On getting to Portland

America being poor as it is, I bet Greyhound is experiencing a resurgence of riders. No more is it just for the extremely unwashed (that only accounted for maybe 30% of the passengers). It’s not even that cheap, considering that you are paying to get somewhere 3 times as slowly and with accommodations enjoyed mostly in kennels. For 15 hours, you enjoy such games as, how do I get this weirdo to stop falling asleep on me, will this drunk guy vomit or get kicked off the bus first, and which of you is most likely to decapitate your seatmate?

Rules for riding the overnight Greyhound bus:

1. Always bring food with you. Otherwise you might be forced to eat a sandwich you bought at 12AM in Sacramento from a convenience store.

2. While waiting in a bus station after dark, avoid eye contact with strangers. While this may seem unnecessarily defensive, it will save you the time of trying to explain that, no, you are not looking to “hook up” while in line for the bus. But thanks anyways.

3. If your seatmate is writing demonic scriptures to him or herself, it’s bet to avoid engaging them in a vigorous religious debate.

4. Know that you probably will not sleep, so be prepared to arrive in the morning with very little idea of where you are, why you are there or how you got there. [Note: The inability to fall asleep can be counteracted with alcohol or drugs. This will make you a part of the majority of your fellow bus riders. However, this is only advisable if you want to disregard rules 2 and 3].

With these and other tips, you too can enjoy a luxury also shared with such members of society of jail inmates and the criminally insane. For both, the same rules apply: find your best bitch face and sleep with one eye open.

Live Blogging Exhaustion, Part II

Place: Portland, OR. One 15 hour bus ride from SF to Portland. One drive up the coast for another person. One drive between SF--Vancouver--Portland for other. Now we sit in the green room, staying awake by sheer group momentum.

Douglas Fir Lounge. I appreciate your awesome room, and that we are staying in a hotel I only have to walk 5 minutes to.

The Southwest, a non-chronological update

I'm in SF right now, but with spotty internet and only a vague interest in remembering the southwest, I'm going to plaster my car written interpretations of NM, AZ, and the rest.

Like most people from the North who haven’t traveled farther south than Virginia (maybe that’s just me?), everything here feels foreign (except the feeling of not speaking the correct language. I don’t really speak French OR Spanish, so I’m used to being confused by background conversations). The farther west we traveled, the more the landscape became dry and flat, its only punctuation the mountain ranges dotting the horizon. Fences penned in flocks of animals everywhere, though they hardly seemed in a hurry to leave with way. There was a strange slow feeling that overcame everything, the only movement from the dust clouds.

Goats in the Texas plains....

New Mexico from a car

The native plants will kill you

The plants, unless they are cacti, are browns, despite it being summer weather, signs on the road warn against dust storms, and, oh yea, border patrol sets up random check points within the US. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that, when their version of “checking” the cars consists of glancing at the inhabitant, they’re just looking for anyone who looks a little too “Mexican”. At first I was shocked, then I remembered that Arizona had set the trend for personally violating laws based mostly on race, so I shouldn’t be terribly shocked New Mexico was on that ball. Seriously, though, it felt like every 10 cars on the highway was a border patrol SUV, just….patroling. Or on the way to patrol.

This is the closest I’ve been to Mexico, and I have to admit I had no real concept of how long the US hugs the Mexican border. You can, at parts, actually see THE FENCE they built. It’s a pretty serious fence, too. The amount of money they spend on building fences and patrolling the borders and convincing people that Mexico is the cause of all economic woe could be used on….well, just about anything else.

Not much else can really be said about Arizona. There are some amazing mountains surrounding some towns that I can only imagine vacationing in. There is a lot to be said about amazing topography, but maybe they could have created towns that weren’t sprawling strip malls. The gallery we played at, Solar Culture, has such an amazing vibe to it. It’s at one calm and energized, and it was the perfect place to begin our tour with Sharon Von Ettan, who has a voice that can break hearts.

Phoenix was basically another sprawling mass. The palm trees, at least, were greener. But good god, what a sprawling, lame town.

On the way we hit not one but TWO different check points. The US is serious about Mexican border patrol, my god.

But there were sand dunes. It was like crawling through a Mojave, but outside of Yuma, Arizona.