We stopped early yesterday in Flagstafff because after this there is nothing for a LONG time.I don't know anything about Geography but I can say from driving it that FLagstaff sits on top of a mountain range in the middle of the dessert. The air is cool here and there are actual places to get healthy food and there are places to walk around. Once we leave here, we will decend the mountains into the maddeningly flat dessert that stretches all the way to Albuquerque NM. It is the hardest part of the drive because the winds, with not physical opsticals, build up a terrific speed from all sides and your car just keeps getting rocked back and forth as you drive, which makes it exhausting work. There is NO WHERE to stop unless you want to buy a blanket in a hot trailer. The terrain is so nasty that there is nowhere to walk a dog. The ground is covered in these horrible little thorns that get stuck in her paws. NO grass. If you want to eat, there is fast food that has been baking in the hot sun for a while. Spoiled KFC. Mmmmm. Last time I drove across that stretch I stopped at a rest area which was a gas station with a "Subway" sandwich shop inside. I watched as some pasty white, tired looking hopeless white guy with blonde self-cut hair sold a sandwich to a guy who looked just like him. This is the American economy today. We sell each other MSG ridden crappy food.

Anyway, every time I make this drive I try, on the first day, to make it across that expanse to Albuquerque but I always drop somewhere and end up spending the night in a really ratty motel and eating something very unhealt

hy. So this time I decided to stop early and spend the night in Flagstaff. I looked up places to stay on my the magnificent Navigator's Neverlost system and found a place called the "Fairview Flagstaff Resort". this is a place where you can rent out a whole house, like a ski condo with a jacuzzi and everything. The great part is that it's off season for them so they offered me a whole house for 80 bucks! I checked in to find I'm pretty much the only guy in the whole compound. I don't know if they accept dogs but I've adopted sort of a "don't ask, don't tell" policy with that so it didn't come up.

I'm very comfortable here. So much that I would like to stay for a WHILE. After a brief rest, Loona and I went to some place called ### it's a small National park with walking trails through this very strange landscape. You park your car and walk up a steep incline till you hit this enormous plateu, or mesa or something. It's hard to describe so here's some pictures, but basically it's covered in white grass and there is a pine tree every fifty feet or so in every direction. There are a lot of stumps too but the thing is it all look exactly the same. you can see far in every direction but after walking for a few minutes you start getting this feeling that you're lost. You look back to where you parked but you can't see it because it's just a level above that so it seems to just drop off. So as you walk you look for landmarks. Tree stumps seem lilke they'll work because there's less of them but they're just low enough that, once you walk away, the grass obscures them. And trees are no good because they all look alike and they are distributed in a random yet indistinguishable pattern. So as you walk you feel like you're in a boat, trying to navigate and stay in the same direction.

Loona and I walked for about fourty minutes before we turned around and tried to retrace our steps (well, I was trying. She didn't care.) Indeed, I got completely lost. Like really. But I didn't mind. The thought crossed my mind that the sun was going down now and we might be lost in the dark. But for some reason, I didn't car. I really felt like whatever happened, I was up for it. It reminded me of the first time I ever went to Europe. Time for a useless tangent...

I spent two weeks in Russia and Estonia, which I'll write about another time. But I was there completely alone, unable to speak to anyone, and going kind of crazy. Then I went to Rome and rented a car and started driving down the Italian coast. I literally hadn't spoken to a human in weeks. Not even to say thank you or sorry. You get tired of being looked at as a foreigner so after a while you use polite sign language and head gestures so no one can peg you. Anyway, so I'm driving down the Italian West Coast, going kind of nuts when I see a road block up ahead. There are about five "Calibinieri" (sp?) which are the National police in Italy, like STate Troopers here. They have a car sitting there with the lights going and they are stopping drivers. There is a guy with white gloves standing on the shoulder with a red stop sign in his hand. He is pointing at me and signaling for me to pull over. IN that moment I made a crazy decision. I decided, first of all, that I didn't want to sit in my car and wait for some fucking cop to check my papers and to ask for a bribe. I also decided that I was tired of nothing happening to me in this spectacular part of the world, so I said fuck it. I hit the gas. The guy's eyes widened and he yelled to his friends. They all got into the first lane and started shouting and waving at me. I just swerved around them and tore off! As I looked in the rear view, I could see them running after me with their tiny feet and wavingg their fists, just like a Pink Panther movie. I thought they would get into their car and chase me, in which case I'd have pulled right over. I didn't care. I figured that spending a couple of nights in an Italian jail would be some sort of interaction anyway. But they didn't come. And I continued down the coast, laughing my ass off.

I don't remember now why this has anything to do with Loona and my walk yesterday. I guess the point was that I didn't care if we got lost. Something like that.

There's nothing much more to say about Flagstaff escept for that I went out last night for dinner and saw the town. I found out that Flagstaff is filled with very very rich liberal democrats. They sit around wearing ridiculous designer clothes, like a very expensive pair of Armani pants with sandals and a Hawaiian shirt in a fancy restaurant and they talk about how much they hate George Bush and about how spiritual it is to take a helicopter ride through the grand canyon. I guess that's the difference between rich democrats and rich republicans. Rich republicans throw embarrasing ammounts of money away on vain, self centered things that make them feel wealthy and powerful. Rich democrats spend just as much money but they spend it on things that make them feel wealthy and "Spiritual". I have nothing against either group (yeah right) but they're funny to watch in a place like this, or Aspen, where they are totally insulated and don't feel that they have to behave properly for any nearby poor folks. They really let it all hang out and the people sitting next to me at dinner last night were shameless. I'm not going to go into the details of their conversation because I want to get moving now, and also because if I really did recount it I'd probably find that there was nothing shameless about them and that it was all my perception, skewed by the chip on my shoulder I got from growing up semi-poor and not getting a College education. If I was half a man I'd erase all the judgemental things I just wrote. But I won't. It's my weblog. Fuck it.

Onward now, across the great Southwest.

That's all for now, my friends...

Thanks for reading,