Red Carpet Inn, Elk City, Oklahoma

Tonight, I had dinner in a place called the Home Cooking Cafe in Elk City, Oklahoma. I had a turkey club. The turkey looked like thick-cut honey-baked ham and the french-fries sat in a pool of oil. Middle-aged men sat around wearing cowboy hats and boots. Two Mexican workers came in and the waitress tested her Spanish on them. The waitress asked me where I was from and (just to make it easier) I said Ontario. Then she asked me what I was doing so far from home. I said that I was studying in California and that I was heading back home. Oh, she said, "That's a long way to go, to do that."

Traveling for extended periods of time is not necessarily an experience that’s pleasurable. It becomes a question of the physical, the material. When you get into a car and step on the gas everything around you falls away. The car is the only thing you have to hold on to. Identification that once made you part of a city or a country is no longer recognizable. You're foreign, conspicuous every time you pull out your wallet, or show your face and speak a sentence.

The Motel here is pretty shabby. There's a giant cicada dead at my doorstep. I've seen these things in books but I'm horrified to know that they exist in real life. Usually they do such a good job of keeping out of sight. It looks prehistoric, like an enormous housefly. Opening the door to my room. I notice that there are a couple dozen flies hovering about the lights and toilet. I take a shower and see that someone's left a booger on the shower curtain and the drain is plugged. So as I shower the tub fills up with this grimy water. But it's cheap at 29.99 a night and I can watch Cable TV for free. Tonight I watch Myth-Busters, and they're trying to make a levitation device out of readily available parts, leaf-blowers, and duct-tape and garbage bags. I want to make my own levitation device and skim across a lake, barely making ripples as I shoot over the surface.