Day 67 - Friday, July 30: Musings from Chris

It’s 4:46 I’m listening to Mingus, “

“The Black Saint and the Lady Sinner”.

It’s not the tail end of a long night of smoking and drinking, it’s an hour into what’s gonna be another long day. Coal trains, endless coal trains pass all night long, rocking the RV as we sleep. Nebraska and Kansas must be run exclusively on coal power. The Diesel engines that push or propel the freight are loud in their own special way and pass quickly, dragging the clacking, incalculable tonnage eastward, laden with coal and then back westward empty. I’m parked on a nice level cement patch, behind a Centex gas station off of Rt 30 in Lexington Nebraska. The tacos I ate last night at Max Taqueria were surprisingly good, I can’t stop thinking about them. It was the Tortillas themselves, they were maybe the best I’ve ever had.

David and Lucky exited a few minutes ago, Luck had a few depressing days off the road, one to save some strength for chemotherapy, one the day of chemo and one the day after. Lucky is deeply disappointed when David takes off without him. Lucky’s loyalty and his “idea” of his role with David are intense.

This morning in the wee hours, David’s thinking out loud about Utah, we haven’t made it halfway through Nebraska to Wyoming. Nebraska is a bit of a grind, now that we’re off the dirt and gravel grid. There might not be a perceptible bend In the road for 15 miles, no vistas. Along Rt 30 roughly every 5 or 6 miles are huge silos for grain, some active, some abandoned. They sit along the Union Pacific rail line which hauls the grain and runs parallel to Rt 30. This is feed corn, these two pancake flat states are it seems devoted to feed grain. The air in Lexington smells like the fertilizer section of Home Depot. It's not shit, though shit is part of it, it’s further refined, ammonia and other lesser known nose fucks.

This corn is the result of unnatural force feeding millions of acres of sun baked plateau.

There’s something awesome and deeply creepy about it, it’s all so heartlessly efficient. The machinery is enormous and expensive, the irrigation systems are gargantuan, the ownership I imagine is highly financed, calculated and centralized in the hands of those who best calculate, the winners are paper pushing early birds.

This is not Seven Generation thinking. Calculated down to the DNA of the seeds, the molecular frontier, the space economy, they own the space between the atoms, the intellectual property rights of genetically modified corn.

I resent the juggernaut of the huge machine.

I’m a part of it as much as any one, well maybe there are a few actual villains in the story. I’m a consumer, Me and my rubber tires travel on asphalt roads and by the illumination of the coal fired street lights. Last night's tacos and the cashless payment, ready to go, full tank of gas, even the Charles Mingus I’m listening to on my expensive phone are all commodities.

The disagreeable attitude I cultivate to pry myself free of this, the contempt I leaven to distinguish myself from the gravity of consumer culture, to naively imagine I am an agent of choice, free somehow free ?

But no, I eat what’s in front of me and take what I get, my lack of greed or my personal degree of greed, my satisfied, grateful nature may distinguish me?

It also has me in the express lane to extinction.

If it all ground to a halt, the convenience, the facial recognition, 5G speed, how kind would I be ?

A data speed bump has me suppressing a fit.

This is backstage of the American dream. Where the sausage is actually made. The beef feedlots are an atrocity.

While the harebrained surreal play about Democracy, we all act in, is going on.

The malodorous foundation of convenience and predictability, staring me right in the face.

There is a brutal coherence about it all, a terrifying inevitability.