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To pick up, incongruously, where I left off, I went to visit some friends in Pittsburgh, mostly to get away from “the House Where My Ex-Wife Used to Live” …”of Doom!”. I also wanted to see them, and see Pittsburgh, because I haven’t seen many Midwestern towns outside of Ohio.
So I drove out there, across I-70 from Columbus through Wheeling, to Pittsburgh. For most of its length, I-70 follows the Route 40 …er… route across the eastern states. After the divorce, I’d been thinking about taking a road trip from Atlantic City to San Francisco, across the great American wide-open…. I’d see the small towns, eat at the greasy spoons, wave at people… really experience rural America.

Hogwash! Here’s a fact: Route 40 is usually less than 3 miles from I-70 as it crosses westward from New Jersey. And I-70 is an endless two-to-eight lane trench, speeding America along, gathering up its small towns as it gains speed to 80 miles per hour, then dropping them off at intermittent intersections so they can build strip malls and cine-plexes.
Not to get all regionalist slow-food commie on you, but the great American road trip has been ruined by interstate highways. It’s all about the destination now. And those destinations are homogenized so when people get to where they’re going, they can go out for a very special dinner at Olive Garden.

As a kid, my high school was a two-story red brick building on a rural stretch of US Route 40. I’d occasionally ride my bike up there, from our house near I-70 (four or five miles south) to visit a friend of mine who lived up the road. In those days, my world was bounded by a few fixed points, Springfield, Yellow Springs, and Dayton to the east and south, and the Great Unknown to the west. I had heard that US 40 ran from the east coast to the west coast, along the 40th parallel (which incidentally, it doesn’t. The numbering is just a happy accident), and I’d wonder what would happen if I rode west… what lay out there, in the vast American frontier. Where might I end up?

I-40 ran from Atlantic City to San Francisco. These days, it ends in the west just outside of Salt Lake City, merging with I-80, which follows its old route westward. (I blame this discontinuity fully on the Mormons.) Eventually I-80 crosses into california, through oakland, and crosses the Bay Bridge to end right inside San Francisco. Now, a couple of years ago, I had a job that put me at 444 Spear st. in San Francisco, which is under the Bay Bridge as it makes its landfall. So to that wide-eyed child of 15 that I was, I’d like to say “the road ends in work. Work and a bad case of food poisoning. Don’t eat the Shwarma.”

And I’d like to think that the connection between those two points–high school and the job that gave me a year off so I could spend a month and a half in europe–that the connection means something. Which is why people believe in ley lines. Because they want to believe that ancient trails and holy places are somehow connected by unseen forces. But I think my friend Wayne put it best “Uh, Ian. A lot of roads are connected. Otherwise you couldn’t get anywhere.”

Am I the only one who finds it amusing that a man whose job is to to shape the flow of a river of people is named “Wu Wei“? (from www.nytimes.com). Our fellow, to the right, there, is Wu Wei from… well… read the damn caption. For those who don’t know, here’s a little about another Wu Wei:

The literal meaning of Wu Wei is “without action” and is often included in the paradox wei wu wei : “action without action.”

Of course, the picture and caption come from the New York Times. perhaps they’re getting lax in their making stuff up. (I’m just kidding. Love you guys! Keep being the bastion of east-coast liberalism you’ve always been! …someone’s gotta stop the moonies. And besides, I’m quoting the wikipedia, also famous for making stuff up.)

It looks like Helmut Lang is getting out of the fashion biz. The article gives several reasons, such as a change away from minimalism, or perhaps the cutback on his jeans brand. They also cite the fact that he didn’t create an “it” handbag like you’d get from, say, Prada or Dolce and Gabbana. Of course, this leads to the real reason:

You can rap about Dolce and Gabbana, but “Helmut Lang” just doesn’t scan