Dear Miss Landau

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What I would most like to do is travel again, and if I blogged en route who would be listening this time? I did it two years ago, and I'd like to do it again. If this is the wired world and the web, who's listening? I only feel isolated when I blog like this and receive no response.

Interest in Dear Miss Landau may be (slightly) hotting up! Said book has just been beautifully reviewed by Tim Coates on his Good Library Blog, and Tim intends to discuss it on BBC Radio 4's A Good Read in a couple of months. I'd also definitely like everyone to know I've started blogging on a community website in Glasgow's West End (to me, really like a weekly column) and I'm hoping that if I travel again, I'd be able to blog back to this and other blogs both here and abroad.

Here's the link to the West End blog:

http://www.glasgowwestend.co.uk/people/ ... ristie.php

and the link to the Good Library Blog:

http://www.goodlibraryguide.com/blog/ar ... landa.html

I would stress that all of these endeavours are intended to inspire people with autism. The actual trip which led to the writing of the book was specifically designed to publicise autism but became in the end more than the sum of its parts, as I acknowledge in the book itself, with the elegiac last sentence of the final blog.

I can remember it perfectly, without need to check or edit:

All for you, Miss Landau!

Best gal in all the world.

Hoping that Dear Miss Landau, like the proverbial submarine, will break surface soon. Help from Whedonopolis, the Good Library Blog and our small local paper, the Lanark Gazette has brought Dear Miss Landau closer to national/international exposure, but it's as if the story won't quite break.

The Gazette article was snapped up by a Press agency, I was reinterviewed and photographed, and now we waits.

The last couple of years, it has been like fate and destiny has had a plan for me, but I can't see the future and do not know what the fruition might be.

Any way to contact Alex Plank? (I have tried and will try his email address again) Having trouble getting through!

Dear Miss Landau (published by Chaplin Books) will be reviewed on BBC Radio 4's A Good Read on or about 17th July.

This is perhaps like a tiny acorn poking at the trunk of a great oak, and from Britain nonetheless, but I'd say it's the greatest adventure story written by an Asperger to date, and I'd hope you'd be able to listen to it via the internet.

Best wishes

James Christie

I think it's the best book I've read for ten years!

(Tim Coates, publisher and library campaigner)

So said Tim about Dear Miss Landau. He is a fine and good man who through the vagaries of blogs and forums I have never met!

Tim was quoted on BBC Radio 4's A Good Read, and his fellow guest, Jon Plowman (former Head of BBC Comedy) who commissioned The Office and Extras, amongst others, also put over a salient point:

In a way what I would have preferred is if the publisher had put in the thing he wrote about Buffy the Vampire Slayer because I think as a non-Buffy person ... I wanted to know a bit about what it was that he'd written that had made it possible for people in L.A. to say, "yeah, come over."

Yes, Drusilla's Roses really was that good! The aim is to get the Drusilla trilogy published and Dear Miss Landau optioned as a film, but for that myself and my publisher need help.

Hope to hear from you.

Dear Miss Landau has gone to a second print run of another 1,000 books.

I'm counting down to America!

Flying out August 7th, the same day the next print run will be ready...

So the story of the most adventurous quest in autistic history goes on...

Like to hear from you, Alex!

What are you up to???

Hi Carol

Oh, you know, stealing the Enterprise again...

(transcript of an email conversation between myself and a rather surprised former National Autistic Society director who helmed the operation last time I crossed America...)

I'm in Chicago, and I'll be visiting the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center 9th-12th August.

They say never beam down in a red shirt, but I'll be wearing a blue shirt.

A blue rugby shirt...

Should also have my own copy of Dear Miss Landau with me. It'd be fun if someone spotted me...

I should be talking to WGTR (WGTRmedia.com), an internet radio station, about Dear Miss Landau at the Chicago convention today. I'm not sure if many people with autism do much broadcasting so it might be quite something to see...

Or rather, hear...

I talked to WGTR, and I met my dear Miss Landau once more...

(I'm going to paste in seven articles written while crossing the US for my dear Miss Landau once again. Read a little piece of history, and someone tell Alex...)

Meet Miss Landau, miss the President...

“Met my dear Miss Landau again, Keith.”

“The president dropped by today, James.”

“What?”

Once again, I’m in my cousin Keith’s apartment in Chicago, just off the Blue Line from Rosemont on the way back from the convention center where Juliet was appearing. It’d be fair to say I’d sat the whole trip back with a silly smile upon my face and my eyes parked upon a spot halfway to heaven, twirling a copy of Dear Miss Landau on my lap.

I’d trundled round the convention happily and anonymously – and yes, Drusilla was there, darting about like a little girl excited by the colour and finery and glitz and glamour of it all, sniffing the odd neck now and again before shooting back and grabbing my arm, momentarily scared by a Star Wars stormtrooper or similar striding by.

Afterwards, the Blue Line’s silver carriages had trundled back down through Montrose and California before slotting into the station at Clark and Lake with a satisfied sigh, I’d told the concierge who’d looked enquiringly my way as I bounced through the doors that I’d just had the best day in the history of the world ever; and perhaps you’d forgive me for thinking that nothing could top that.

Well, almost nothing.

“What, you mean here?”

I’d even bought a Drusilla doll that day (the one with the fangs, the bloody white dress and the blackened rose), placed it irreverently before Juliet and said, deadpan, that I really didn’t think my life could get any more surreal...

Keith looked at me patiently as I stood in front of him, holding a plastic vampire doll.

“No, not here. Where I work. At the Obama for America campaign office.”

The campaign to re-elect the president is centred on Chicago, Obama still has a home on the South Side, there’s only 80 days to go until America has to choose between a Republican nominee wedded to elitist ideals of tax breaks for the stinking rich and the destruction of Obamacare (and probably America) and a Democrat president and Party who at least seemed to be living in the real world; and he’d dropped into Campaign HQ to rally the troops.

However, a president never just drops in.

The Secret Service threw everyone out of the building for two hours before Obama came by, conducted a security sweep of the offices and a connecting corridor through which the president would walk, and then let the staff back in through portable metal detectors.

All this for a five-minute rallying call, and the way of life for a president.

Unfortunately, Obama decided to do a little walkabout, as a result the rallying call took a little longer than expected, and the connecting corridor through which the great man was due to depart? It had been locked off, it stayed locked off, and that’s where all the restrooms were.
His loyal staff stood there gamely with their legs crossed, and there was a general rush for relief once the president went on his way.

Relieving America’s ills will not come so easily!

In his book First Principles (2012), John B. Taylor, Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford, made the clear and chilling point that:

...”if the fireworks graph [a graph showing the total amount of debt owed by the U.S government at home and abroad] is realized, it will be the end of America as we know it. The United States would be an impoverished debtor nation.”

Let me repeat part of that quote:

...”the end of America as we know it.”

At the time of writing and according to the U.S. national debt clock, U.S. debt is nearly $16 trillion. Some debt is necessary and even desirable, but if a country’s debt tops 60% of of its gross national product (GDP), that country’s got problems. According (arguably) to James Taylor’s predictions, U.S. debt will be about 75% of GDP in 2012 and 100% of GDP by 2020.
The United States of America has many other problems – the worst drought since the nineteen-thirties in the Midwest and Southwest, the struggle to implement the Affordable Care Act, the rising costs of Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security, and a probably unsustainable defense budget ($525.4 billion requested for the 2013 fiscal year), but such problems might just be that little bit easier to solve without such an Everest of debt weighing down the can-do attitude and ingenuity of the average American.

In less than three months, the average American will have a choice between a party utterly opposed to any form of tax increase, period; and a party willing to accept that tax bills may well have to go up to decrease debt, but that spending will also be needed to stimulate the U.S. economy.

It is as if the United States is locked in the office and the Republicans will not let them into the restrooms, assuming average Americans will be able to find their own means of relief.

Personally, I’d rather vote Democrat. I like to be able to go to the toilet when I want.

James Christie
13th August 2012

Flight of the Clara Pandy

Descent into Chicago was smooth but the change to another culture bumpy. I’d transferred at Newark from Glasgow and made the second city’s flight at the final call, grateful for enough fitness still to jog-trot along the long and winding halls.

A lot had happened since the last time I’d been in Newark, the last words written there still often on my mind:

...maybe it was more simple than that. The need to go into battle once more before it was too late. The need of the knight to stand before his lady one last time, before accepting the fading of the light.

All for you, Miss Landau!

Best gal in all the world.

And the man who wrote them not the published author I’d since become.

Dear Miss Landau, published by Chaplin Books two years to the day I’d met my Rose on Sunset Boulevard, and on the inside page the short and simple sentence I’d waited a lifetime to see:

The moral right of James Christie to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

A straightforward sentence finally making sense of a lifetime of trial and error, hope and despair.

A story which should indeed inspire people with autism, the original aim of Dear Miss Landau.

So what to do next?

The Enterprise had been stolen, the continent crossed and Drusilla redeemed. I’d returned to a quiet house with the ghost of my vampire flatmate still in the corner of my eye, but though a Hollywood film could have spun the closing credits across the last and final scene, life had to go on.

So I’d brushed the dust off my rucksack and gone out once more, while I was still young and strong enough to find an answer to the call.

Holiday or trek, trip or pilgrimage? An incisive set of notes on a nation perhaps heading for a fall. Or just a few days off, near the surf and hanging round the mall?

I’d brought my Steinbeck and his book of Wrath, bought a short sharp text on possible U.S. decline or deliverance. I even planned to take the Blue Line from Clark/Lake to Rosemont like a motorized pilgrim to see my dear Miss Landau at her convention, Dear Miss Landau in my hand and everybody happy, one and all.

A short step from 2010, a damaged, disabled man, and the faraway scent of roses in the wind.
I didn’t think I was exactly that man any more, but I didn’t really know my new role yet, nor what exactly was the score.

Then I glanced left as we approached O’Hare, found the answer laid clear and bare. A 747 in flight, climbing away from Chicago’s towers, seeming to hang suspended above the inland sea in the light, bright air.

That light still bright, not yet fading.

I remembered the tale of a ship in a story I’d read long before. The Ballad of Halo Jones, of a girl who’d worked her passage to the farthest stars on the Clara Pandy, a starship which, saved from the breaker’s yard by the billionaire Lux Roth Chop, had lifted away from the city and the sea with sure and stately grace.

Enterprise. Clara Pandy. A ship’s a ship. Call it what you will. I was tasked to take her out again, to find that sunlit hill.

And Halo Jones? What was her aim and goal?

Not a hill, not a call. Just to go on out, that was all.

James Christie
14th August 2012

In Search of Smallville

They’re hoovering (or should I say Dysoning?) the Greyhound terminal on South Jefferson, decked out in a nice newish livery of red, white and blue since I last passed that way. A bunch of young cowboys, from Tennessee it seems, is playing cards in the cafeteria, and I’m waiting on the service for Topeka.

I’ll get there about 2.00 a.m. tomorrow morning, wait ‘til break of day, then try and get through to Council Grove, an otherwise ubiquitous small town, but the only one planted right in the exact dead centre of America as well as deep amidst the Kansas wheatfields, and for all I know right in the middle of America’s longest, deepest drought since the Great Depression.

It seems I am leaving the Gotham City of Christian Bale’s Batman for Clark Kent’s mythic Smallville, and what small-town America will make of a lanky, blond Asperger from Glasgow, Scotland, I really do not know.

Like the Wichita lineman, I am strung out on the wire. Autistic fear and anxiety are ever with me, if compressed and translated into little blocks of decision and anxiety linked by grappling hooks which let me navigate through the day.

The six-wheeled Greyhounds sit idle in the bays. The last of the Discovery Passes is in my pocket (they’ll be discontinued after August), but it feels like yesterday.

It is yesterday.

But I’ve already left my dear Miss Landau, who flew home from Chicago on Sunday.
I don’t believe I’ll see her in L.A., and I know I must make the crossing alone. One last time, without a guide along the way.

But yesterday is just a step away, a tap-dance in the avenues of time. There are ways and means to turn back the clock, easy as spinning on a dime.

I once wrote of “doors which let the lucky traveller, still young, walk out into a different summer and another day.”

An author I admired once put forward a fantastic idea:

Convince a man he’s living in another era. Take away everything that tells him he’s in the world of today and replace them with the backdrop of another time. 1900, 1880, 1850, whenever.
Slowly, he forgets where he really is and the impossible, the unreal, becomes the mundane and everyday.

And then, when the last fragments of doubt are gone, he throws open the curtains and walks out into that other summer...

I am carrying her colours again, out of place in this day and age, but my ghosts from long ago and far away, they seem a little closer now, I’m very glad to say.

I may be out of place and time, I may be mad to search out yesterday, but just between you and I, my friend, I’m going to do it anyway.

James Christie
14th August 2012

Went looking for America and couldn’t find it anywhere...

I blew, or rather soughed into Topeka (which, unlike Kansas City, is the actual capital of Kansas) like a strung-out piece of half-chewed taffy, and came ingloriously to a shuddering halt.

I’d swum through a sea of white and silver silos, wheatfields, sad old car lots, State Police and hold-ups on the highway. St Louis’ Prairie Arch still stood tall above the city. Paddle steamers tramped gaily down the Mississippi and great, empty former warehouses stood sadly by the banks of Old Man River.

A sign in St. Louis’ notorious Greyhound terminal (we will lose yore luggage! Guaranteed!) stressed the need for courtesy while, a few dozen yards further on, a driver or transportation agent with a broad Missourah accent barked at a bunch of poor unfortunate passengers with all the wit, civility and tact of a prison warder at Shawshank. I wondered, as he snapped out something about taking their shoes off before they reboarded, whether he was shepherding a newly-released gang of ex-cons.

Two girls gliding along like liquid chocolate in motion seemed to be the first allowed on the bus while slow-moving chaos reigned at the gate. They’d tried to make us board their new Express service via separate groups of seat numbers back in Chicago, ensuring everything took twice as long. At the time, I’d acidly commented:

“It used to work fine. Then they organised it.”

That, however, all went by the board in St. Louis, and apart from being half-an-hour late, we chugged out pretty much on time...

But when I reached Topeka, it all came to a halt even more effectively than Greyhound could have managed. There simply was no bus service to Council Grove. Period. It seems America is now so totally reliant on the car that most branch or subsidiary bus lines have just withered away.

I’d dropped into the lobby of the local Ramada Inn as there wasn’t much else to do at two o’clock in the morning in Topeka (to be a bit catty, it didn’t look like there’d be much to do at two o’clock in the afternoon, either), and found out from a gentle-voiced security guard that Arrow Stage Lines was no more (if indeed it had ever even existed), and that the only way I’d get anywhere near Council Grove was if I hitched, hired a cab or flew. No wonder that, growing up in Kansas, Superman learnt to fly. It was probably the only way he could get around.

But, and this must clearly be said, that good and decent gentleman was then kind enough to let me hang around in the lobby until the break of day.

And that, I suppose, sums up the fine and decent Westerner of Middle America. Seemingly a tad slow and thoughtful, but considerate and hospitable both at the beginning and end of the day.

There’s the other side to consider, though. The comments in Topeka’s Metro Voice of August 2012 to the effect that, ...”in science, your child will learn he is not the product of an evolved ape,” or the decision by the Boy Scouts of America that “it will not be changing its membership standards to allow openly gay persons.”

Then there’s the subterranean Cheyne-Stokes breathing brought on by the twin terrors of crops in trouble and a stalling economy. Corn is Kansas’ second biggest crop, and among other things 40% of that entire crop usually provides ethanol for America’s automobiles.

Unfortunately, by mid-summer of 2012 63% of America’s entire landmass was stricken with drought, and the one-half to three-quarters of an inch of rain a day which the corn plant’s tassel needed to pollinate was nowhere to be seen. Nearly 40% the United States’ entire corn crop is burning on the bare red earth beneath blue and empty skies. 2,000 counties in 29 states (82 in Kansas) have been declared natural disaster areas, and the effects of the disaster will ripple outwards, pushing up fuel prices and damaging the U.S. trade balance.

All this despite the fact that, last spring, American farmers planted 96 million acres of corn, the most since 1937. They couldn’t have known they’d also run into the worst drought since 1937...

“The sun flared down on the growing corn day after day until a line of brown spread along the edge of each green bayonet. The clouds appeared, and went way, and in a while they did not try any more ... The surface of the earth crusted ... and as the sky became pale, so the earth became pale, pink in the red country and white in the grey country.

In the water-cut gullies the earth dusted down in dry little streams ... And as the sharp sun struck day after day, the leaves of the young corn became less stiff and erect; they bent in a curve at first, and then, as the central ribs of strength grew weak, each leaf tilted downward. Then it was June, and the sun shone more fiercely. The brown lines on the corn leaves widened and moved in on the central ribs. The weeds frayed and edged back toward their roots. The air was thin and the sky more pale; and every day the earth paled.”

(John Steinbeck ; The Grapes of Wrath)

Despite the deepening shadows of the grapes of wrath, it would be so easy to wrap up this article with a glib and shallow summary, but there’s an old school building south east on Monroe which tells a better tale of the hospitality and fairness of the Midwest Kansan.

Blacks moved west to escape the segregations still practised in the South, coming to Kansas from the turn of the twentieth century to find a better life, and by and large they did. Segregation does not appear even to have been practised in rural Kansas. It wouldn’t have been an absolute rural idyll, and there would have been bigots, but the Klan didn’t ride and the work was steady.

Urban Topeka, however, still segregated the schools, but by the standards of the time that segregation was fairly managed. All schools were of the same standard and blacks got a good education, but not in the same classrooms as whites.

However, by the early nineteen-fifties the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) had been challenging laws which upheld the colour bar for nearly twenty years. Segregation, for example, had been institutionalised in 1896 by the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the concept of separate-but-equal facilities for blacks and whites. In 1951, Topeka’s NAACP chapter filed suit (Oliver L. Brown et al. v. The Board of Education, Topeka [KS]) against the Board’s policy of segregation in District Court. By 1952 the NAACP had taken the case of Brown v. Board, and four others to the Supreme Court. All five cases were combined under the title of Brown v. Board, and the NAACP argued that although facilities were indeed much the same in Kansan schools, black students suffered psychologically by being classed as different and in practice felt inferior, in violation of the US Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

In brief, the NAACP won their argument. The Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision with regard to Brown v. Board overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, changed the federal law of the United States, desegregated classrooms nationwide and paved the way for the Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties.

But judgments made by learned men in the Supreme Court are one thing. The grassroots reaction of rednecks and bigots to those judgments quite another.

So what happened in Topeka when the Board of Education put the new rules into practice?

Nothing much, it seems. No lynching, no riots, no muss, no fuss.

I think that pretty much sums up the fundamental fairness of the Kansan. They obeyed the laws of the land when they had to, and maybe they liked it and maybe they didn’t. But when that law changed, they just shrugged their shoulders and adapted, honestly and hospitably.

There is an old school building south east on Monroe. Once, only blacks walked its halls, and then one fine day whites did, too. The way Topeka allowed the legal challenge and then adopted the legal change without fuss or bother gave the ripples of that change the chance to spread out over the whole country.

Yeah, the Kansans might seem a tad conservative and they sure do like their Bible, but when they were tested in the most radical way, they were hospitable to their fellow Man, and that’s a fundamental lesson in good behaviour which echoes down to us today.

James Christie
17th August 2012

Things to Do in Denver When You’re Not Dead

“Is it possible that, after all the years of our knowing, after all the centuries of our poets and prophets having accurately charted the territories of the human heart, we still wander ...

I hit the road again that night, the bus climbed into the Rocky Mountains at sunset and dumped me in Cheyenne, Wyoming at about 4 a.m. A wave of freezing weather was also passing through and the town was twenty or thirty degrees colder than it should have been. I had not had much sleep either. Somebody up there did not seem to want to make things easy for me.”

(James Christie [quoting John Donne], written on the road back from Australia, 1st November 1989)

It would be twenty-three years before I’d come right up against the Continental Divide again. The Rockies are aptly named. A seemingly solid wall of jagged, sloping rock separating the Midwest from the Far West. Two years earlier, I’d slipped around it via Flagstaff and up to Vegas through the San Francisco Peaks. This time the walls of cliff stood straight before me and it felt as if, like Ourobouros, the snake devouring its own tail like a black reptilian Möbius strip, I’d been brought back to face myself before finding the way home.

So, come out of the brown and failing Kansas wheat and cornfields, past tall thin wind turbines which seem to stand guard over fragile and remote farms like Martian monopods, find your way to Denver for the first time in your life and find yourself a mile high in the Greyhound terminal one morning, eating a sub and contemplating the end of days like a lone mountaineer on the last ledge he’ll ever scale.

I remember that young man who’d first passed that way, but I am no longer he.

A radio interview which Juliet and I have done for WGTR in Chicago has gone out along the wire, word is spreading about Dear Miss Landau, and I am like the Wichita lineman, out there in the ether and still on the line.

I stay the night in a Motel 6 on West 49th Avenue, ruefully reflecting on the fact that I’m a mile high and the couple next door are making a determined effort to join the Mile High club. Seeing around the 16th Street Mall in the centre of Denver the following day, I hear slower Western drawls and see an elderly Native American woman on the RTD bus, hair like steely coal and skin of light tan.

This seems to be Denver, a slight whiff of frontier territory but a city without major problems (or so a seller of Street Voice tells me) and an open, friendly air on its wide streets.

But this is the same city where only a month ago 12 people were killed and 59 injured in a random attack during the premiere of the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises.

The issue of gun control has been rumbling on in America for generations, and I do not want to revisit the same old hackneyed and polarised arguments (guns don’t kill people, people do! – yeah, but they use guns to do so...) and endless dispute over the wording of the Second Amendment.

So here’s a straightforward little thought. I come from an army family, and know a little about guns. Basically, a gun makes it very easy to kill someone. Far too easy. It’s just a twitch of thumb and forefinger which sends a projectile tearing through someone’s body at 2,000 miles an hour. The entry wound is usually small, but you could fit a big man’s fist in the exit wound. It isn’t like it’s shown in the movies (except The Wild Bunch and Saving Private Ryan). The victim is thrown back maybe half-a-dozen feet and nearly broken in half. And it’s not a trickle of blood that comes out, it’s more like a fire hydrant erupting.

Put such weapons within easy reach of those who are disturbed, immature, irresponsible or violent, or those who do not consider the consequences of their actions, and you have a situation where catastrophic violence can erupt in seconds, with the consequences which were plainly seen in Aurora.

America has too many guns within too easy reach of too many individuals with the potential to be hot-headed or irresponsible. It’s easy to sniff at comic-book quotes, but Spiderman’s ethos, that “with great power comes great responsibility,” could not be more serious or true.

If you don’t know what you’re doing with a gun, don’t pick one up.

I lazily took a cab back from pleasant, easygoing downtown Denver and talked about good times and bad with the driver.

All he seemed able to say was that everything had been peaceful, then the violence suddenly erupted, as if from nowhere.

Now there’s a surge of gun licence applications in Denver, with lots of people looking to protect themselves, so it probably won’t be too long until there’s another massacre, there or elsewhere.

I’d like to think this article might make a difference.

But I doubt it.

James A. F. Christie
22nd August 2012

Crossing the Continental Divide

The Greyhound gears down as it climbs into the Rocky Mountains, up past slopes of scree dotted with pine and fir and aspen. The Interstate is a scar cut into the mountains and the bus the ant traversing the straight razor. And so it hunkers down and pulls up the pass, past Lookout Mountain and one most strange dwelling place, shaped like a flying saucer and standing tall on the highest bluff.

Vast deep passes cut through the mountain walls, rock of iron dusted the lightest shade of sand. Pine trees clustering on ridges sharp as the blade of a Bowie knife and holding onto clefts in the sloping stone.

The bus goes past Silverthorne at 8,790 feet, a town of standardised shopping malls, it seems, coming just after a shallow inland sea. Long lean Mack trucks with smooth curved engine cowlings carrying logging or pipes, sometimes lacking the traditional old twin smokestacks, cruise alongside and then we are come upon the Vail. Vail Pass, at 10,662 feet the summit and apogee. A high elevated flatland bowl at the top of the Rockies, the continental division crossed and now descending in the wake of the Vail, the foliage thickening and the stone reddening a touch.

A sign says Exit 19, No Name, 1\2 mile. Old style telegraph poles shadow the route of the downhill railroad like tall thin crosses and I’ve no doubt these parched mountains broke many a prospector and sent them right up further higher passes and straight on to Boot Hill.

Travelling down this rollercoaster country equivalent of Chicago’s El, truly dwarfed amidst great plummeting rock walls, the debt of trillions seems an abstraction in the greater scheme of things.

The mountains pare down and fall away to dusty plains and cloned truck stops. We roll into Las Vegas and I phlegmatically end up in the same old hostel I’d been in before, but at least they have a private room. I can clean up, catch up on sleep and go see my favourite old Starbucks franchise on Fremont Street.

There is a sameness to it all. The snake has swallowed its’ own tail, I’m getting towards the end of my trail and I do not expect much more to happen.

James A. F. Christie
22nd August 2012