I know it’s a bit premature to say, but when Halloween falls on a Tuesday, all the costume-dressing spirit tends to get used up on the weekend previous.

I say such a prediction may be a bit premature – given that today is Halloween proper – but once you reach a certain age, say, 20-ish, most of your desire for candy sublimates into a desire for liquor and outrageous costumes. (I’m using the adjective ‘outrageous’ as a substitute for ‘outrageously provocative,’ as we can learn from the nation’s newspaper of record here.

What I’ve decided, though, is that it’s just not worth the hassle to find a costume, to purchase said costume and then to ruin said costume in one night. This year, I actually did have somewhat of a good idea, something more creative than dressing up as Iceman from Top Gun. This has been my go-to idea for the last three years, given that I can wear a blue polo, a flight suit and aviators … and do a passable Val Kilmer. There’s something a bit, well, lazy about pulling your pop-culture references from a movie released in 1986, so I decided to be a rapper from 1987 and channel my inner Flavor Flav.

Granted, my costume was a bit lazy, considering gold teeth were $40 at the local costume shop – for not that much more, I’m sure, I could have had a real gold tooth put in. So Flavor’s getup this year consisted of a backwards Nintendo hat, some ‘70s glasses and a clock around the neck (of course). It was pretty much a wash, considering the parties Flavor attended were stock affairs, full of twentysomethings drinking beer. And then, without any fanfare, the whole weekend was over.

Much like Flavor’s clock that’s now hanging on my mantle, Halloween’s time this year is up. Here’s hoping the kids get some candy, because I’m partied out.

Sometimes I wish I were young again. I wouldn’t have to work, I would get crust-free sandwiches cut in triangles, I would watch Perfect Strangers reruns all day. Then again, there are some downsides to being young and tiny – because a small stature makes it easier to get stuck inside vending machines.

As reported by the Associated Press:

ANTIGO, Wis. - Three-year-old Robert Moore went fishing for a stuffed replica of Sponge Bob and ended up trapped in a vending machine. “I told him I could get it for him,” his grandmother said. “He’s a character. He said, ‘Oh no, I can get it.’” When she turned her back to get another dollar for a second try, Robert took off his coat and squeezed through an opening in the machine. He landed in the stuffed animal cube. FULL STORY

The vending-machine escapade reminds me of that old Twilight Zone episode where Bookworm Guy is sick of being distracted from his reading, so he goes into the bowels of a library. While he’s down there, nuclear war is unleashed, killing the rest of the planet.

‘Finally!’ he exclaims. ‘Now I’ll have time for my books.’

Then he breaks his glasses and the show ends with him wailing in agony, showing the ironic plight of Bookworm Guy.

This is just like that. Except it’s a vending machine, not a nuclear holocaust. And the kid doesn’t end up a broken, twisted shell of a human being. And the point was to get SpongeBob, not a stack of books.

Nevermind. This is nothing like that episode.

But the kid didn’t get his SpongeBob … so maybe there is some irony in this story, after all.

The metrics of my recent cross-country adventure speak for themselves.

• 25 days
• 25 states
• 7,952.0 miles traveled
• 54.0 miles per hour average speed
• 22.9 miles per gallon on average
• 1,452 usable photos taken
• 2,986 photos taken (light tests, et cetera)

Combining some of those numbers, we find

• 147.259 hours spent in a moving car (that’s 6 days, 3 hours, 15-ish minutes)
• 347.249 gallons of gas used (20.43 fill-ups of a 17-gallon tank)
• 48.6 percent of all photos were usable

With all that excitement, it’s not a far stretch to say that adjusting to my relatively standard, scripted life – with all its meetings and job responsibilities and social obligations and such – was a bit more difficult than I initially anticipated. First was the issue of payment: Suddenly I had to use my own money for things like food and snacks (purchasing booze was always my responsibility), rather than putting it on the company tab.

Second was the lack of the morning nomadic ritual. Each day, we would wake up around 10 a.m., drive somewhere, do an interview and photo shoot, drive somewhere else while working in the car, check into a hotel, take care of office responsibilities and go to bed at 1 a.m. My first day back at the office, for example, I was up at 5 a.m. because I was so nervous I wouldn’t rise until the trip’s normal waking time.

In any case, it’s good to be home.

The gods of weather – Zeus if you’re an Ancient Greek, Jupiter if you’re Roman, Wulwuaid if you subscribe to the mythological beliefs of Australian aboriginals, whomever – have smiled upon our white Buick LaCrosse for the last 23 days. From San Francisco, California, to Salem, Massachusetts, it’s been the rare time that sunny, clear skies weren’t above us.

In Boston, however, we must have forgotten to sacrifice our fatted calf or burn some incense or throw a virginal maiden off a mythical cliff, because trying to run a photo shoot in the rain with a battery pack – were you to use two words to describe such a situation, ‘sucks ass.’

But with the shutter click of what would become the 1,500th or so of my *usable* images (this figure doesn’t include those taken to nail down light settings, blurred images, ones with people picking their noses or grabbing their crotches, et cetera, making my pictures-taken figure something in the realm of 25,062), I felt a weight off my shoulders, I felt a burden lifted from my soul … I felt fucking raindrops on my face. Wuluwaid was telling me to finish this damn trip after day 24 drew to a close.

Now all that’s left to do is pack up the gear, ship it back, have a nice, refined dinner … and to celebrate National Collegiate Alcohol Awareness Week by getting drunk as Faulkner. This was a guy who, when asked to rehash his acceptance speech for his 1950 Nobel Prize in literature, couldn’t remember because he was too drunk while receiving his award to recall what he said. Tonight, I celebrate the end of a trip – an epic journey lasting three and a half weeks, covering 7,800 miles, bearing witness to the 25,062-odd pictures taken and serving up one $179 speeding ticket – by doing my best Faulkner and hitting the streets of Boston in style.

Tomorrow night: Our intrepid hero sleeps in his own bed!

I could go on and on about the Rollins State Park that we spent two hours driving through and how beautiful the colorful trees were and how refreshingly crisp the air was and how personally recharging the experience was, but I think you pretty much get the picture – it was, you know, nice.

I could also go on and on about Salem, Massachusetts, and how it’s amazingly quaint and historical but also endearing and comfortable and that, unsurprisingly, there’s an acceptance of all things Halloween – the town is internationally famous for its 1692 witch trials, after all, and even the police department uses a flying witch as its logo – but there’s nothing surprising there, either.

I would like to discuss something a little more, well, widespread: Irish pubs.

We had dinner at O’Neill’s, which – as you can guess – is an Irish pub. For some reason, I went into dinner with a different mindset; being on the road for 23 days will alter your perception of what is ‘normal’ and what is ‘expected,’ traveling through the West will alter your perception of what is a ‘normal distance,’ traveling through the South will alter your perception of what are ‘social norms,’ and traveling through small-town New England will alter your perception of what is ‘average.’

I guess I just wasn’t thinking clearly, because this Irish pub was like every other Irish pub I’ve ever been to. I could have ordered a shepherd’s pie and a Guinness or I could have ordered a chicken sandwich and a cider or I could have ordered a burger and a Smithwick’s … and it wouldn’t have mattered if I were in Chicago or Salem or Dubai.

I did some research on the topic and found that Slate had quite a few words to say on why this phenomenon exists (hint: Diageo, the parent company of Guinness, and a Dublin-based company have been exporting various flavors of pre-fabricated Irish pubs, from ‘Gaelic’ to ‘Brewery’ to ‘Traditional Pub Shop,’ since 1991), and you can read the full article here.

Maybe I was expecting something a little more … spooky. I had just photographed Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famed House of the Seven Gables, after all, and I had just purchased a Tarot deck and kids in Halloween costumes were walking around all over the place, so I guess the Salem version of the Irish pub should have been more, I don’t know, eerie, I guess.

Like I said, I didn’t really think it through. But I did have a few pints of Smithwick’s, so I suppose I’m just fine with the way things worked out.

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Today’s Photo Gallery, With Appropriately Witty Captions.
I told you the trees were pretty. (This caption isn’t witty.)

The reason this upstanding citizen got a statue was because he wore his Pilgrim-style hat with élan and flair. And the buckles on his shoes were always gleamingly polished.

While I was taking pictures in this graveyard that sits in the middle of Salem, I kept hoping against hope that we would have a Thriller-style awakening of the dead and a dance-off with 17th-century garb. Alas, it didn’t happen.

What? I don’t get it … why is the word ‘bunghole’ funny? According to the dictionary, a ‘bunghole’ is an opening in a keg or a barrel through which liquor flows. Or a liquor store in Salem. Whichever.

I had a post all ready to go, full of vitriol and cynicism about America and the perversion of its ideals that I witnessed on Friday, October 13 (how often do you get that date? Every eight years or so?) that made the following points:

• The memorial planned for Flight 93 – the United plane that crashed into Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on 9/11 – is tantamount to the theme park-ization of the sacred, perverting the current impromptu structures there into nothing short of a tourist trap and twisting what was organically created by those initimately affected by the tragedy into something consumable by all;

• The interview and photo shoot I did just after visiting the Flight 93 site, which would feature Spencer Bailey, a survivor of the Flight 232 crash in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1989, was a media fabrication of hero worship for someone who – by his own admission – was simply in the right place at the right time, not someone who did anything particularly heroic;

• The tour I took of Hershey, Pennsylvania – home to the world’s largest chocolate plant – was a symbol of this country’s obsession with overconsumption and gluttony. The tour guide even went so far as to say that the purchase of Hershey’s products was a selfless act of philanthropy, not just a desire for candy, since a portion of all proceeds benefit the Hershey’s campus, a foster home/school for underprivileged children;

• And the late-night pictures I took of Three Mile Island, site of a 1979 nuclear meltdown, were indicative of America’s quest for the illusion of security – we’re never really going to be safe from a nuclear holocaust, or terrorism, or war, but we’re sure as hell going to act like we’re invulnerable.

I was going to write about all of that, stringing the lyrics to John Cougar Mellencamp’s ‘Pink Houses’ – itself a tongue-in-cheek indictment of the American Dream – but I can’t bring myself to finish it without coming off as a jaded cynic. So instead, I’ve decided to simply show photos of the above four events and to describe the good times I had in New York the day after Friday the 13th.

One of the great paradoxes between my personality and my career is my dislike of New York City. Prior to yesterday, I had never had a good time there, because every time I visit, something goes wrong. In 1998, there was the Forced March Around Manhattan Because My Friend’s Dad Doesn’t Want To Pay For A Cab. In early 2006, there was the Visit A Friend Who Ignores You. But I’m a magazine editor, and that’s the center of my industry. Two of my three former interns now work for magazines there, in fact.

So if I want to continue working in publishing, I should learn to like the damn place.

If liking New York is my goal, this most recent did a good job of changing my mind. I started the day with a photo shoot in Herald Square, and realized the following two things:

1. There’s always something going on, no matter what part of the city you’re in, no matter what time you’re there. People will always be walking around, providing great backgrounds for photo shoots.
2. Not a one of those passersby care enough about what you’re doing to even look in your direction. I could have been naked except for a a tin-foil hat and angel wings while I was taking those pictures and I would have been given the same disregard as my normal, fully-clothed self was.

Times Square was an absolute monstrosity, almost schizophrenically frantic – but it was exactly as it looked in all the pictures I’ve seen. The metro system from Wall Street to 34th on the 2 Line was exactly like taking the El in Chicago. Greenwich Village was full of fetish shops and NYU students and everything in between. In short, nothing surprised me, and I felt like I blended in.

My only regret was not going to the Blue Note – a jazz club I’ve wanted to visit since something like 1994 – but we did have a drink at The Slaughtered Lamb, a pub with the most rockstar name *ever* and a logo that depicted a wolf, fangs bared, snarling at the moon, so that was a good consolation prize.

In short, I suppose I’m as guilty as anyone else in this country for wanting my memorials to be theme parks and my temples of consumption – Hersheytown for some, pubs like The Slaughtered Lamb for me – to be monuments to gluttony. And who am I kidding? I’m staying in rural Vermont right now, ready to get up early to take pictures of the changing New England leaves (which my sister says makes me a ‘leafer,’ a tourist who shows up in the fall for photos) and I’ll be in Salem, Massachusetts, tomorrow evening to exploit the memory of the witch trials.

I even bought a t-shirt at Strand, the famous ’18 Miles of Books’ store at Broadway and 12th when I visited this morning.

Sometimes hipster cynicism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

It’s official: The cold days of fall are here. I’m sitting in a garage, typing this, while I’m a bit less than warm and snug - there’s something called a ‘frost advisory’ in effect for northern West Virginia. I didn’t know you needed to alert people that frost can occur when the temperature drops below, say, 32 degrees Fahrenheit. I just took such ice formations as a matter of course in sub-freezing weather, but then again … people sometimes need a kick in the pants.

Speaking of a kick in the pants, I was blown away by the campus of the University of West Virginia. Apparently the sleepy town of Morgantown isn’t so sleepy, as it’s home for more than 24,000 college students, all of whom, it seemed, decided to gather today for some sort of dance-off or fundraiser or act-goofy-day.

And, of course, this was my photo assignment for the day: to capture photographically the antics of semi-choreographed skits and dancing. The first problem was the sky, as it was a bit bleak. See below.

Due to the dropping temperatures, what was supposed to occur outside in the somewhat-chilly-but-better-for-photography-afternoon-light was moved indoors. This is where trouble started, because the student union of WVU - which is large enough to host four fast-food restaurants in a food-court setting - wasn’t quite spacious enough to accomomdate the sudden influx of costumed college kids, all jockeying for the best position from which to cheer, or yell, or whatever, for their group’s performance.

My light settings were screwed. Spaces in which to hold a photo shoot were rapidly dwinding. So I had to jury-rig a light setup, yelling at people to get the hell out of my way the entire time. Some people didn’t listen so well. See below.

Rather than my customary 60 or so pictures, I had to make do with fewer than 10. And of course most of them are unusable, since people can’t seem to keep their eyes open when I say ‘ready guys? Okay … one … two … three’ and then snap a picture. When the photographer counts to three, that’s the time to blink or make a dumb-looking face. Thanks, guys.

In any case, the skit I photographed was, well, interesting to say the least. The best part, far and away, was the theme: Classic Nickelodeon. I had a conversation about the shows ‘G.U.T.S.’ and ‘Legends of the Hidden Temple,’ which until this point had been banished to that part of my brain that typically deals with lyrics to ’80s pop songs - Paula Abdul’s ‘Vibeology’ (Ooh / when you do that thing you do / I’m in a funky way) and Simply Red’s ‘Stars’ (I / wanna fall from the stars / straight into your arms / I hope you comprehend) - and, of course, someone dressed up as Quailman from ‘Doug.’ Then they danced. See below.

Stay tuned as our intrepid hero treks to Hershey, Pennsylvania, tomorrow and gorges himself on Reese’s cups - after battling the ‘frost advisory.’ Thanks, Weather Channel, for stating the obvious.

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Postscript On Poorly-Named Chained Restaurants.

We ate lunch today at a Pennsylvania-based chain called ‘Eat ‘n Park.’ It’s your typical salad-bar-and-entree style restaurant, with a demographic skewing well into the AARP generation, but I couldn’t get over the name. I was trying to convince Brandon to follow directions, to ‘eat’ and then to ‘park,’ but we couldn’t logistically figure that one out. So, defiantly determined to have our meal, we had to ‘park’ and then we got to ‘eat.’

Doesn’t ‘Park ‘n Eat’ make more sense? I should work in marketing.

Some days are run as marathons; some are sprints. Today was definitely the latter, albeit a slow one.

The Part Where The Author Discovers The Weather Is Changing.

I got up a little later than I would have liked and discovered the golden part of fall had passed by, leaving nothing but dreary, overcast skies in its wake. That was okay by me, though, considering both of today’s photo shoots were going to be indoors - and taking pictures of industrial plants (and haunted manors - more on that later) is great with a steel-grey backdrop.

The Part Where The Author Holds Photo Shoots.

The first shoot was with an art professor at Bethany College, a beautiful campus nestled into the West Virginia hills. His studio was the top two floors of a former gym, now full of printmaking equipment and half-finished canvases and a couch that old students had written all over. It was, in short, one of the most picturesque places I could have ever envisioned for a professor to work in … and this guy had a Thriller-era Michael Jackson lamp in his office. He got points in my book for that one.

After finishing that interview and shoot, we drove to a small town whose name escapes me now, but suffice to say that instead of the seven-minutes-per-quarter parking-meter rate you get in Chicago, we found that 25 cents bought us a full two hours of street parking. Small town, indeed. I posed this second subject, a lawyer, in front of his legal library, and then we were on our way. It was then that Brandon had a great idea: to show me a haunted mansion up in the hills away from town.

The Part Where The Author Has A Supernatural Encounter.

You might be thinking ‘kids in bad makeup jumping out of the shadows’-type haunted house, but this was the real deal. Apparently, a guy who inherited his father’s money just before the end of the 19th century decided to build a full compound, complete with a separate power source (he had electricity before the town below had it), a gaming room, numerous guest quarters … and an opium den. With his status as Former Local News Celebrity, Brandon convinced the caretaker to give us a tour of the grounds.

It’s creepy enough see a dilapidated mansion in the hills on a dreary day, but then I learned that the mansion is now a retirement community - so elderly people were wandering the halls, adding to the atmosphere - and then I found out why the place was supposedly haunted. Vandergrift, the man who built the estate, found that his wife was, well, less than faithful … and soon after, the barn burned down under mysterious circumstances. With her in it.

Soon after, he left the area, claiming it was ‘too painful’ for him to remain. Apparently his wife’s ghost didn’t feel the same.

And I definitely felt a chill as we wandered into room after room, seeing hidden alcoves open in the walls, seeing the photographs of countless Indians lining the walls, seeing the light-up eyes of an owl statue in the billiard room, seeing a fireplace mantle covered in Native American spiritual masks, seeing the opium den with medieval war weapons lining the walls. And our tour guide didn’t seem the least bit concerned with any of this, as he calmly explained the current state of the home and the spooky circumstances of its construction - all while wearing a wooden cross, the symbol of the St. George Christians, the current owners, around his neck. I didn’t expect any of this when I came to West Virginia.

The Part Where The Author Concludes, And A Picture Of Said Haunted Masks.

We left and met with Brandon’s father for dinner, and then stopped at the temple to all things hunting, Cabela’s. Apparently that store is like a Mecca for anyone peripherally involved with outdoors-y activities. I did get to hold a hundred-year-old shotgun, at least.

But here’s to tomorrow being a little more, well, normal and less, well, supernatural.

While on this trip, I have tried to exist as close to my normal operating sphere as possible. West Virginia, however, has proven to be Bizarro World - the polar opposite of my normal life - in two disparate realms:

• I’m used to near-constant wireless internet. Such a service does not seem to be available here.
• I’m used to bars, restaurants and cafés without gambling devices. Such wager-free zones do not seem to be available here.

So in a strange twist of normalcy, Brandon and I spent the better part of an evening driving around, looking for a wireless internet connection … and instead found gaming parlors.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘There’s the Café-Something-Or-Other. I bet they have wireless.’

‘Nope,’ he replied. ”Café’ is just code for ‘place with a slot machine.”

I had wondered why we had passed so many of these ‘cafés’ that didn’t look like they sold lattes or scones - they were covers for low-grade gambling! Of course! But we were desperate for a connection, so in a 20-minute drive, we pulled in and out of the parking lots of the following, testing their (nonexistent) wi-fi connections: Mugsy’s. Hollywood Hollywood. Front Street Café. The Coffee Mill. Sunset Café. Darla’s Café. All were for naught.

Then Brandon had an idea for a journey that would take us back to Stuebenville, Ohio: We would hit up a *for real* coffee shop on the campus of Franciscan University. That sounded like a good idea. On the way to the campus, however, we saw an unassuming sign that read ‘DIAL-A-PRAYER 748-7900.’

Come on. That’s just an invitation to call. We did, and were welcomed by (I’m assuming) a priest of some sort:

‘Welcome to Dial-A-Prayer. It is our hope that your prayer life might be strengthened through this ministry of Cove Presbyterian Church. Today’s reading is Mark, chapter 8, 34 through 37.’

Our prayer lives thus strengthened, we ventured to the coffee shop. It was a Good Thing that we had listened to Dial-A-Prayer, though, because the shop was called Heavenly Grounds, and three of the four people standing inside - including workers - were wearing t-shirts saying ‘He died for our sins’ and ‘It’s Cool to Be Catholic’ and such.

I don’t think I belonged there. The shop’s internet connection sucked, and yelling ‘goddammit’ and ’son of a BITCH’ in a Christian establishment just doesn’t work.

So I learned my lesson for today: ‘Café’ in West Virginia means ’slot machine,’ and based on my experiences in Nevada, I don’t need any more of those. ‘Christian coffee shop’ means ‘no profanity zone,’ and I don’t belong in those places. Ah, West Virginia, you’re just Bizarro World.

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Discussion on the Beginning of the Day, Written in the Style of William Faulkner.   

You want some coffee mom said, poured a cup. ‘I was about to go for a run’ but I drank it anyway hot liquid caffiene then I got dressed in my running clothes shorts earphones shoes laced tight for the next five miles. Make sure to watch for them dogs Brandon’s stepdad warned ‘if they come at you keep running ignore them.’

After my five miles sweaty tired huffing puffing from the hilly roads in the red-green-brown-gold blanketed trees we piled into the car to go to Pittsburgh and there I saw the city Three Rivers full of old steelmills and the surprising young crowd in the Burgh. Brandon’s sister was nice ‘oh so you think my bed is comfortable she said’ because i’m sleeping in it while she’s away for work so we moved to the next part of the day stopping to buy postcards and to give change to a young prostitute ‘you have any change she said Im trying to catch the bus’ out of breath as she ambled away, looking for her next doe-eyed victim.

‘Take a picture with the football’ I told the president of the company Mid-Atlantic Capital who took everything in stride even his picture stopping only to comment on the constant snap-click of the camera and the flash-pop of the studio lights ‘how many have you taken?’ Nearly sixty, maybe 75 I replied, thats enough.

After living in Italy, I’ve always wondered how far I could take the game of ‘act like you know what you’re doing.’

I use Italy as an example because in that country, no matter where you were or what you were doing, anything is permissible as long as you look like you should be doing it. Walking into a secure area at a train station? Hold your shoulders high and glare at anyone who gives you more than a glance. Trying to scam your way into a museum? Walk right in and don’t let anyone stop you. The bureaucracy in Italy is so thick and so convoluted that the left hand not only doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, it doesn’t even know the other hand exists.

So I’ve always wondered how far I could take that in my own country. So today, we played that game at that memorial to President William McKinley.

The memorial was a large, open-air, colonnaded structure in the classical revival style. One wing was the museum portion, the opposite wing a public library named for the former President. Since it was Columbus Day, the museum was locked. We figured we’d try to find someone in the library to help us out.

The front-desk worker, a bearded man in his early 40s, gave us nothing but blank stares when we gave him the standard lines of ‘We’re from an organization of which McKinley was a member,’ and ‘we’re on a cross-country trip on business.’ Both of these statements have worked before, with varying degrees of success, at Rowan Oak, home of William Faulkner, and in various university administration buildings. Neither worked today, so we decided to pull out the big guns.

‘We’re from a magazine in Chicago,’ we offered, ‘and we’re featuring this museum.’ Bingo.

Not only were we given access, but said mid-level bureaucrat later tracked down the museum’s director and explained our situation to him. We were granted full, unchaperoned access to the entire museum - as well as photo rights. And we did all of this while I was wearing a grey t-shirt with ‘ARMY’ written across the front, jeans and flp-flops. But I was holding a camera, so I suppose I looked the part of the professional photographer. Or something like that.

Kids, try this at home. Say you’re with the press; it works every time.

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A Footnote on the Proven Inaccuracies of Wikipedia.As a side note, I’m not sure I trust Wikipedia as much anymore. According to the entry on McKinley, who was shot at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, on September 6, 1901, ‘The newly-developed X-ray machine was displayed at the fair, but it was thought of as a technological novelty, not a serious piece of medical equipment; consequently, no one thought to use it on McKinley to search for the bullet, a procedure that might have saved his life.’

That was interesting, I thought, but farfetched. While browsing the museum, however, I found a Chicago Tribune front page from September 14, 1901, the day McKinley died, that claimed ‘X-Ray Apparatus Ready.’

I’m no logician, but I’m going with the Tribune report. Sorry, Wikipedia.

Today, we drove to Athens, Georgia. Athens looks like this on game day. See the lady pet the pretty bulldog statue!

When we were looking for parking, we saw this guy. He needed tickets. ‘Hey ticket guy!’ we yelled. ‘I don’t have any tickets!’ He made a mean face.

We found the party, and there were people drinking. Imagine that! People drinking! At a tailgate party! On a college campus! For a football game! Oh the horror!

This girl was so excited, she showed us her purse. And she wasn’t drinking booze. But there was booze in her purse. Coincidence?

‘Oh my gosh!’ said Guy on the Left. ‘What do you mean I’m at a party?’ ‘Shut up!’ said Guy on the Right. ‘I’m doing the Flashdance.’

We spent the evening relaxing at the Yellow River Game Ranch. The car General Lee lives there. And then we hunted deer and did Road Work 500 ft, just like the signs said to do.

And that’s how we spent Saturday.

After a morning of grinning and bearing it – or, if you prefer, grabbing our ankles and saying ‘thank you sir may I have another!?’ – by putting up with fake Southern hospitality, we swung through Tupelo, Mississippi, on the way to Alabama. If you know your history of The King, you’ll know that Elvis Aaron Presley (who, incidentally, has the best middle name in the history of the world) was born in 1939 in Tupelo.

While I declined to pay any money for the privilege of touring the six-by-12 foot trailer-esque thing in which Elvis was born, I did take some great pictures of an old lady sitting on the porch swing, so that was a plus.

But nothing could prep me for the redneck sideshow carnival campground visible from the side of Interstate 20 between Birmingham, Alabama, and Atlanta.

I had been warned that we were coming up on Talladega, the raceway that I had peripherally heard of by means of Will Ferrell’s Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. I should have seen the 1974 Pontiac with a Dale Earnhart ‘3’ flag on one side and a Dale Earnhart Jr. ‘8’ flag on the other as an indicator of what was to come. But I was caught unprepared, for when we rounded a corner, I saw …

Trailers. Pickups. Rebel Confederate flags. Shirtless men atop said trailers. Lawn chairs. Smoke from (I’m guessing) bonfires that were burning effigies of hated drives … and tires, maybe. It was like the footage from Woodstock 1994, but replace the sea of bodies with any sort of redneck conveyance, and there ya go. As far as the eye could see. And according to my calculations, this impromptu Talladega parking lot was a straight 10-mile shot, not including roads and turns and things like ‘traffic,’ from the actual raceway.

It’s a good thing that I spent a part of my afternoon prior to the tackiness of Tupelo and the difficult-to-comprehend gathering by the side of I-20 at the home of Nobel-winning writer William Faulkner.

I’ve decided that in order to write the Next Great American Novel, I have to either a) move to Paris, or b) purchase a reconstructed Civil-War era mansion where I will spend my days figuring out how to deal with my newfound literary fame. Or I could make like Faulkner and do both.

Either way, it was great to see someone who, as a way of figuring out his own thoughts, wrote daily postings and notes on his own walls.

Again: He wrote on the walls of his own study to make sure his ideas were both immediately accessible and constantly surrounding him. Now all I have to do is buy that Civil-War era home … any donors?

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A Footnote on the Southern Economy, Wal-Mart and the Super Happy China Buffet.A fully mature free-market economy consists of many interlocking, often unquantifiable factors competing in a (mostly) privately owned, laissez-faire structure. Such an economic arrangement is propped up by many different factors: the amount of industry, the type of manufacturing, et cetera. It would seem that, in order to maintain a healthy economy, it would be a good idea to ensure a wide breadth of retailers, producers, suppliers and the like.

This is not the case in the South. I’m all for open markets, but the one thing I’ve noticed is the preponderance of Wal-Mart in the South. And by ‘preponderance,’ I mean that *every single town* we’ve passed by or been through – if its population is greater than, say, 3,000 – has a Wal-Mart. Like clockwork, we saw a Wal-Mart every 40 or so miles. And many of these are Wal-Mart Supercenters. In case you don’t know, Wal-Mart Supercenters sell standard fare – as well as food, thus eliminating the need for just about any other sort of store within the immediate area.

While I don’t have anything against Wal-Mart, I’m just noticing that the entirety of the Southern economy is predicated on one single (omnibus) retailer. If Wal-Mart were to go under, Enron-style, the South would be more than screwed. Well, I suppose people could still find foodservice establishments, which brings me to part two of my economic analysis.

As a sub-tier of the Southern economy, you have your restaurants. Sure, there are the McDonald’s chains and the gas stations and such, but far and away the most prevalent restaurant is the Chinese buffet. You have your Happy Buffet. You have your Super Buffet. You have your China Buffet. And, of course, you have your Happy Super China Buffet. It’s all the same crap, and there are at least four of them in each small town.

Right next to the Wal-Mart, of course.

I’m absolutely sure a Harvard Business School case study could be written about this.

Let me start with a disclaimer: Pedophilia is a horrible thing.

Now that I have your attention, let me continue by saying that sitting in an empty parking lot between the hours of 10 and 11 p.m. with the windows of your car open – while people come out of neighboring stores to stare at you and whisper – is enough to make you feel like a pedophile. This behavior was necessary, however, to get my work done.

After yesterday’s drive out of New Orleans, we pulled into small-town Mississippi, Lucedale, to be exact, and drove around, marveling at the quaintness. The main store had a craft-style depiction of a pumpkin sitting outside. The Church’s Chicken prominently featured a sign touting its support of local churches (‘Church’s for CHURCHES’ was the exact wording) in the form of fried-chicken dinners. All the businesses closed at 5 p.m., ostensibly so all the children could get home in time for a family meal and for hand-holding and group prayer (that last part was an extrapolation, but you get the point).

So when we found a large-ish Holiday Inn Express on the outskirts of town, we thought the famous Southern hospitality would be a main selling point. And it was. But they just didn’t have the amenities we needed: they could give me free Macadamia-nut and white-chocolate cookies, they could give me a USA Today crossword, but they couldn’t give me what I needed the most. Internet access. Apparently it was down for the week.

“Y’all will just have to go down the road,” the front desk girl explained. “Take a right, go across the bridge and the train tracks, then take a right at the second stop sign, and you’ll pass the Pizza Hut, and take a left into the little shops there.”

“And … what will I do there?” I asked.

“There’s a little coffee shop that has internet,” she replied. “But he closes at 9, so you can just sit there in the parking lot and turn on your computer. Y’alls have wireless?”

This was Southern hospitality: Sure, you’re completely screwed, but we’re dang sure going to deliver that news in a twangy accent, with a smile.

So there I was, answering e-mail and putting up yesterday’s post at 10:15 p.m., sitting in the empty parking lot of The Hot Spot coffee shop with the windows down. And there came my brush with that pedophilia feeling: I was some big-city creep who just happened to find himself in Lucedale.

Moral of the story: If you can avoid stalking the parking lot of a coffee shop in rural Mississippi while you’re searching for a wi-fi signal, do so at all costs.

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Postscript the first: We put Edna, our fearless Buick LaCrosse, on a ferry across Mobile Bay this afternoon. She was well-behaved, and even served as our air-conditioned oasis on the watery desert, because it is damn hot in the Gulf Shores. We had just visited Fort Morgan, site of where the founder of my fraternal organization met an untimely demise – and permanent infamy – when he became the first Alabaman to lose his life in the Civil War. While you may think that’s actually pretty hip, that this valedictorian from the University of Alabama-turned-preacher also founded the largest fraternal organization in the country and gave his life in the service of what he believed in, his death is a little more … homely.

He fell off a gangplank and drowned.

He wasn’t drunk, as he was a preacher, and he most likely wasn’t in a fight because, remember, he was a preacher – he just fell while boarding the boat. So we took a picture of the sign commemorating his sacrifice and got the hell out of Dodge. Or Gulf Shores, Alabama, as the case may be.

I was driving out of New Orleans today when my boss asked me a question.

‘What did you think of Mr. Rob?’ he said, referring to the man he had just interviewed and I had just photographed.

I paused for a minute before answering, glancing at the scenery. Flashing past were the fallen shells of strip malls, the debris of suburban street signs, even the semi-rusting metal skeletons of a Six Flags amusement park, all abandoned in the wake of Katrina. In slightly more than a year, one of the most tamed and cultivated environments – the parking lot of a roller-coaster park and its surroundings – had been overrun by nature. Ever seen what happens to grass and weeds when left for that period of time? Instead of a blacktopped surface, gridded with yellow guidelines for cars, you have a veritable prairie. Even strip malls, normally something I despise, were almost heartbreaking, not just because the sign for a furniture store was twisted and laying on its side, but because of what that destruction meant: Nature was not fucking around last year.

I paused for a minute longer, thinking about 30 minutes earlier when I was driving down Canal Street toward the French Quarter. Something as symbolic as a McDonald’s sign had been destroyed by winds, its letters missing, the plastic covering its golden arches gone. Entire blocks of New Orleans had become demilitarized zones, complete with semi-closed fast-food restaurants still operating by taking walk-ups at the drive-through window, hordes of people milling about and a general air of confusion punctuated only by the occasional walking beat officer. Nothing was right; the entire city seemed … broken. But just a few streets south – in the tourist casino district and the French Quarter – it was if Katrina had never happened. Businesses were open, active construction was taking place, drunk people were walking down the middle of a Bourbon Street that reeked of vomit and urine. In short, things were back to normal in the areas that were actively visited by non-New Orleans residents. Something didn’t seem right.

I paused even longer, thinking of Mr. Rob, a man who stayed on Tulane’s campus in the middle of the most destructive hurricane in recent memory, a man who kept the house safe from looters and bailed water out of the basement. A man who talked Cubs baseball with me while I was taking his picture, a man who declined to remove his Seattle Seahawks hat during the shoot because it had been given to him by a friend, a man who unabashedly told me of his two ex-wives and three children. A man who told me that his destiny was to appear in the magazine I’m taking his picture for.

He told me his life was now complete. After 13 years of living in New Orleans and watching over the countless undergraduates in his care and living on the South Side of Chicago and serving in the 82nd Airborne and loving women and siring children, his life was now complete because I took his picture for a magazine.

‘I think Mr. Rob is the right man in the right place at the right time who is surrounded by people he cares for, and who is cared for in return,’ I said. ‘I think Mr. Rob is doing exactly what Mr. Rob should be doing.’

With people like Mr. Rob around, I think things are going to be fine.

But let’s be honest, here: Stopping for a drink on Bourbon Street before heading out of town helped the situation too. New Orleans, you’re okay.