particles

This Land: New Jersey

Alright, here we are… back in Horseheads, NY. Now, Ronnie and Rocinante were supposed to be in New Jersey. Writing about New Jersey from the Jersey Shore, no less… from the Boardwalk… gnoshing on saltwater taffy.

But plans, you know. They’re like little paper boats you set sailing in a bathtub, and then the dog jumps in… C’est la.

We aimed for the Atlantic, for the roar of the ocean and the smell of fries, and we landed in Clinton. Clinton, New Jersey. Which, naturally, kicked off a little ditty in Ronnie’s head, a bastardization of something that was definitely better in its original form:

Well I’ve never been to Jersey…
It’s charms are kinda hidden…
Well we headed for the boardwalk…
Only made it out to Clinton…
Can ya dig it…?
Ya just can’t rig it…
Go on and swig it.

And I’ve never been to Heaven…
But I’ve been to Kanorado…
Well they tell me i was born there…
But i really don’t remember…
In Kanorado… not Eldorado…
What does it matter…?

What does it matter indeed? You try to make sense of things, write a nice little blog dispatch, and your brain starts howling like three lonely dogs.

Now, New Jersey. It gets a bad rap. A real thumping from the wits over in New York, the titans of 30 Rock, who probably only ever see the bits that look like the inside of a vacuum cleaner bag – all that industry flanking the Jersey Turnpike. “Garden State,” they call it. And you drive past refineries that look like metallic dinosaurs coughing up their last, and you wonder about the gardener.

But listen: Jersey. It’s small. Fifth smallest, a little postage stamp of a place. But it’s packed. Like a can of articulate sardines. Most densely populated state in the whole damn Union. And these aren’t just any sardines, mind you. They’re educated. They’re rolling in it – ten percent are millionaires. Millionaires! Probably from inventing some new kind of concrete or a better way to subdivide themselves. They’re healthy, too, second healthiest. And diverse? You betcha. Religion, ethnicity, the whole shebang. They’re practically a miniature, well-funded, surprisingly fit United Nations. Human Development Index, both the American kind and the regular kind? Near the top. So there.

And the noise they make, these New Jerseyites. You’ve got Frank Sinatra, Ol’ Blue Eyes, serenading the Meadowlands. Then there’s Springsteen, The Boss, sounding like he swallowed a gravel road and a book of working-class poetry. Whitney Houston, voice like a goddamn angel, soaring over Newark. Queen Latifah, hip hop royalty. And Tony Soprano, figuring out life’s little and bada-bing tragedies, usually involving gabagool. Even Snooki, bless her heart, contributing to the general, unscripted, leopard-print chaos. Moxie, Jersey’s got it.

So, Ronnie and Rocinante, they’re trundling along, aiming for the shore, and they hit Clinton. No beach, no boardwalk. But Clinton, it turns out, has ghosts (a prominent HSoB Tour objective). Every October, the Red Mill there gets dressed up as a Haunted Village. They even had Ghost Hunters poke around in 2008. Ghosts, by gawd. We were supposed to be looking for the soul of the Jersey Shore, and we found a place that specializes in things that ain’t there anymore. Or maybe never were.

Excuses, excuses. They’re like armpits, Ronnie always said; most people have two and they usually stink. One excuse for falling short of the salty air was a detour. A holy pilgrimage, almost. Rocinante, with a mind of her own, or maybe just following the subtle magnetic pull of craftsmanship, wandered off to Nazareth, Pennsylvania. Nazareth, PA. Where they made Ronnie’s guitar. Martin, the kind of guitar that made Robbie Robertson want to sing about feeling about half-past dead. Which, of course, set off another little ear-worm:

Pulled into Nazareth, feelin’ ’bout half-past dead…
Don’t need to find a place where i can lay my head…
Cos’ Rocinante was smart ’bout thinkin’ ahead…
Allowing Ronnie to skip the part ’bout askin’ for a bed.

It’s a funny old world. You aim for the ocean, you find a guitar factory and Jersey Mike’s for lunch. You expect one thing, you get something else.

And speaking of something else, New Jersey. Blue state. Thoroughly blue. But even in the bluest of states, you’ll find some folks trying to repaint the town red. Some genius, some absolute card-carrying comedian without an audience, tried to change the name of little Clinton to “Reagan.” Reagan, New Jersey. You can’t make this stuff up. The universe just hands it to you on a slightly greasy, very confusing platter. Who needs The Onion when you’ve got municipal politics?

So, the report on the day trip to New Jersey got written, not from the boardwalk, but from the quiet, and ever-friendly Horseheads Free Library. About a trip that missed its target but hit a few other things along the way. Ghosts, guitars, sandwiches, and the perplexing, often hilarious, business of being human. Turn, turn, turn.

Onward through the fog… RH

You don’t need beach towels…
On a Clinton hike…
But if you’re hungry…
There’s Jersey Mikes…
And if you’re lucky…
You’ll stop in Nazareth…
And pick out a brand new Martin ax.

This Land: Connecticut

LISTEN: If you want to understand the United States of America, and you’re in a hurry, you could do worse than look at Connecticut. It’s a real grab bag of a place. It’s got all the shiny things and all the sharp, rusty things America keeps in its pockets. It’s a place of beautiful, brilliant minds, some of which are put to work making new and interesting ways to blow people to pieces.

C’EST LA: They had a war there, once. The Pequot War. This was long before the powdered wigs and the Declaration of Independence. It was just plain, old-fashioned barn-burner. And then, not so long ago, a young man walked into a school called Sandy Hook and did something so awful it’s hard to write words about it. Between those two points, you will find a long and profitable history of making tools for the unfortunate vocation of killing people and breaking things.

A man named David Bushnell built a submarine there called the Turtle. This was way back. It was supposed to sneak up on British ships and make them go away forever. It didn’t work so well, but we’ve been perfecting the idea ever since. Now Connecticut is home to companies with names that sound like comic book villains. Raytheon. Pratt & Whitney. Lockheed Martin. They make clever things that fly very fast and then explode. Busy, busy, busy. And the money rolls in.

But here’s the thing about people: they are messy, unpredictable creatures. For every looper building a bomb, there’s another sitting in a quiet room, trying to write a letter that might save the world.

Connecticut had one of the best letter-writers of all time. His name was Sam Clemens, but he called himself Mark Twain. He lived in a big, beautiful, goofy house in Hartford. He had a mustache. He saw all the greed and the violence and the hucksterism, and he thought it was the saddest and funniest thing in the world. He used free speech like a fire hose. He pointed it at hypocrisy and cruelty and tried to wash some of the filth away.

And not far from him lived a woman named Harriet Beecher Stowe. She wrote a letter about owning other human beings. It made a lot of powerful people very, very angry. That’s how you know a letter is doing its job. She was using her brain and a bottle of ink to fight against loopers using whips and chains.

It’s enough to give you an existential whiplash…?

And get this: back in the day, the political party of Democrats in Connecticut thought the Civil War was a bad idea. They weren’t too bothered about the whole slavery business. Now, of course, that same party in that same state plants signs in every lawn about diversity and inclusion. The names on the jerseys have stayed the same, but the players, and the rules of the game, have gone topsy-turvy. It’s all very confusing. It’s a good reason to spark up some of Snoop Dogg’s doobois.

So what’s next for the little state with the big contradictions? Now we’ve taught the machines to think, or at least to write book reports and make up pictures. We’re feeding all of our nonsense into these things, all of our history, and our hatreds, and our love poems. What will the thinking machines make of Connecticut? Maybe they’ll tell us to keep building the bombs, only to do it more efficiently. Or maybe they’ll read Mark Twain and decide the whole human experiment is a joke. A bad one.

I imagine old Sam Clemens would have a thing or two to say about it. He’d look at the internet, where everyone has a megaphone and no one has an editor, and he’d probably light a cigar, pour himself a whiskey, and rack the billiards. He might have watched that movie, Idiocracy, and said, “They got it mostly right, but it should have been sadder.” He knew the score. He knew that human genius was a beautiful and dangerous thing, like a bottle of nitroglycerin. You could use it to help prevent a heart attack, or you could use it to blow up the world.

C’EST LA: We have the angels of our better nature, and we have the howling monkeys who want to burn it all down. They both live in Connecticut. They both live in us. Words are nice. Books are nice. But they might not be enough to keep the monkeys from the matches.

We’ll have to do better. We’ll just have to be kinder. And that’s all we have to say about that.

Next Stop: Jersey, Baybay!

Onward through the fog… RH

You got your swords…
You got your ploughshares…
Visit Hartford…
They’ve got it all there…
Commune with ghosts…
Converse with brilliant minds…
All await you in Connecticut!

HSoB: Dawg Dayz

Ronnie Hays, a man whose summer spirit animal was likely a slightly singed tumbleweed, had come to the nation’s capital with the best of intentions. The Hot Springs or Busk tour, a grand delusion hatched during a particularly brutal February, was predicated on the simple, Nietzschean idea that purposeful suffering builds character. Having already suffered enough, Ronnie decided to route his nation-wide tour to stay in climate zones ranging from fifty-five to eighty-five degrees, the sweet spot of human endurance, the crucible of the soul! He’d envisioned himself a Thoreauvian guitar hero, strumming universal chords amidst humanity’s waxing and waning.

Bullshit. Pure, unadulterated, desert-baked bullshit.

The “Heat Dome,” as the local news charmingly called it, wasn’t a dome at all. It was more like being trapped inside a giant, sweaty armpit, the kind belonging to a long-haul trucker who’d mainlined lukewarm coffee for three days straight. The air in Ronnie’s trusty Sprinter van, Rocinante, felt thick enough to chew. He’d envisioned festive busking celebrations, though getting him no closer to Saturday Night Live, would render enough spare coin to grab a meal at the local sandwich shop. Instead, he found himself sweating under a near ineffectual ceiling fan, each morning waking up feeling like a poorly wrung dishcloth.

So, the busking gear gathered dust. The call of the troubadour was drowned out by the siren song of the mall food court’s air conditioning. After a productive shift dodging rogue toddlers and the whispered anxieties of the internet-addicted masses at the public library, Ronnie would retreat to this muzak-infused oasis. There, amidst the clatter of plastic cutlery and the pervasive aroma of lukewarm orange chicken, he’d tap tap tap away on his tablet, crafting ironic insights (or at least, moderately coherent sentences). Roughing it, his ass. This was more like politely surrendering to the crushing reality of climate change and a distinct lack of masochistic tendencies.

He pictured himself now, a bumbling, modern-day Don Quixote, sweat beading on his five-o-clock shadow. His armor traded in for a Hawaiian shirt that clung to him like a damp second skin. On his head, not a gleaming helmet, but a decidedly un-gleaming bucket hat, perpetually askew. His trusty spear replaced by a backpack, its hydration bladder more vital than any lance against the oppressive thermal foe. Rocinante, the wheezing van, stood sentinel in the D.C. Metro Branch Avenue parking lot… a tin can beast of burden in this concrete desert. In the hazy distance, a monstrous broadcast tower pulsed with invisible signals, a modern-day malevolent windmill against a humidity-choked sky, a reminder of the information war that had lured him to the proud highway in the first place.

He’d braved the sweltering streets of D.C., a city buzzing with a nervous energy thicker than the humidity. The political air crackled with a pre-apocalyptic fervor, the news a constant barrage of impending crisis. A grumpy waiter here, a train car full of faces etched with worry there. And then, the memes. Oh, the memes. Those digital harbingers of discontent, the unfunny, menacing pronouncements hinting at a redux of some long-ago, blood-soaked uncivil conflict. Ronnie, with his comfortable former life in the ivory towers of academia, knew he was on the wrong side of that particular partisan divide, labeled with that delightfully reductive term: “woke.”

He’d spent hours wandering around the fenced-off National Mall, the intended epicenter of his social exploration just out of reach. Denied entry to the Pride Fest because of his backpack – a water bottle deemed a potential weapon, for Christ’s sake – he felt like a character in some absurdist Kafka adaptation. The irony wasn’t lost on him: all this purposeful social exploring he’d signed up for, only to be thwarted by something as mundane as a plastic water bottle and transparent back-pack.

He thought of Churchill, of course. That eternal optimist (or perhaps just a bloke with a stiff upper lip and a fondness for the drink). “Americans can be counted on to do the right thing once they’ve tried everything else.” Ronnie clung to that like a life raft in a sea of digital vitriol and oppressive heat. This flirtation with the dark side, this collective descent into the fever swamp of ethnonationalism – it was just a phase, right? A particularly sweaty, anxiety-inducing phase. Eventually, the fever would break, and they’d stumble back towards something resembling pluralistic sanity.

He hoped.

The Metro ride back to Rocinante was a sweaty, sullen affair. The promise of the night in a tin can under a sky slow to cool was less than appealing. Just weeks ago, he’d been shivering in that damned mummy bag, wishing for a single degree of warmth. Now, the thought of trying to sleep in a pervasive coating of sweat felt like a prelude to spontaneous combustion.

He’d had enough. This noble experiment in “Hot Springs or Busk” had devolved into a sweaty, keyboard-tapping surrender in a mall food court. Protest season in D.C.? They could have it. The call of the open road, the beckoning of cooler climes further north… that was the only pursuit that held any appeal now. Time to point Rocinante toward the hazy promise of something less… apocalyptic. All that said, and with all the hassle of dodging heat stroke, he’d still take these dog dayz over winter frostbite and existential dread any damn day of the week. Over and out, he muttered to himself, the glow of the tablet screen reflecting in his weary eyes. Over and out. Time to get back to the original plan. Time to head NORTH. And for the love of all that is holy, someone please convince the powers that be we REALLY don’t want to turn Earth into another Venus. Can we please get back to that Post WWII spirit of sacrifice in the face of collective crisis? Can we, PLEASE, start prioritizing a life-friendly climate over billionaires’ bank accounts?

Onward through the fog… Rohlfie

This Land: New York

Of course, like California, Texas, and Florida, New York is too big for just one post. However, we’ll have to settle on this phase of the tour as Ronnie & Rocinante are on an ever tightening time schedule. They may return to NY in late July or August, Texas in September or October.

Anyway… New York! The Big Apple! Everybody’s got a New York story, right? Like it’s a damn pilgrimage you gotta make to prove you’re a fully functioning ‘murican. So, Ronnie has his personal connections to New York, that slab of concrete crammed with eight million other schmucks all trying to get somewhere slightly faster than the next guy.

First up, Bob Dylan! Yeah, Bobby Z. The voice of a generation, a moniker he wisely refused to hold. Voice like a rusty wheel on an outlaw biker’s ride, but hey, you know what they say about the squeaky one! And Ronnie has a deep reverence for Dylan’s impact on the music biz. Over the years Ronnie has cultivated a small garden of his own. Well… not so much in the “business”. Even though he was active as a player in the 1980/90s, he retreated from that merry-go-round in time to ring in the new millennium. No longer playing for money, but not willing to abandon his garden. He’s out there with a tiny little rake and a watering can, growing organic, timeless songs while the bulldozers of pop-country are paving a formulaic paradise next door… in “the biz”.

Anyway, Ronnie retreated from the biz. Got out before some cheap hustler grafted a spiked dog collar on his neck and made him rock out about peach cobbler, or cherry pie, or something equally inane. Meanwhile, in contrast, Dylan, like Ronnie, came from “nowheresville“. But, unlike Ronnie, Bobby Z. made good. You could say he cashed in. Or you could say he wisely avoided J. Edgar Hoover’s death ray at a time of serious danger for influential folks taking contrary views on the war in Vietnam. And Ronnie? Well, he “jumped off the bandwagon in time to raise a couple kids and try to pursue some resemblance of adult career-like activities.” Translation: he chickened out and got a job! A job, folks! That thing you do so you can afford the therapist you need because of your job! But hey, at least he’s got his self-produced records, no autotune, all-natural. Not perfect, in fact, fairly crude. But hey, imperfect authenticity beats sanitized, pitch-corrected pablum any day!

Next up for Ronnie’s New York story! Those goddamn 1970s and 80s TV programs. Oh, the cultural landmarks! “All in the Family” apparently had a big impact. Well, that explains a lot, doesn’t it? His maternal grandad and eldest uncle were “Archie Bunker clones.” Clones! Like they were churned out in some bigot factory in Queens! Provincial, nativist, racist, misogynist… the wholeunenlightened enchilada! The things Ronnie’s Grandpa would say watching ball games on TV would make a PC maven cringe all the way to their socks. We kid you not! Probably stuff that would make Archie Bunker hisowndamnself say, “Whoa, take it easy there, Meathead’s dad!” There’s that. Yeah, but for Ronnie, Saturday Night Live came as a refreshing cool breeze… a tonic for the raging rebel soul!

Then, there’s the mid-2000s. Ronnie and his girlfriend hit the big city! A “whirlwind junket around Gotham.” Five days in Manhattan! Almost enough time to get used to the subway system. Almost! That’s like saying five minutes in a high-school boys’ locker room is almost enough time to get used to the smell! I’ve heard folks say you never get used to the New York subway. Like a mobile petri dish filled to the rim with way too much humanity and the distinct aroma of “what the hell is that?”

They “visited MoMa.” Modern art! Where jaded connoisseurs stare at a red square on a white canvas and go, “Profound!” Yeah, easy money, right? After a good stroll through MoMa, Ronnie and his companion “Sought out culinary treasures.” For some, that would be like paying $30 for a hot dog and calling it “artisanal.” But no, there’s super interesting ethnic fare to discover if you know where to look. Our heroes had an “exotic food on a budget” guide, and it delivered, in spades. They also hiked across the Brooklyn Bridge, a little slice of history. Hey! You can take the boy out of the High Plains, but… Anyway the pair also rode the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building! The observation deck! “Look, sweetie! Tiny little yellow cars full of tiny little schmucks just like us!”

And the highlight: a nighttime 5K around Central Park! Because running in circles in the dark in a city famous for its muggers is just good, clean fun! Nothing like a good dose of adrenaline to pump up your 5K time. And then, the pièce de résistance: Ronnie got yelled at by a Ralph Kramden clone driving a shuttle bus! A shuttle bus! They didn’t have a pass! A pass! For a bus! What is this, Gaza? “Where you from?” the bus driver bellows. Ronnie, thinking he’s clever, says, “Queens?” And the driver, a true scholar of human nature and New York geography, wasn’t buying it! So they had to walk back to the hotel! Oh, the humanity! Trudging through the concrete jungle, probably past a dozen guys selling “I Heart NY” shirts made by children in a sweatshop in a country they can’t pronounce. That’s your New York experience right there!

Finally, Ronnie and Rocinante are hunkered down in Horseheads New York for the writing of this post. Horseheads… central southern New York. Now there’s a name that just rolls off the tongue and lands in a pile of what-the-hell. The story behind it is “somewhat Stephen King-esque.” You might imagine it involving a disgruntled farmer, a cursed field, and a pile of, well, you know. Horseheads! We wouldn’t be surprised if the local football team was called “The Impalers.” Truth isn’t far from all that, by the way. You gotta love a town that just puts the weird right out there on the welcome sign. No pretense, just “Yup, Horseheads. Deal with it.” At least it’s honest, unlike the rest of the current era in the good ol’ U.S. of A.

Ok…

Onward through the fog… RH

In New York City…
You’ll find no pity…
To make it there…
Takes lots of gritty…
But like ol’ Blue Eyes…
In soothing crooner tones…
Make it there…
You’ll make it anywhere.

This Land: Maryland

We have the “West”.
We have the “Midwest”.
We have the “Southwest”.
We have the “Post-Jim-Crow South”.
We have the “New England” colonies.

All of these regions have their unique character. However, there is a place where this variety gets brewed into a delicious stew. That place is called Maryland. Sorta like “spiral motion physics,” where the motion around a source of attraction forms spiraling patterns toward the source like a whirlpool. That point is DC, and the American stew is at its diversity-best in the surrounding area, Maryland. And it’s not just the people as the geography is also representative of this diversity. Maryland may not be one of the largest states in the US, but with its variety of culture, climate, topographical features, and temperament, some would say…

Maryland is America in Miniature

Now… it’s impossible to speak of Maryland in the year of our lord 2025 without mentioning the apparent shifting in nature of that cultural/political source of gravity in DC. It is a brazen spectacle to behold, our present-day republic teetering on the precipice of a descent into a veritable kakistocracy. A governance of the witless and the fearful as outlined in the so-called “Project 2025.” This ponderous tome, a testament to the enduring American appetite for sanctimonious nonsense, imagines a future so bleakly uniform, so relentlessly scrubbed of the invigorating cacophony of realpolitik, that one is almost moved to pity the authors for their impoverished imaginations. They pine for a nation remade in the image of a white-washed sepulcher, a monotonous ethno-state lorded over by a monarch of their own anointing.

In moments of such profound national heartburn, it is instructive, and indeed, affirming, to cast a backward glance at the decision to remove the federal government’s seat from the feverish grasp of Philadelphia to the relatively blank slate of Maryland and what is now known as the District of Columbia. This was not merely a geographical relocation, but a providential compromise of competing interests escaping the miasma of a political homogeneity that then, as now, threatened to asphyxiate the nascent republic in its sleep.

One need only consider the character of Maryland, that delightful America in Miniature, to appreciate the wisdom of our founders. Here is a state forged in the crucible of religious tolerance, a haven for England’s persecuted Catholics, who, though a minority, were granted the revolutionary courtesy of coexisting with their Puritan tormentors. This early experiment in pluralism, though not without its lamentable “plundering times” at the hands of Cromwellian zealots, set a precedent for the rich and varied tapestry that is modern Maryland. It is a state where, to this day, the descendants of indentured servants and the progeny of freed slaves live and work alongside a vibrant influx of souls from every corner of the globe – Africa, Asia, Central America, and the Caribbean. Indeed, it stands as one of a handful of states where the so-called “minorities” now constitute the majority, a demographic destiny that sends shivers down the spines of the Project 2025 Christian Nationalist hierarchs.

The very soil of Maryland seems to reject the notion of a monolithic culture. From the salt-laced air of the Chesapeake to the rolling hills of the Piedmont, the state’s varied topography mirrors the diversity of its people. It is a place where the first American-born saint rests, a testament to its Catholic roots, yet where Protestants and the happily godless now outnumber the papists. It is a “Free State” not merely in its defiance of Prohibition’s follies, but in its very essence – a haven for the unconventional, boasting one of the highest concentrations of those who defy the rigid taxonomies of gender and sexuality. Let us not forget that the first American to proudly proclaim himself a “drag queen,” the courageous William Dorsey Swann, hailed from these parts, a pioneer in the eternal struggle for the right to be oneself, however flamboyant.

Contrast this vibrant, chaotic, and ultimately more interesting reality with the sterile vision of the Project 2025 evangelists. They yearn for a nation of one political philosophy, one creed, one stultifying set of beliefs, a landscape as flat and featureless as their own intellectual horizons. Theirs is a philosophy born of fear – fear of the other, fear of the new, fear of the messy and unpredictable nature of a truly free society. They would dismantle the very administrative state that, for all its bureaucratic bungling, provides a framework for our collective endeavor, and replace it with a system of pay-to-play patronage and ideological loyalty tests. They would, in essence, turn the clock back to an imagined golden age that never was.

The historical record of Maryland stands as a powerful rebuke to this retrograde fantasy. It was in Maryland that the ideals of the Revolution led to the liberation of thousands of slaves, a moral awakening that, while imperfect and tragically delayed, pointed toward a more just future. It was on Maryland’s soil, at Antietam, that the tide of a bloody Civil War, fought over the very soul of the nation, began to turn. And it was Maryland that, in the ashes of that conflict, abolished slavery and extended the franchise to its non-white citizens. This is not the history of a people wedded to a single, exclusionary identity, but of a people grappling, often violently, with the complexities of building a society out of disparate and often conflicting parts.

The proponents of this newfangled ethno-nationalist monarchy would do well to study this history. They would do well to observe the thriving economy of Maryland, buoyed by its proximity to the very federal government they seek to corrupt. They would do well to visit its public libraries, those bastions of self-directed education that offer knowledge to all, regardless of station or background.

In the final analysis, the decision to plant the nation’s capital in the embrace of Maryland was a stroke of genius. It was an implicit recognition that the strength of this republic lies not in its ability to enforce a bland uniformity, but in its capacity to absorb and celebrate its manifold diversities. The future of this nation, if it is to have a future worth mentioning, will not be found in the sterile pages of Project 2025, but in the noisy, vibrant, and gloriously untidy reality of places like Maryland. Let the hollow sycophants preach their gospel of homogeneity; the rest of us, the free human beings in this republic, will continue to draw our strength from the rich and fertile soil of our diversity.

And that’s all we have to say about that.

Onward through the fog… RH

You can’t just waltz by…
The state of Maryland…
Too much to see…
Too much to do…
Get on the Metro…
To the Fed. Triangle…
And don’t forget…
To hydrate properly.

Wizard Whisperer

By the smoking shrooms of the Riviera City, what fresh hell is this? Stan Diller, they call him. Diller Monkey, the festering boil on the backside of Oz. This ain’t your cuddly winged primate flinging feces for giggles, no sir. This is a creature brewed in the very cauldron of Quadling nationalist bile, a walking, squawking hate-balloon who somehow, by the grace of some seriously twisted karmic joke, has the ear – and apparently the drooling attention span – of the goddamn Wizard.

They gossip, these nervous little Munchkin handlers with their sweaty palms and darting eyes, that Diller is the “Wizard Whisperer!” More like the Wizard’s ventriloquist, shoving his twisted rhetoric up the old man’s puppet-hole while the Wiz just blinks and nods like a wind-up jack-in-the-box. Remember that fiasco at the Castleforce Guild global summit? Poor Wizard, nodding off like a goddamn used car lot inflatable tube-man gone limp, and there’s Diller, his beady little monkey eyes gleaming with some kind of perverse pride, practically dragging the befuddled old coot out by the sleeve. You’d almost feel sorry for the Wizard, if you weren’t so busy choking on the stench of Diller’s racist policies.

Family separation at the border? “Zero tolerance” for anyone who doesn’t sport pristine Quadling papers? Banning Oompa Loompas? This is pure, uncut Diller Monkey madness, a xenophobic freak show orchestrated by a tiny, bitter primate with a heart full of rusty nails and a brain marinated in White Quadling grievance. All the more puzzling is the fact that Diller is a flying monkey. A race of creatures formerly demonized and nearly exterminated by the very Quadlings he currently champions. Irony, apparently died in the realm years ago. And the Wizard, bless his fading faculties, scarfs it up like a Big Mac and large fries.

“A simple, no-brainer,” Diller chirps, regarding the trauma inflicted on families ripped apart at his command. This is the kind of soulless pronouncement that should send a chill down the spine of every sentient creature in this cursed land. “The powers of the wizard… will not be questioned!” he screeches, his voice echoing with the unmistakable timbre of a tinpot dictator in the making. Familiar, you say? You bet your lollypop stick it’s familiar. It’s the sound of freedom getting a fake-news red pill shoved up its bum.

And the literary tastes of this creature? Mourning the loss of some scribbler peddling White Quadling “genocide” fantasies in the pages of “Blackheart,” that festering rag for the Oz alt-right? Of course he did. Because this isn’t about policy for the common good, loopers. This is about the primal, gut-level ugliness of racial animus, plain and simple. Diller Monkey isn’t interested in making Oz great again. He’s interested in making it “white” again. Whatever the hell that means in a land full of tin woodsmen, upright lions, and talking scarecrows.

So here we are… the Wizard, the once-revered reality-TV star, now a doddering puppet dancing to the tune of a racist little monkey. The citizens voted for a Wizard, but what they got was Diller, the “Wizard Whisperer,” the architect of Oz’s slow, agonizing descent into a xenophobic hellhole. And all we can do is show up, amidst the crumbling grandeur of Riviera City, and rage against the machine. Because in the grand, twisted theatre of Oz, that’s the only goddamn sane response left.

Stay tuned… much more to come.

This Land: Delaware

Ok… Ronnie wants to share another vivid dream. This time accompanied by a lone, mournful saxophone moaning a melody from some vaguely familiar smoky jazz club. The scene is a dusty phantom TV studio at night with the sound of a flickering fluorescent light, buzzing like a trapped fly. The dream conjured forth a vision so preposterous, yet so uniquely American in its blend of earnest naivety and jaded cynicism, that it deserves attention.

To the mournful strains, a debate between two ladies, from drastically different eras, denizens of that diminutive state of Delaware. A place known for its accommodating incorporation laws and its haste in jumping on the Federal bandwagon.

The first, a clever gal called “Lizzie” Magie, the originator of the popular board game, Monopoly, was aflame with the righteous indignation of a perennial reformer. Her prescription for the nation’s 21st Century Defcon-II constitutional emergency? To uproot the entire federal governing apparatus from its swampy roost in DC and transplant it for a time to the hallowed, if somewhat cramped, soil of Delaware. Rehab, a shock to the system for a period of time before moving back into the original storied monumental structures. The symbolism, she declared, of returning to the “first state” would, by some occult magic, restore the pristine virtues of the Founding Fathers… those gentlemen who, if they could witness the current state of their handiwork, would likely prescribe a universal draft of Jonestown Cool-Aid.

This Lizzy Magie creature, with the touching faith of a Nebraska retiree buying into a Mazatlán time-share, lamented over the rapid degradation of the “three co-equal branches,” a charming myth that has as much relation to current reality as Schoolhouse Rock has to the operations of Donald Trump’s meme-coin exchange. The branches, she correctly observed, are no longer co-equal; they are, instead, a grotesque mirage… it’s all about the ONE, she would say. One part AI Pope, one part Verruca Salt, and one part Bonaparte wannabe. Her solution to this, beyond the geographical transplant, was a ballot method currently adopted by a few progressive states and municipalities called “ranked-choice voting.” Anathema to the current crop of minority rule denizens, and so not likely to be adopted as long as they hold the reins. Then again, the notion of an innovative method of tabulating ballots can somehow transmute the base metal of homo imbecillis into political gold is rather quaint! The idea, as she expounded it, was to compel the scoundrels who infest the halls of power to appeal to a wider swath of the electorate, to dilute their venom, to approach a reasonable approximation of “the common interest”. Of course, this will only fly over Christian Nationalism‘s dead body.

Against this geyser of well-intentioned wishful thinking stood the second apparition, a younger, livelier, specimen of Delawarean womanhood named Aubrey Plaza. This curious exhibit, draped in the deadpan weeds of fashionable apathy, met the older madame’s reformist zeal with a blast of arctic cynicism that was, we confess, almost refreshing in its bleak honesty. To the proposal of Delaware as the governmental rehab facility, she responded with a chuckle worthy of a seasoned city editor observing a cub reporter’s first fumbling attempts at the Parks & Rec. desk. The problem, she drawled, with a voice like coffin nails scratching ice, was not the capital’s temporary address, but the fundamental, irredeemable character of the political species and the greed that elevates them.

This Aubrey Plaza-like apparition, to her credit, harbored no illusions about “fairness” or the noble aspirations of the founding slave-owners. Politics, in her view, was a naked grab for power, and the current vogue for “minoritarian rule” was not a bug but a feature, a “boutique monopoly of misery” to be savored by its practitioners. She saw in ranked-choice voting not a path to a more reasoned polity, but a machine for manufacturing “beige” politicians, an army of anodyne chameleons stripped of even the base authenticity of their current awfulness. Her ultimate vision, delivered with the deadpan ennui of a bored Delphic oracle, was of an algorithm anointing rulers, a prospect that, in its sheer mechanistic horror, almost eclipses the current system of selection by dark money, performative martyrdom, and juvenile bullying.

What, then, to make of this nightmare debate between the earnest, if deluded, progressive and the languid, clear-eyed absurdist? Lizzy, with her touching faith in procedural tinkering and the essential goodness of humankind, represents the eternal optimist, the kind who believes a new coat of paint can mitigate dry rot. Her desire for a return to foundational principles is understandable, if naive; her championing of ranked-choice voting, merely the latest iteration of the age-old quest to make silk satchels out of swine ears. It presupposes a citizenry capable of, and interested in, nuanced decision-making, a presupposition so wildly at odds with observed reality as to be laughable. The average voter, faced with ranking their preferences among a slate of multi-creed options, would likely succumb to vertigo or simply vote for the candidate with the most reassuringly vacuous slogan.

As for dear Ms. Plaza, her pronouncements, while reeking of the intellectual sewer, at least possess the virtue of an unvarnished realism of sorts. Her embrace of minoritarian rule as an “elegant slide” is, of course, monstrous, yet it is an accurate enough description of the trajectory of more than one so-called democracy. Her dismissal of compromise as “what people who are losing agree to” is the distilled wisdom of every ward heeler and backroom boss since Odysseus launched his armada. She sees the game for what it is: a contest of audacity, not a symposium of philosophers. Her suggestion that some tribes are simply “better” and that the point might be for the “correct minority to achieve a beautifully efficient, aesthetically perverse monopoly” is the quiet part said loud, the unspoken ambition of every tinpot Messiah and aspiring oligarch.

As rare as it is to glean coherence from these prematurely interrupted sleep cycles, Ronnie was able to dredge some meaning, if fleeting. Namely, the dream offered a grim choice between two equally unappetizing just-desserts. On the one hand, the saccharine, pie in the sky nostrums of the bleeding heart progressive librul, forever convinced that one more committee meeting, one more ballot reform, will usher in a new Shining City on the Hill. On the other, the cold, reptilian embrace of power politics, a frank acknowledgment that the entire enterprise is a swindle, best enjoyed by those with a taste for the perverse.

The notion that advanced information technology, as Lizzy hopefully termed it, could facilitate a more pluralistic utopia via ranked-choice voting is perhaps the most vulnerable element of the entire phantasmagoria. Technology, in the hands of civic charlatans, may end up being a more efficient tool for bamboozling the citizenry, for refining the techniques of mass manipulation, less for elevating civil discourse. To imagine it serving the “interests of all” is probably a hopeless pipe dream.

So, the capital can remain in Washington, or it may, for all we care, be relocated to Mars, with Congress critters required to broadcast their imbecilities in matching blue space suits… it’ll make no damn bit of difference. Ms. Plaza’s final, chilling observation about Delaware’s “low incorporation fees” as a boon for some minoritarian corporate monarchy is perhaps the most salient takeaway. For in this emerging grand, cacophonous, and increasingly deranged Republican Autocracy, the only true constants are the pursuit of plunder and the eternal, unyielding willful compliance of at least a bloated third of the electorate. And it will take more than bizzarro dreams to push back against this unfortunate state of affairs. Now, if you’ll excuse us, it’s time to head out to the van and throw a burrito down a clearly hangry dreamer’s throat.

Onward through the fog… RH

A sure-fire way to…
Spoil Thanksgiving…
Fire up a game of…
Classic Monopoly…
It works the same way…
For national unity…
Go ahead and blame Delaware.

Below the Earth – Above the Sun: To Whom it may Concern

06-FridayThe13-2025:

Ok… laundry day in Waldorf, Maryland. A mere 16 miles from DC-Metro’s “Green Line” to the Federal Triangle. Last weekend, i spent 45k steps perusing the triangle, including a walkabout in the Jefferson Library and the Smithsonian “Portrait Studio.” As well, it just so happened to be Pride Fest and that’s the reason i got so many steps. I had to walk AROUND the fenced-in festival area until such time as they accepted revelers. When they started letting people in, they wouldn’t allow my freakin’ backpack, so i had to ditch it for the Sunday visit.

Anyway… this is No Kings weekend, the 250th year anniversary of the Continental Army, and (more importantly) Donald Trump’s birthday. So, in honor of all that (mostly the naked emperor’s birthday), there will be a festive military parade, as if we had something to prove to our nation’s enemies. By the way, what enemies really need to be intimidated?? The DOMESTIC enemy?? That’s right, Mr. Trump and his acolytes have been demonizing his political opposition for nearly a decade, declaring them the “enemy of the people.” He behaves as if he REALLY wants a Civil War redo. He even re-renamed all of those recently renamed Southern military bases after Confederate Generals.

I would say, “can you believe it?” But we’re WAY past that, we can believe it. It’s no longer horrifying, and i fear a climate of having the US executive branch at odds with half the population they are SUPPOSED to be serving is getting normalized. Seriously, what does he think? That he can politically cleanse the nation till only MAGAs remain

Bleep THAT!!

How this shakes out beyond the political black hole’s event horizon is anyone’s guess. Mine is as good as any, so here are a few plausible scenarios:

ONE: Investigators chasing the possibility that Elon and his hacker buccaneers rigged the 2024 election, find a smoking gun that proves Mr. Trump’s posturing about a stolen 2020 Election was merely foreshadowing for everything 2024 and after. Between congressional gerrymandering, the stacking of the courts by McConnel, and Elon’s hacker squad actively changing ballots, we’ll find Harris actually won that election, and the house of cards Mr. Trump built comes crashing down in a whispering whimper.
TWO: The rightward shift of several key demographics was actually a thing. Trump holds on to his Trifecta, and there’s no more democracy. Curtis Yarvin’s wettest of dreams come true, Steve Bannon finally pops like the malignant cyst he is, Stephen Miller laps up the blood, and the upside down is permanently installed until such time as a stout resistance infiltrates the military and stages another coup, setting in motion a constant cycle of banana republic-esque military coup after military coup.
THREE: The mid-term turnout is so overwhelmingly blue that no amount of cheating can stand, and MAGA’s demise is somewhat delayed.
FOUR: California, Washington, Oregon, and the North Eastern New England states secede from the MAGA disunion, join forces with Canada setting off a fierce border war with which Idaho, Montana, and North Dakota desperately lobby Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, and Florida for assistance. A futile effort in the end as Mexico takes advantage of the chaos keeping the southern states too busy to be of much help on the Northern Front.

Yikes…!!

I ask my MAGA friends and neighbors… “is this REALLY what you want? Do you HATE gays, atheists, independent-minded women, brown and trans people so much that you’ll gladly push this formerly respected world power into a zero-sum contest over cultural trivialities?” Seriously, i NEVER got mad at anyone wishing me “Merry Christmas.” In fact, i am prone to throw that greeting around preemptively as a way to bring down the temperature in my ruby red neighborhoods.

As well, i have been propositioned by gay men for what reasons i cannot fathom other than you CAN’T JUDGE a BOOK by the COVER (duh)! Did i get angry?? Of course not. It’s flattering. In one case, i was in a typical top-40 dance band playing a ski-resort gig. Flaming youth! Apparently, i was broadcasting pheromones… it was a compliment. I politely thanked the bar patron for the compliment and let him know i was playing on the hetero team, “straight as an arrow.” He turned his attention elsewhere and that’s that… not rocket science.

At another extreme… in my elementary school days, i was on fire for Jesus and ready for a lifetime of evangelism and missionary wanderings. But something happened as my frontal lobes started developing expanding my worldview past the tip of my nose. I came to understand that all devoted religious followers believe theirs is the best or only path to the divine. Mine also happened to include doctrines about those who do NOT believe, that they would be in for eternal agony if they didn’t, “see the light.” This i simply could not square with what i learned about Jesus’ example, and so i began a spiritual search that ended up somewhere around Tao, Buddhism, QuantumMysteriousness.

Do i now hate those who cling to their exclusionary creeds?? NO… i have Muslim friends, Mennonite friends, Baptist friends, Hindu friends, Catholic friends, Cherokee friends, etc. etc. I tend to regard religion with the same discretion as sexuality, in private, among friendly interlocutors.

Regarding trans people: Do those hopelessly bigoted troglodytes actually believe a person would CHOOSE social ostracization, a lifetime of being regarded as a freak? Anyone who believes a human being (social animals to the core) would CHOOSE exile probably need professional help. I wonder if they’ve ever tried engaging empathetic thought experiments, like walking in the metaphorical shoes of a trans person found in any community. Not in your back yard, you say? Maybe think in terms of bell curves. The numbers may be miniscule but each bell has a tail at the extremes; least and most likely. Can you put yourself in the shoes of the trans person you’ve encountered personally? Did you choose to be that way? Why? Think it through and get back to me won’t you?

Dear MAGA…
Why can’t you be more like Jesus?
Please explain as if speaking to Kindergartners.

If you don’t want to have this discussion in public, please DM me, i will keep your confidence… you have my word.

FINALLY… i’m getting this out in the open because there have been speculations about what may happen to protesters in DC tomorrow. If we have another Kent State or Tiananmen Square and i don’t make it out, i want my MAGA friends to ponder the above questions for my sake. Lastly, i beg you… don’t drag my children into a zero-sum violence choice… Please Please Please??

Cheers and gratitude… Rohlfie

This Land: Pennsylvania

Ok… Rocinante has ventured into the Pennsylvania interior, not so much because Ronnie asked her to, but because the public libraries in Altoona all seem to be stuck in the 20th Century. Either lacking accommodations for folks with their own productivity machines (laptops) or prohibiting Ronnie’s coffee mug AND lacking places for him to work with power and WiFi. Anyway, they finally settled in a Sheetz convenience store to compose this post.

Now, the extent of Ronnie’s personal history with Pennsylvania is from the deep dark days of the 1980s. A time of self-discovery, good times, and madness. Ronnie and few other lost children formed a brief tribal bond, and one of those lost children was a native of Pennsylvania Amish Country. So… rather than dig up a bunch of boring travel-blog fare, let’s relive a version of this story.

Without further adieu, the saga of “Dangerous Dan, the Sonesta Stud.”
WARNING – nearly all of the following names and places have been changed in order to avoid future heartbreak or litigation. Consume at 2025’s level of truth-decay:

The weathered picnic tabletop in the Yoder kitchen probably saw more existential dread per square inch than a Parisian café, and that’s saying something. Young Danny Yoder, not yet “Dangerous Dan,” certainly not the “Sonesta Stud,” just Danny, a kid with an ample bowl-cut mop of hair and a future he figured was about as exciting as a rerun of Hee Haw, was chief among the brooders. Pennsylvania. God’s country, his old man called it, usually right before hitching the family horse to the buggy to run errands. For Danny, it was a landscape of muted greens and plain grays, a place where dreams went to die, or worse, to settle down and work the farm.

He’d seen the rock gods on MTV, their hair a defiant sculpture against the drab backdrop of whatever town they’d crawled out of. Poison. Mötley Crüe. Bon Jovi, for christsake. Their rebellion was loud, dyed, and probably flammable. Danny wanted a piece of that. So, the bowl was stowed, replaced by a peroxide inferno and enough Pink Can Aqua Net to qualify as a minor environmental hazard. He spiked it high, a golden crown of defiance, and pointed his rust-bucket west, toward Thornton, Colorado, a place he’d picked off a map because it sounded like it might have a decent guitar shop.

Thornton in the ‘80s. It was a magnet for the misplaced, an endless sprawl of cloned, cookie-cutter future meth labs, much like its inhabitants. Dan, as he now insisted on being called, found his tribe. There was Rikki, a drummer whose rhythm was only slightly less erratic than his love life; Timothy “Zipperhead” Johnson, who’d fried half his brain cells working at a battery plant but could beat Kasparov two out of three, or so he claimed; and a rotating cast of lost boys and girls, all chasing something just out of focus. They congregated in the “Mountain Knowles” apartments along the Valley Highway smelling of stale cigarettes and ambition, the kind of ambition that usually fizzles out with the rising of the “Golden Orb.”

Dan, with his newly minted blonde spikes and a sneer he’d practiced in gas station bathroom mirrors all the way from PA, fell in with a band. Not in the band, mind you. More like… around the band. Their singer, a raven-haired siren named Tina whose voice could melt glaciers and whose eyes promised paradise and peril in equal measure, had a habit of attracting trouble. The kind of trouble that wore leather jackets and carried bike chains. Dan and the boys, fueled by cheap beer and an even cheaper desire to be heroes, appointed themselves her unofficial bodyguards.

Now, the legend of “Dangerous Dan” was born one sticky night behind a dive bar called The Rusty Nail. A gaggle of local tough girls, jealous of Tina’s allure or maybe just bored, decided to redecorate her face. Dan, armed with nothing but his Pink Can Aqua Net (extra super hold, naturally, because even in a brawl, a man has standards) and a surprising amount of righteous fury, waded in. He didn’t so much fight them as…disperse them, in a cloud of aerosolized lacquer and screeching. Tina, suitably impressed or perhaps just grateful not to have a black eye, rewarded him with a kiss that tasted like cherry lipstick and untapped potential. He was smitten. Head over heels. A goner.

The Sonesta Bowl, a local institution smelling of lane wax, stale beer, and desperation, was where the other half of his moniker took root. Dan, it turned out, had a certain…knack with the ladies who frequented the attached tavern. Maybe it was the hair. Maybe it was the brooding silence that some mistook for depth. Whatever it was, the whispers started: “That’s the Sonesta Stud.” He’d just shrug, order another Bud, and try not to think about how Tina’s eyes were increasingly drawn to the lead guitarist, a lanky dude with actual talent and fewer outstanding warrants.

The good times, as they always do, started to curdle. West Colfax was a different beast than suburban Thornton, a gritty strip of pawn shops, rods & bods, adult bookstores, and taverns where trouble wasn’t just brewed, it was served on tap. A turf war, or something equally pointless and testosterone-fueled, erupted between Dan’s loosely affiliated crew and a rival gang of greasers who looked like they’d stepped out of a time machine stuck on 1957. One night, under the flickering neon of a liquor store sign, things got biblical. Or at least, club-ical. Dan zigged when he should have zagged and a tire iron, or maybe it was a table leg (details got fuzzy when your bell was being rung like the Liberty on the Fourth of July), connected with his scalp. He woke up with a headache that could curdle milk and a ragged scab that peeked out from his blonde spikes, a permanent souvenir of his Colorado escapade. Dangerous Dan, indeed.

Then came the scattering. It happened not with a bang, but with a series of mumbled goodbyes and slammed car doors. Rikki, ever the pragmatist beneath the wild-man exterior, joined the Navy. “Three hots and a cot, man,” he’d said, “and maybe i’ll see the world, or at least a different part of this godforsaken country.” Zipperhead, after a particularly bad batch of something he’d scored, decided the ski slopes of Summit County held the answers, or at least better powder. Another, a quiet kid from South Dakota named Rogger Dogger, just packed his duffel one morning. “The grass ain’t always greener, Dan,” he’d offered, a sad smile playing on his lips. “Sometimes it’s just…different grass. And sometimes, your own patch ain’t so bad if you just water it right.”

The final blow, though, was Tina. She found her more eligible bachelor, a guy who owned a chain of car washes and didn’t have a collection of empty ramen noodle cups under his bed. Dan saw them once, gliding out of a steakhouse, her laughter echoing, bright and carefree. It was a sound he realized he hadn’t heard from her in a long time, not when she was with him anyway.

The Sonesta Stud. It was a joke, really. A hollow crown. He’d make out with the local talent, sure, a brief flicker of connection in the smoky haze of the bar, but it was like trying to warm your hands over a book of matches when you were freezing to death. The depression, when it finally hit, wasn’t a sudden storm but a slow, creeping fog, muffling the world, turning the vibrant colors of his imagined rock star life into a dull, aching gray. The kind of gray he’d tried to escape back in Pennsylvania.

The realization hit him harder than that club on Colfax. Wherever you go, there you are. The bleakness wasn’t in the rolling hills of PA or the strung out sprawl of Thornton. It was in him. A little piece of that old familiar picnic table, that existential dread, had apparently stowed away in that rust-bucket Pinto wagon and made the trip west with him.

So, Dangerous Dan, the Sonesta Stud, packed his remaining can of Aqua Net (it was mostly empty now, like his promises to himself) and pointed the Pinto east. Back to the land of doting parents, nosey cousins, and primitive back roads.

And a funny thing happened on the way back to being Danny Yoder. Or maybe it happened once he got there, once the Colorado dust had settled and the ringing in his ears from too many nights spent too close to overloaded amps had finally faded. The primitive back roads? They weren’t so bad. Kinda pretty, actually, especially in the fall when the leaves turned. The provincial attitudes? Hell, most folks were just trying to get by, same as anywhere. And his nosey cousins and doting parents…well, they were family. They’d clucked over his scar, his suspiciously blonde hair (now growing out, revealing the sensible brown it had always been underneath), and his general air of a man who’d wrestled with a few demons and maybe, just maybe, pinned one or two of them to the mat.

The things that used to grate on his nerves like a cheese grater on a raw potato suddenly seemed…comforting. The familiarity of it all, the sheer, unadorned Pennsylvanianess of it, was a balm. He even found himself helping his old man on the farm, the smell of turned earth a far cry from stale beer and regret.

Danny Yoder was home. The Sonesta Stud was a ghost, a story he might tell his own kids someday, if he ever got around to having some. Dangerous Dan? Well, maybe there was still a spark of him left, a reminder that even a kid from an hard working family in Pennsylvania Amish Country could chase a crazy dream, get his scalp split open, and live to tell the tale with a wry grin. The grass, he finally figured, was green enough right where he was standing. He just had to remember to look down once in a while, instead of always staring at some distant, peroxide-fueled horizon. And maybe, just maybe, that was the most rebellious thing of all.

Onward through the fog… RH

You can gain insight…
Off a single sheet…
From Amish country…
To the Denver mean streets…
To pin your demons…
To the mat of destiny…
Everywhere you go…
There you are.

This Land: West Virginia

Well well well, we’re still on the road. This week… West Virginia. We’re finding the fun has dwindled a bit. At times Ronnie confesses to feeling like an exposed nerve. It may have something to do with the change of scenery. After all, as a Kanorado native, Ronnie’s comfortable with wide open spaces. But starting in North Carolina, approaching the beginning humps of the Appalachians, Ronnie started developing a contracting state of claustrophobia. This sense of dread actually started earlier, in South Carolina, with conjured imaginings of what it would be like to navagate congested urban sprawl nestled amongst relentless steep grades, up and down and up and down, trying not to ride the brakes but sometimes unable to avoid it. Then what do you know? The two West Virginia college towns Rocinante stumbled into (WVU and Fairmount State) presented conditions exactly like Ronnie’s worst roller-coaster imaginings.

Now, the other side of Ronnie’s Kanorado upbringing leaves him no stranger to mountaineering. And, truth told, our heroes have learned to keep up with the locals. But there ain’t no autopilot moments like those on the prairie, and Ronnie’s exposed nerve feeling keeps interrupting the vagabond felicity. So, this brings us to what appears to be a recurring theme investigating West Virginia’s general “vibe”. From readings and conversations, Ronnie has detected a more than usual sense of bi-polar contradiction, set in some of the most beautiful, lush country our heroes have yet encountered.

West Virginia! A veritable Janus of banjos and 5g smartphones. Even before the rabble in Philadelphia started their tiresome bleating about liberty and taxes, this land of craggy peaks and shadowed hollers harbored a glorious dichotomy. On the one hand, you had rugged frontiersmen, creatures of axe and rifle, suspicious of anyone wearing hats indoors and whose idea of polite conversation involves hitting the spittoon bullseye. Folks of fierce independence, mind you, who’d sooner wrestle a bear than abide a revenue agent or a banker.

Then, cheek-by-jowl with these noble savages, you’d find the seeds of a peculiar sort of… let us call it genteel indolence. Picture the languid river valleys, where the air hangs thick and sweet as overripe peaches, and where ambition rarely stretches beyond a decent slash of corn liquor and a comfortable spot on the porch swing. Folks who view haste as vulgar and consider vigorous debate over the proper way to cure tobacco the height of intellectual ferment.

Enter the great unpleasantness of the Revolution, and West Virginia, bless her conflicted heart, found herself straddling the fence like a hound dog caught in a barbed wire. Still part of greater Virginia, she sent forth her share of flinty riflemen to give the Redcoats a proper thrashing, a surprising burst of collective energy. Yet, even amidst the patriotic fervor, one might suspect there were plenty of mountaineers more concerned with deer season than the pronouncements of some powdered wig in Williamsburg.

The Civil War, naturally, only amplified this delightful schizophrenia. Brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor… a perfect illustration of a populace simultaneously capable of profound loyalty and stubborn contrariness. One faction, fiercely attached to the traditions (and peculiar institutions) of the Old Dominion, marched off under the Stars and Bars. The other, smelling a chance for their own patch of sovereignty and perhaps harboring a lingering resentment for the tidewater gentry, cast their lot with the Union. The result? A bloody, internecine squabble fought amidst some of the most gorgeously indifferent scenery on the continent.

And now, in this glorious age of the World Wide Web, this bi-polar beast roars on. You have pockets of genuine, unadulterated Appalachia, where decent 4g access is as mythical as the Sasquatch, and where the most pressing technological concern is whether the battery in the coon-hunting flashlight is still good. Here, the ancient rhythms of the land persist, the wisdom is passed down through generations of storytellers, and a firm handshake still means more than a thousand likes or shares.

But then, just over the next ridge, you’ll stumble upon a Starlink antenna sprouting from a double-wide, its tendrils reaching out to the digital ether. Here, the denizens are just as likely to be scrolling through TikTok as whittling a piece of wood. They’re ordering drone parts on Amazon while simultaneously canning beets according to a recipe passed down from their great-grandmother. They’re arguing about cryptocurrency on Reddit while their hound dog snoozes by the wood-burning stove.

It’s an all too human mess, this West Virginia. A land where the echoes of Daniel Boone‘s long rifle mingle with stock-ticker notifications. A place where the fierce independence of mountaineers clash with the modern craving for instant gratification and online validation. It is, in short, a microcosm of the American condition, amplified and seasoned with a healthy dose of mountain stubbornness and a suspicion of anything invented after the Mason jar. Long may it remain so, a testament to the enduring human capacity for glorious contradiction.

As for OUR contradicted heroes, they’ll keep pushin’ on. Ronnie’s “exposed nerve” will surely abate. And just as well as the worst is yet to come. In fact, we’re told Blue Highway windshield time in Upstate NY and further North amounts to traveling up endless claustrophobia-inducing tree alleys. It’s funny because delusional Ronnie thought he would NEVER miss driving on endless prairies, but here we are. He probably just needs a reminder that flatlander driving very often includes bucking white-knuckle gale-force head and cross-winds… and that ain’t no fun neither.

Onward through the fog… RH

It makes you dizzy…
Blue Highway shizzy…
In West Virginia…
You can get busy…
And take a page from…
The Tao Te Ching…
This too will pass…
And equalize.

Loopcircus

Loopcircus

particles

This Land: New Jersey

This Land: Connecticut

HSoB: Dawg Dayz

This Land: New York

This Land: Maryland

Wizard Whisperer

This Land: Delaware

Below the Earth – Above the Sun: To Whom it may Concern

This Land: Pennsylvania

This Land: West Virginia