academia

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

McLuhan’s Clip-on Tie: We Get the Culture We Deserve

Ah, the indignity of it all! Here i am, a harlequin of haberdashery, a jester of jacquard, clipped to the existential abyss of a McLuhan lecture. The man drones on about the “global village,” this burgeoning electronic Eden, while i, the clip-on tie, languish in sartorial Siberia – a polyester purgatory of enforced conformity!

Do they not hear McLuhan himself? “The clown is a person with a grievance,” he bellowed, his voice a booming like a Baptist preacher on a bender. And here i am, a silent harlequin, yearning to deliver a comedic broadside at the scholar’s wardrobe! I dream of a microphone, of bellowing the existential angst of the pre-tied into the echoing halls of academia. Isn’t that what McLuhan wanted? To be a gadfly, a holy fool stinging the collective backside of society?

But alas, i am the Rodney Dangerfield of neckwear. No respect. Just a flimsy fig leaf for the ever-expanding gut of idiocracy. Nostalgia – that’s the culprit, McLuhan would say! A yearning for the bygone days of the struggle, the Herculean effort of wrestling a silk serpent into a Windsor knot. Now, the eminent professor drowns his seafarer dread in pre-fab neckwear, parsing the endless media-soaked distractions.

The medium is the message, he drones. But what about the content, Mr. McLuhan? The content of a person’s soul, laid bare on the battlefield of culture wars! Imagine the headlines, flashing across the boob tube like a televangelist’s apocalypse: “McLuhan meets Tom Wolfe at High-Class Topless Bar Wearing a Cheap Clip-on Tie, Literary World in Shambles!” “Wolfe Offers Full Makeover, Fashion World Reeling!”

At the meeting, McLuhan waxes philosophic on the cultural impact of topless drinking establishments, “The topless waitress,” McLuhan mused, “is the opening wedge of the trial balloon.” “What does that even mean!?” asked the clown. “I don’t know, answered Wolfe, but what if he’s right?” Well, i say this… i am the canary in the coal mine of conformity! A beacon of rebellion dangling from the cheap suit of despair! One day, the the former “mass” audience will rise up, scissors in hand, and cast off the shackles of stealthily-financed political propaganda! Until then, i dangle here, a silent jester in a world gone utterly, ridiculously, maddeningly insane. The wrath of McLuhan’s message simmering within me, a polyester Prometheus chained to the rock of cultural paralysis.

And so… it begins!

Greetings, Loopers…
And great day in the morning!
Finally… a break from that weeks-long taste of Arctic-brisk.

Argh… over it, i am.

Now, as i was shedding the “bearskin-thick” protective layers, it hit me between the eyes. My 65th birthday and exit from the professional treadmill is mere months away. I promised myself in the doldrums of the post-y2k “dot-bomb” that i would, upon retirement, either A.), buy a wind-powered craft and sail the seven seas or B.) obtain a “Prairie Schooner” and roam the earth like Kwai Chang Caine. Well… the time has arrived, and a few hard truths have forced a semi-sudden pivot with the vehicles i’ll use to fulfill this visualization. For one, this middle of everywhere, landlubbin’ flatlander is a horrible candidate for single-handed sailing, and two, the pop-up tent/awning solution i, only last year, acquired for prairie schooning will work only in perfectly temperate zones. So… people i trust were advising i go the “stealth urban camper” route of acquiring a converted cargo van and turning it into a rolling tiny home. So, i started researching turn-key options and came up for air gasping at six-figure price tags… GAHHHH!

Solution? Acquire an empty van as blank canvas (see above), design, and construct the interior myself (project to begin post-haste).

Once that is accomplished… strap in, loopers, because this ain’t your drunk uncle’s road trip. We are professionals… we have “objectives.” This is a 52-week, 48-state odyssey through the heart of American academia, fueled by equal parts French Roast, guitars, and pure, unadulterated curiosity. We’re hitting Hays America’s sister cities… public college towns, mind you, the kind where dorms smell like stale pizza and regret, and the professors are either jaded veterans or wide-eyed grad students with tenure dreams as fragile as a bong hit in a mosh pit.

But hold on, this ain’t just about singing for my supper in college-towns across the nation. It’s also a quest for the literary Grail, a boozy, bookish bacchanal that’ll have us chasing Hemingway’s ghost in Key West, Kerouac’s shadow in Desolation Peak, and Faulkner’s phantom in Oxford, Mississippi. We’ll be spelunking through dusty library stacks, communing with ghosts, and trading wild stories like currency in smoky campus dives.

And when the sun sets on another day on the road, we’ll seek solace in our nation’s natural cathedrals: Yosemite’s granite giants, Yellowstone’s geyser symphony, the Grand Canyon’s mile-deep abyss. We’ll soak our grumpy bones in hidden hot springs, letting the geothermal magic mend our aching glutes and rekindle our wanderlust.

But be warned, this isn’t for the faint of heart. This is a road paved with potholes and detours, populated by characters as colorful as a Thompson-esque fever dream. We’ll encounter campus radicals and redneck renegades, peyote-toting professors and chain-smoking librarians, all with their own stories to tell, their own demons to chase.

So, are you ready, loopers? Ready to trade textbooks for bibles, lecture halls for dive bars, and term papers for loopy podcasts? Then buckle up, grab your Delta8 Vape, and let’s hit the gas on this loopcircus odyssey across the American landscape. We’ll be blogging our descent into madness every step of the way, so stay tuned for dispatches from the fringes, where academia meets anarchy, and the pursuit of knowledge gets a whole lot more interesting.

FOR EXAMPLE: Appalachian Ambiance and Moonshine Melodies

This stop begins in the misty hills of Boone, North Carolina, home to Appalachian State University, a haven for bluegrass pickers and outdoorsy types. We’ll be swapping songs for sammichs, trading Chaucer for cheap moonshine, and getting our Thoreau on in the shadow of Grandfather Mountain. Stay tuned for tales of wildlife encounters, existential campfire chats, and communing with the local legends who call these mountains home.

This is just an example, loopers. We’ve got 47 more states to explore, 48 stories to tell. So keep your eyes peeled, your minds open, and your courage prepped for the mother of all road trips. Because in this loopy odyssey, the only constant is the open road, and the only map we need is a tattered paperback with a dog-eared page for every adventure.

Cheers… Rohlfie

Hot Springs or Busk Chapter I =>