Road Trip

A fastidious packer, I. My car, a bento box filled with bento boxes. Smaller versions of themselves in infinite regress, like Russian nesting dolls. Babooshka. Kate Bush. One 8GB iPod Touch (movies & games), one 16GB iPod (music), one 3G Blackberry Bold 9700 (connectivity). Watched the original Fun with Dick and Jane last night. Funny thing to put on television during a recession, no? I was familiar with the opera they used in the unemployment bit of course. Bizet's "Carmen." I have a favorite recording of it. Where though? Not found. 404. Carmen Jones - did for Carmen what The Wiz did for The Wizard of Oz. As a child, seeing The Wiz on the big screen was...confusing.



Electric shaver: charging. Above mentioned devices: syncing. Mobile computing in my hand. Found CD. Wrong label - EMI Classics. Gheorghiu Alagna with the Orchestre National Du Capitole de Toulouse. Michel Plasson conducting. But what I really want, is Herbert Von Karajan conducting the Berliner Philharmoniker. I am ready. I am a racecar. Maybe stop for some brekky along the way. West bound and down. More or less. Mostly down. Interstate 35 for 5 hours. Like going to Kansas, but the other direction. Texas. Big state. Open road once I bust outta Big D. Like going through the planet's core.



Photographs are pensieves - reservoirs of memory. Bookmarks. I've just traveled a lifetime and back, from the contents of a box. Got lost a few times along the way. Funny thing, time - so many constructs in which the theory doesn't fit no matter how hard we want it to. I have no idea how much time passed, if any, while I was away. And ghosts reside there too. Caution is always prudent. Photographs can inadvertently unlock memories we've hidden away. Even those which should remain forgotten.



Summer of 1990. Two years out of High School and my best friend and I enlist in the Air Force. He's three months behind me going in, and I encourage him to join Intelligence so we could have assignments together. Outside of Tech School though, we never did. I left after 7 years; His retirement ceremony as an E8/Senior Master Sergeant is Friday in San Antonio.

I'll be there.