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.)

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.

Speaking of hungry Toronto horses: Above is a small, weird, ugly ornamental corbel seen at Casa Loma that appears to be depicting 1) a spectacularly gruesome jousting mishap, 2) a wince-inducing session of medieval horse-dentistry, or 3) an intervention-minded war-pony forcibly dissuading its smirking, flinty-eyed clean-freak master from Dustbustering his own fucking foot.

Another October nineteenth. This year I turn thirty-five. Here is a recent photograph of me looking revoltingly smug while a Torontonian bistro-horse devours my brains.

Sunday evening: A skeptical Laura throws a long shadow across scrap-paper Nijinsky’s kneecap. (Memory jog: Those are the Bogusławski posters described two Marches ago.)

One month ago today we are on a Lake Huron beach, suntanning. This is a different Great Lake suntanning session than the previously-mentioned one, the one on Lake Erie over Labor Day weekend. Lake Erie is nice. Lake Huron is kind of nicer. The two suntanning sessions are basically the same except that on Lake Huron we sit facing facing west instead of south (thus getting a more even afternoon tan), and we are there a little longer, and also there are sandwiches. The sandwiches are homemade and fresh and accompany us in a small cooler. We wolf them down mere moments after sitting down on our beach towels, which are bath towels. At the Lake Erie beach we feel keenly the absence of sandwiches. It is a mistake we will not make again. Cold sandwiches on the beach are the best. Lake Huron is also bluer of sky and water than Erie, and louder of surf — a pleasant lacustrine low roar keeping aural pace with the more upper-register low roar of beachgoers’ voices. A lulling white noise conducive to reading and sunning. It seems a world away from the green-grey and waveless Lake Huron we stare into two springs ago. This beach is one of several beaches in Pinery Provincial Park. Cape Coddish long-grassed sand dunes wall off the beachfront from Pinery’s namesake forests. The name Huron, as in both the Great Lake and the Iroquois peoples formerly living near it, derives from a French word meaning rough hair of the head, presumably from seventeenth-century French explorers’ and fur-traders’ insulting description of the tribespeople they met. We chase our sandwiches with cans of Coke that despite the cooler’s coolness have been long approaching lukewarmth and emerge from the cooler exuding beaded films of condensatory science. It has been about a three-hour drive west across southern Ontario to Pinery. Ever look at a map of Ontario? It is staggeringly immense, most of it uninhabited. Southern Ontario is like a tiny appendage of Ontario’s total Ontariority and this tiny appendage still takes three hours to drive across, Lake to Lake, unless of course you’re a road-trip spoilsport and you take the multilane arterial highways instead of the scenic rural roads. We vegetate in the Lake Huron sun until evening and then hit Grand Bend for a sunset dinner out and then drive a multilane arterial highway home in the dark, chewing coffee beans with chocolate chips and screaming along with ghastly Beatles tribute-band tracks to keep from nodding off. Below: That day’s Great Lake late-summer sundown.

Above: Swaying swing-stage ropes and cables on our building, two weekends ago, as viewed while leaning backward out a window and looking up. (Just kidding. Actually looking down.)

Yesterday: Mid-air goons on a swing-stage scaffold, floating past our windows.

Above: Lake Erie, Long Point Provincial Park, end of the day. Photo by Laura.

Last Saturday, Long Point, looking south over Lake Erie’s pond-ripple surf and alien horizon-haze, I sit with Laura in the sun, toes in freshwater sand, suntanning our faces, suntanning our limbs, suntanning our backs and bellies, perspiring in unison, beach books in hand, she reading about magicians, me reading about John Steinbeck putting small sea animals in jars, basically filling up at the last minute on whatever light and heat and outdoor oxygen is left of this summer because I can see the future and I know what the weather is dying to do.

Here is my bad, blurry photo of downtown Toronto as seen from the top of the CN Tower. We are looking west-southwest through reflection-riddled observation-deck glass. This is a few weeks ago, Monday 22 August 2011. A few days later I learn that Train and Maroon 5 were that very night co-headlining a show in Toronto at the Molson Amphitheatre, which venue is distantly visible in the photo. Great ghost of Gary Benchley! The mind reels at the thought of such a concentration of suckiness under one roof, open-air or not. I suspect this nearby singularity of soccer-mom rock somehow hosed my camera’s electronics, and/or wreaked havoc with my inner-ear balance. The Amphitheatre is, I believe, the Orion’s Belt–like trio of lights in the upper quarter of the shot, just left of center. From this vantage point high above the Earth, if you look carefully, you can actually see the bending of space-time caused by the ravening, cosmos-crushing vortex of corporate-pop awfulness generated by this concert. (Note: I confess that the girl-crazifying sounds of Maroon 5′s machine-stamped polyurethane supermarket-funk can often be heard in our car, and occasionally inside our house. They, and we, suck.)

Above: Butter, sugar, and flour. With some other stuff.

J. Fogerty, “Rhubarb Pie”:

Rhubarb pie!
Rhubarb pie!
It might rain tomorrow!
Better get some before I die!

I forgot to mention here that back in June I bake a rhubarb pie. Made from scratch on a sun-flooded Sunday afternoon. I am not sure what possessed me. Earlier in the month, one of Laura’s co-workers had offered us some fresh rhubarb from her family’s garden. We’d love some, thank you, I told the co-worker. What are you going to do with it, Laura asked me. Bake a pie, I replied. I had never baked a pie in my life, but it seemed like the correct answer. The rhubarb arrived the following week. Recipe-wise, I adhered to the Gospel of Mark. The bake went down on Sunday the twenty-sixth and the resulting pie was sort of shockingly delicious. Maybe not perfect in the presentation department, but for a first-timer, a damn fine pie.

I must confess to one serious cheat: There wasn’t enough rhubarb for the filling, so to top up the volume I threw in some thawed frozen strawberries — yes, frozen, very embarrassing — and thus it was really a strawberry-rhubarb pie. To me, though, it was all rhubarb in spirit.

Photo taken from my window, zoomed in substantially, cropped with reluctance.

Above: Rubble. A long reach excavator with a big fat chomping robot claw has been slowly demolishing parts of this derelict eight-story brick building across the street from us. Here on the west face of the Hotel Fantod we get to observe this spectacle up close. Lean out the window a bit and one may watch, hear, and savor the bouquets of the resultant dust clouds as the claw meticulously eats each section of the building one floor at a time, releasing great thundering showers of crumbled brick and concrete blocks and rusty-looking girders and roughly several hundred million billion petrified rat corpses all over the debris-strewn ground below.

I guess I disapprove of the demolition — I’m told, persuasively, that it would’ve been better for the city had the building been converted into lofts (as was done with the Hotel Fantod) — but I’m not exactly shedding tears over the loss of the building, a former federal-government hellhole where tax-department drones of yesteryear slaved away at their lead-and-asbestos desks. I’ve only ever known the building as an old, ugly, long-abandoned embarrassment taking up space in the downtown core. It is an eyesore. A reptilian local developer with a comic-book-villain name is knocking it down to build some sort of new and even worse eyesore. And of course the long process of knocking-down and building-back-up will enliven the downtown area with plenty of interim eyesoreness to tide us over. The sort of thing Ogden Nash refers to in “Paradise for Sale” as: This manic, fulminating ruction / Of demolition and construction.

I take back what I said about that wolfish grinning grin. And the staring mug-leopards, for that matter. It was just that fucking red-shirt guy in the background that was bothering me, of course, his own self. That behind-the-back photo-bomber. That expendable Star Trek grunt. The things I said about wolf-grins and leopard-stares were just thrown in as syllabic interlardings. It was the bad red shirt all along. The bad red background shirt and its terrible bad background redness. It was my fault for taking the photo and not shooting around the shirt. That accursed shirt. I felt I was stuck with the shirt in this otherwise fine photo because I am disinclined to change photos after I take them. No photo-cropping, no Photoshopping. But I have caved and allowed a tweak or two. All the photo needed was the merest soupçon of light-fingered Photoshop massage and the offending shirt barely even registers anymore.

Side note: The word wolfish is no insult in this house. Particularly with regard to grins. In fact wolves and their many winning characteristics hold a great fascination for me, as do persons who occasionally are wolves. I am a lycanthrophile. I am Team Jacob all the way. I saw Taylor Lautner drinking a piña colada at Trader Vic’s. His pecs were perfect.

Related: I ate Icelandic Wolf Fish at a Bonefish Grill in Lexington, Kentucky during last year’s Yanksgiving road trip. I can definitely recommend it.