody of badness that’s almost too good.)

Continuing:

The editors of The Century didn’t expect you to read that poem with your full mind. They knew it was just some rhymes thrown pell-mell together with some cornstarch. They knew full well, because this is America, land of bad poetry. Yes, sir! Bad poetry, sir! Loads of it in the back, sir! Just keeps coming. Tipped in. The shovel eases the soft tonnage of poetry over the rim, and it just pours into the pit, pluth.

Holiday fun fact: On Canadian bilingual packaging, the French name for eggnog is “lait de poule” — chicken milk.

Just a quick note here to say that I could not be happier that the insane presidential candidate whose first name is my last name (how embarrassing) is finally political toast.

Samuel Butler, from his notebooks:

I have squandered my life as a schoolboy squanders a tip. But then half, or more than half the fun a schoolboy gets out of a tip consists in the mere fact of having something to squander. Squandering is in itself delightful, and so I found it with my life in my younger days. I do not squander it now, but I am not sorry that I have squandered a good deal of it. What a heap of rubbish there would have been if I had not! Had I not better set about squandering what is left of it?

Unplugged!

Above: We not only drove into the South — we drove into the future. (Photo by Laura!)

So who won? Road or Car? Well, we do not drive off the road and die, and we suffer no car trouble, and we meet with no bad weather, and we make decent time. We travel new routes and do not get lost. We stop to visit relatives and do not seem to visibly offend them. We eat OK road food, listen to ass-kicking road music, sleep in comfortable hotels, shock our lungs with the invigorating country air of ten states and the vitamin-enriched exhaust fumes of a dozen or so interstates. We drive over rivers and under mountains, past snowy pastures and down palm-lined parkways. We consume leftover Thanksgiving stuffing in the car at 80 mph. We resist road fatigue by taking turns at the wheel, eating chocolate-coated coffee beans, and drinking cup after inky black cup of gas-station ghoul-coffee. We see and do things that lazy writers love to describe by resorting to excessive anaphora and a wearying abuse of the first-person plural.

So … it seemed to have been a good time, a fine trip. Technically, Car defeated Road. Having said that, though, I feel in a more general, experiential sense that Road may have won after all. I’m haunted by something I said three weeks ago: that we’ve been fortunate enough to have had our Yanksgiving drive always seem to be: a fun, safe, pseudo-adventurous novelty, rather than an exhausting, soul-annihilating, life-and-limb-threatening slog across a country that sometimes never seems to want to end. “Rather than”? No. This trip was both things.

The fun pseudo-adventurous part was the drive down to Florida, when we spread the drive across a number of days, only going eight or nine hours per day, mostly in daylight. It’s fun! It’s vacation! You travel toward warm weather and crazy people! You check into a hotel at dinnertime then eat and drink and chill out! You drift off to sleep in your starchy hotel sheets with thoughts of exploration, wanderlust, possibility!

The soul-annihilating slog part was the second and final day of driving back to Ontario this past Saturday. It is a little too fresh in my mind right now. The thing of having been driving for eight hours and staring at like seven-plus more hours to go, and the sun has just gone out and now we’re in darkness and stuck on that bleak, purgatorial, never-ending stretch of I-79 snaking out of the mountains of northern West Virginia, creeping for hours up to the outskirts of grimmest Pittsburgh, then inching across the vast desolations of northwestern Pennsylvania up to Erie, then crawling for lightless miles up I-90 toward Buffalo, then finally that last gasping hour over the border to Hamilton … it goes on forever. We get home after midnight but to us it’s been midnight for hundreds of miles. The next day my mind is gelatin and my body is cement. There is some Einsteinian general-relativity shit going on on that I-79-to-I-90 route at night, some serious bad-news bending of space-time, where dashboard clocks and odometers and human body rhythms do not operate by normal Earth rules. We may actually still be driving there, and it may only be a highway-delirium fever dream that I’m typing this.

OK, Road. You win. Our loser punishment is that next November we must fly. (Or maybe, Scott, you unbelievable idiot, you should just split the next drive home into three days so you can have more of your magical country air and starchy sheets and la-di-da dreams of possibility and “fun” and then arrive home on Sunday in what passes around here for daylight.)

OK. We are leaving in a minute. Our driving routes have been squared away, taking us through nonstop breathtaking scenery, sprawling shopping malls disguised as cities, half-horse yokel towns with entertaining names, and a thousand miles of spotless, gleaming gas-station restrooms. The weather forecasts promise 100% sunshine and 0% precipitation from here to Florida, today through Monday, twenty-four hours a god damn day. We have an iPod and an iPad crammed with infinity hours of driving music to suit all moods, a car stereo that understands the language of USB, and some CDs if we feel like getting retro. We have caffeinated snacks and a reasonably tuned ukulele. We have jackets and hats. We have cameras and cellphones. We have learned almost all the words to our sing-along music video for this year, which will be Crash and the Boys’ “I’m So Sad, So Very, Very Sad”. The car is looking good. It has gotten a new set of tires, a new pair of windshield wiper blades, fresh oil and topped-up fluids, a ferocious exterior power-wash and an interior clean-and-vacuum by a hustling squad of car-wash goons, and an engine tune-up from back in the spring that I’m sure is still in effect. We are ready for Road Versus Car. We are ready for Car Versus Laura-and-Scott. This concludes our pre-departure road-trip jinx. Nice knowing all of you.

Above: A recently-opened mason jar of aged homemade BBQ sauce from a gas-station/BBQ joint in ruralish central Pennsylvania called Gio’s Roadside Grille. It is aged because we bought it at Gio’s in November 2008 (!!) during our Yanksgiving drive to Florida, and god only knows how long the sauce had been in the jar when we bought it. The jar has remained sealed and untouched these past three years in two different pantries, the one at Chez Tunis and the one here at the Hotel Fantod. Last night I finally pop the seal and open the jar to see if there’s any chance the stuff is still edible and has not rotted into a hideous putrefied ooze. It tastes fine, familiar, pleasantly lacking in rancidities, corruptions, or microbial befoulments. The two of us then consume half the jar’s contents, heated up, over plates of of local BBQ smoked pulled pork takeout and here on Sunday we are still alive and upright and feeling unpoisoned … so far. The ancient occult technology of mason jar food preservation appears to have served us well. The label shows no expiration date, just a command to Refrigerate after opening, which I obey.

The sauce, if I’m not mistaken, is done in the Eastern North Carolina BBQ style: thin, tomato-based, with vinegar and mustard and Worcestershire sauce and brown sugar and molasses. It’s entirely possible that if such a combination of ingredients did rot into a hideous putrefied ooze, we would not be able to tell. On reflection, also, it does seem a little strange to happen upon a BBQ joint in the PA backwoods that not only has outstanding southern BBQ, but whose sauce adheres to the Eastern NC recipe. Or maybe this isn’t surprising at all? What do I know. — The main mystery is how the chillaxing fireproof pig on the label keeps that glass of lemonade cold.

Batman #188, December 1966. Scans via Blah Blah Blah, link via Comically Vintage.

Fingers crossed that Nolan brings this guy back for one of the future Dark Knight sequels.

Above: Roadeo, shown paused at a scoreless tie; or, the road trip metaphor I’ve been waiting for. Link via Austin Kleon.

A few notes on the upcoming annual Yanksgiving road trip to Florida.

1. Our drive south will involve two overnight stays; the drive back north just one, if all goes well. In between, we have a four-night reservation at a nice-ish Florida hotel that we’ve been to before. But it’s the prospect of the reservationless, transient eight-to-ten-hour overnight stops in the interstate Marriotts or Holiday Inns or Best Westerns that are in my mind more, now, before the trip. Check in, sleep, check out, disappear. A low-level escapist thrill from that sense of provisional locatedness, the allure of just passing through, etc., etc.

   Many sense-memories of overnight road-trip way stations have stayed with me, amassed from the past decade’s worth of annual cross-country drives, Virginia to Texas, Virginia to Florida, Ontario to Virginia, Ontario to Florida. They are basically all the same memory. Staggering into a nighttime hotel lobby in a carlagged stupor, being checked in by a late-shift desk ghost, collapsing into an anonymous, starchy hotel bed, passing out beneath a lulling soundtrack of highway traffic, under-window heat/AC, and parking lot altercations.

   A less wide-eyed way to put the above is that I am guilty of a type of naïve, oblivious travel-slumming. I’m able to find this stuff interesting/evocative/memorable/whatever because I drive long distances by choice rather than by necessity, and I do it seldom enough for it to seem a fun, safe, pseudo-adventurous novelty, rather than an exhausting, soul-annihilating, life-and-limb-threatening slog across a country that sometimes never seems to want to end.

2. Though we do this trip every year, we try to take different routes when possible, stop in different places. While using Google Maps to plan our route and Google Street View to check out hotels and restaurants and stores in our path, I’m once again setting myself up to experience the phenomenon of Déjà Street View — driving or walking around a location one has never been to before, but which one nonetheless has an uncanny, detailed familiarity with after having explored it in advance on Street View. It’s happened to you too, I know.

3. My attitude toward these cross-country road trips, though I do enjoy them, has been given perfect metaphorical expression by a recently-released online game called Roadeo. Actually it is a pretty solid metaphor for life in general. It is a two-player racing game in which one player drives a car on a road, and the other player plays as the road. The road is imagined as a sentient, active entity, unrolling just in front of the car, constantly changing its direction and slope, and its object is to make the car drive off the road and die. The car’s object is, simply, to stay on the road. Who will win? Car or road? Car or road?? A very good philosophical question. In the long run I think we all know the answer. (There is also a cooperative gameplay mode in which car and road team up and work together, but road-trip-wise this only seems symbolic of the first few hours of driving each day, in good weather, surrounded by scenic landscapes, and after a fine greasy diner breakfast.)