Running West and East with Important Books in Liquor Store Boxes

Kant and the Platypus. I false-started that one dozens of times. I false-started Kafka, Representative Man. That was in 1991 in Los Angeles. Hollywood. Laguna Beach. El Toro. It’s not El Toro anymore, but I tried it all over southern California. It’s over six hundred pages; you cannot blame me. I false-started Camus’ The Fall. You can blame me for that. That one clocks in at barely hundred and fifty. But I false-started it. At a truck stop in Albuquerque, just before going through the most awful, monstrous storm I’ve ever seen in a rickety Karmann Ghia loaded with boxes and clothes. In Oklahoma City at a Luby’s. Eating cold Chinese food for breakfast in Amarillo. Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville, Roanoke. Always there was some excuse. I can’t read Camus while driving standard at eighty miles per hour down the Blue Ridge Parkway. I can’t understand Mann while sipping on fatty, nasty, chicken soup in some diner in Tucumcari. There are literal tumbleweeds rolling through the parking lot. Any time now the Coyote will blow by, chasing the Roadrunner. Or some old, leathery Indian will stroll up and offer to sell me a Kachina doll. I don’t believe in Hopi and Pueblo cosmology. No thanks. The big news in Kingman was Arizona State playing Arizona. Lute Olson. That’s all I heard. Lute Olson. And I cooked ravioli out of a can in a little copper pan on a portable, electric element; the kind you find on stoves in real apartments. I cooked that rubbish in a Comfort Inn, off route 40 in the middle of nowhere. Every day for fifteen days. At the Arizona crater I clipped a rock I wasn’t supposed to. Stuck it in my pocket all sly like. Like I was some kind of delinquent astronomer. Geologist. Whatever you call those people who steal rocks from national parks. Took a piss in the Petrified Forest, too. At the Grand Canyon the Cocteau Twins muttered something about Heaven or Las Vegas. Got caught up in a traffic jam snaking up toward Hoover Dam, then down. The septic tank to the caravan in front of me gave out, and all the shit started flowing onto the road. Then we stopped. I couldn’t get out of the car for 78 minutes. All around there was a two-inch giant puddle of excrement. The Ghia didn’t have air conditioning.
In Barstow:
–I’ll give you a blow job for a ride into Westwood.
–It’s ok.
–No, seriously.
–It’s all right. Just pay for half a gas tank.
In Fort Smith, Arkansas:
–We have the best fried chicken in the entire You-Nited States, sunshine.
–I believe it.
–What’s that accent you got?
Lebanon, Tennessee had girls with the poofiest hair I’d ever seen. They were all nice. But the hair.
Lebanon, Tennessee:
–Whatchu readin’?
–Nothing. I’m just looking at the same paragraph over and over.
–Yea, but what is it?
–Depression, I guess.
Petrol ran like this:
Dollar twenty in North Jersey. Ninety-five cents in Kansas City. Ninety cents in Memphis.
Arrow heads ran like this:
Dollar fifty for a small in Estancia, New Mexico. Dollar ninety-nine for a large in Clovis and Gallup.
I traded an old paperback copy of Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar for a gyro sandwich and a postcard at a gas station in Pulaski. The clerk had been an English major at Virginia Union in Richmond. He gave me a tip and I snagged The Tokyo-Montana Express later that year from a used bookstore in Westwood. The postcard? I sent that to myself, at the old address in Annandale. In case I changed my mind and went back home. I did, but only nine months later.
–What is it?
–Nothing.
–Eh, nothing. What?
–Nothing. Depression, I guess.

I. Kant

How I feel is, I’m a fresh aphthous ulcer being doused in pure lime juice.
How I feel is.
Remember? Conversion engine. Surface breadth. Great circle distances between cities.
Here to Rabat: 4222.08 miles
Here to Damascus: 5656.73 miles
Here to Quito: 2323.03 miles
Here to Toronto: 798 miles. On Tuesdays and Thursdays. But on Fridays, Mondays, and Sundays it’s 813 miles. Remember? I can’t.

Mercopress:
“Falkland Islands hydrocarbons exploration development and the potential to hire a rig for a minimum six-well drilling program advanced considerably on Monday when Desire Petroleum announced that it had accepted the terms of an offer to farm in to three of the company’s eighteen exploration prospects in the North Falkland basin.”

Between Abu Dhabi and Accra: 3811.7 miles. Thirty-three twelve nautical.
Between Albuquerque and Algiers: 5721.1 miles. Forty-nine seventy-one nautical.
Here to here:
Thirty-three miles. Still un-calibrated. Between here and here, great circle: 33 miles.
It comes up over and over.
Latitude: 38°:49m 0s N
I also enjoy immobilization, etymology, and tickling.
Again. My own coordinates.
33.
Thirty-three.
Three-three with a red asterisk in the form of a hyperlink. It’s a Wikipedia entry for “Hades.”
Also known as Pluto. The unseen one.
Here to Pluto: 2.7 billion miles. Roughly.

Though our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises out of experience.
I am trying to follow this while sirens are blaring outside my window for the third time to-day. Firetrucks and EMS at the Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow Assisted Living Facility. It’s the third heart attack of the day. Three and you’re out.
“Though our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises out of experience.”
I am trying to follow this.
I Kant.