Blogging from Arkansas

I left Austin at about 7:40 Sunday morning for the arduous drive to southeast Arkansas to visit my mother. It's amazing I can have 2 cups of coffee, his the road that early and then drive 350 miles before my first stop -- and no, I did not wet my pants.

I stopped in Marshall, Texas to refuel and then drove on to Shreveport where I stopped at a Wendy's around 12:45 for my "lunch" of fries and a Coke. It's not always easy to find vegetarian food on the road and since I failed to research the options beforehand, I decided to take the quick and easy one, knowing I'd have a fine home-cooked meal when I got to my destination.

The trip wasn't as bad as I expected. It's interstate highway from Austin to Monroe, Louisiana which is the bulk of the trip. The last 2 hours or so involved mostly deserted two-lane blacktops. The most interesting part of the journey is definitely the stretch from Monroe to the Arkansas state line. If I stopped to take a photo at every opportunity, this would be a 12 hour drive instead of 9 hours.

I passed what must have been hundreds of little churches... and some huge ones which, in the midst of poverty-stricken towns, look a tad bit boastful in my opinion. When you only see run-down shacks and vacated store fronts and then are confronted with a brand-new megachurch and a Wal-Mart, something's wrong.

The one photo I wish I'd taken was of a church in a small town in Louisiana, it might have been Mer Rouge just outside Bastrop. The church name was something like this:

Church of the Holy Ghost - Deranged. Disturbed! I think maybe that was it. I knew "Deranged" sounded a little too far gone! (Either might work... you never know.)

Sounds like a hotbed of spiritual fun & games doesn't it? I could not help but wonder what goes on inside those doors. Are people rolling around on the floor speaking gibberish I could not understand? Are they jumping from chairs with their hands held high screaming about something? Are they waving snakes around?

There's something about coming here that absolutely depresses the hell out of me. Once I'm away from it, I forget about it. Then when I return, the feeling envelopes me again like a thick wet blanket. I can hardly breathe, and I want to scream but I'm not sure anyone will hear me. And I don't particularly want to attract that kind of attention anyway, so I sit here and quietly suffer, listening to the clock on the wall tick away the seconds, the minutes, the hours, until at long last I have my bags in the car and can start the engine for the drive home.

Sleeping isn't that easy here either. This is a railroad town, the house is just a couple of blocks from the tracks. Trains crawl through town during the night like cheap desperate aging whores blowing whistles to get attention during a shift-change outside a steel mill. Occasionally you'll hear the coupling noises of trains. It's not a pleasant noise -- very much like loud metallic claps of thunder.

I just finished lunch. After limited sleep last night, I need a short nap before I drive around town to see what else has either burned or been abandoned since my last visit.

UPDATE** It's late afternoon on Monday. My mother and I have driven up and down a number of streets and toured the town. There's plenty of houses for sale here, many at "reduced" prices. Everyone, come on down. Bargains galore. And there's amenities out the ass: a post office, a hospital badly in need of repair and updating, a Subway sandwich shop, a Chinese restaurant, a catfish restaurant, a Pizza Inn, and a Mexican restaurant -- I heard the Mexican place sucks. Oh, and there are PLENTY of vacant businesses for all you entrepreneurs. Lastly, there's a Wal-Mart. Quelle surprise!

As Dennis Hopper's character in Blue Velvet might say, "I'll be hitting the fucking road" in the morning.