Down In The Sprawls

Airport
Cincinnati, Ohio

Last night, the city of Oberlin went dark. Around 11 pm, the last night of midterms week, the grid just went dead. There was a shriek from the next room as my housemate's computer flickered off mid-paper. We lit some candles, blew them out, and stepped tentatively into the street. Down the block, in the distance, traffic lights were on, blinking hesitantly. The college was an island in the middle of a black sea.

We moved cautiously down the block, half expecting to find ourselves in the throng of a riot. Nothing. We heard yawps off in the distance, echoing through the obscured streets. Occasionally, a yell was followed by an immediate reaction from several blocks over -- a binary communication.

At the library, I looked at people's beaten faces as they emerged bleary-eyed from cubicles at closing time. Everyone seemed to be humming with a nervous energy and sharing stories of lost papers -- a bond in loss of systems. I'd had about eight hours of sleep in the previous two days and the darkness seemed like a warm blanket. The power went off again this afternoon while I was out finishing midterms. My computer stayed on, battery draining. Now, I sit in a corner of the Cincinnati airport, plugged into the wall, juicing, and listening to the Disco Biscuits. And no one's the wiser.

All day, I've been suspended in a surreal world of minor freak occurrences that have somehow resolved themselves. Besides the flickering power, I woke up today to an unseasonably warm October day -- tee-shirt weather. Walking into my statistics final, I pulled out the calculator I've used since high school... which didn't go on. My prof had an extra. Over the course of the afternoon, I ran into a friend of mine that I hardly ever see on campus -- yet somehow managed to run into her about five times.

When I got to the airport, I stopped to get some food at the Great American Bagel... who were out of bagels (which struck me as odd). I arrived at the gate to check in for my 5:05 flight. I was told that I should look at my ticket. I did. It was for the 6:00. Then how did I know there was a flight leaving at 5:05? Either way, they filled me with sedatives, shoved me on the plane - the 5:05, that is - and prodded me down the aisle. At the 13th row, the stewardess grabbed my duffel bag and crammed into the overhead. "Keep going," she said. I did.

I stopped in the 37th row, the second to last row of the plane. The row behind me had no windows. The view out of mine was of the oblong mass of the right-hand engine, with only the faintest sliver of sky if I leaned back and tiled my head at just the right angle. I slid my journal out of my bag in lieu of my computer and dated the entry: 10/13/00. "Jesus Lord," I muttered. I thought about grabbing the businessman piled into the seat next to me by the lapel of his blazer and shaking him. "Why didn't you tell me it was Friday the 13th?"

Eh, no matter. It would've been lost on him. He wouldn't believe that it had anything to do with it. And neither would I, for that matter. It's just been one of those days. If everything continues to move with such grace, I'm fully willing to surrender myself to the chaos of it, letting myself bounce like a metal ball through a pachinko machine. Around me, businessmen shoot with precision, like shorthand messages in pneumatic tubing, heading off to exotic locales across the world like Toledo and Minneapolis.

There's something weirdly beautiful about it -- a kind of elegance shown by David Byrne in "True Stories" or Soul Coughing lyricist/singer M. Doughty in songs like Collapse and Blue Eyed Devil. It's a perfectly poetic world in its own way. In front of me, the Airfone blipped with stock quotes from the different markets. Travelers ripped open packs of salted snacks with a kind of atavistic efficiency that bewildered me.

Coming into Cincinnati, the freeway loops spun smoothly across the landscape. "These are the cathedrals of our time, somebody said. Not me," Byrne said in "True Stories". Just as organic things - people, trees, and other living matter - are representations of DNA and the like, freeway loops and strip mall architecture are representations of far more obtuse codes of philosophy and mathematics -- sleek and cultivated in their own way.

In the airport lounge, I sat eavesdropping on one side of a cell phone conversation. The man - tired looking, but still with a gleam of excitement in his eyes - gibbered into the phone speaking of "segments of the market... certain accounts and their exclusivity... headquarters... regional exclusivity in California... special circumstances... west coast distribution, but only with special permission... BGA Enterprises..." They were all vague allusions. Nothing ominous, to be sure, just utterly ambiguous. I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about, what he was referring to. It struck me that the language of businessmen isn't too far removed from that of abstract literary theorists who exist in a world of their own, somehow parallel to the texts the scrutinize. And, yes, there's a poetry in that too.

I spent the summer down in the sprawls. I made it from New York to California and back in my car, accompanied by a different folks on various legs of the course. The first half of the summer - from the third week in June through the third week in July - was subsumed by Phish tour. Granted, it was a lot of fun, but the America I saw was one that - for the most part - pissed me off. Everything, everywhere, was the same on just about every conceivable level -- from the motels we stayed at to the amphitheaters. During the second half of the summer, though, I drove west and realized that I had very much stayed on the beaten path during tour.

I thought I would come back from the second leg of the trip hating America. Instead, we somehow managed to find nooks and crannies away from the rest stops and chain restaurants that really showed off a variety of local colors. All of this is utterly cliché, of course, but it was great. During the summer, I posted semi-frequent dispatches from the road -- during July, reviews of this Phish shows; during the rest of the summer, travelogues... which moreless stopped when we arrived in Portland, Oregon.

There was nothing drastic that happened in Portland that caused me to stop writing. There was the monthly JamBands.com deadline that caused me to put it off for a few days. I had an article due in for another publication. Somehow, the journal just kept getting pushed to the side, until - suddenly - I found myself back in Ohio with nothing to show for the return trip across the country. It was a speedy affair: Jon and I left Portland on a Tuesday morning and got back to his parents' place in Chicago on Thursday night.

Along the way, we encountered a wide variety of weirdness. Montana, for example, was on fire. It looked like the sun was setting behind an entire range of hills, when it turned out the backs of them were just on fire. In South Dakota, we ended up smack dab in the middle of the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. Somehow, we'd both forgotten that the Rally existed, let alone that it took place in the middle of South Dakota. Motels were booked up for hundreds of miles -- we had to cross the Missouri River before we could find a place to stay. Things like that.

I'm ready for a second crack at the northwest. Tonight, I will fly into San Francisco and shoot down to the Great American Music Hall to see the Disco Biscuits. I will meet up with dear friends from New York. We will rent a car and wreak havoc on the west coast. Moreless, anyway. I'm looking forward to it immensely. This three hour layover in Cincinnati has been the first time I've gotten to sit down and write for pleasure without a looming deadline or phones ringing or people wandering in and around the place where I was trying to write. It's quite relaxing.

After all, I'm on vacation.

Jesse Jarnow can be reached at jesse.jarnow@oberlin.edu or by his homepage. Previous tour journals are located here.