No Cream Cheese

I don't notice my blood sugar while I'm driving until it's too late, sometimes. I waited too long for lunch today, and pulled off just before St. Paul to a Chipotle. I realized I looked deranged when I kept saying "no cream cheese" to my burrito maker when I was trying to say "no cheese or sour cream" -- and then couldn't figure out which of the spouts contained iced tea. (To be fair, it was the unlabeled samovar-like thing that would have held *water* in Canada).

It was 850 km worth of almost-prairie today, all straight road, sunny blue clouds punctuated by an occasional sudden storm, pickups and cars with boat trailers, small sparkling lakes. Big blonde people in the Chili's in Fargo where I ate dinner.

I had an email from F noting that a long drive gives you decompression time with no obligations, no need to interact in any way you don't want to. I think I need that... and I think my life really doesn't lend itself to that. I was listening to a piece on CBC the other day about how with the current array of technology, you can't lose yourself in a foreign city the way we did even five years ago -- the stream of tweets and fbook and wifi means that you are as hooked into other people as anywhere else. I've kind of arranged this trip on purpose to be relational -- and it's got an accidental but perfect symmetry where my stays started with my childhood home, then the familiar bed at P's, then the familiar-but-new space of my first real-life meeting with the miraculous Amy. Then tonight, a never-before seen town (though of course, it looks like every other edge of a mid-size american city, though the full double rainbow in the parking lot of the Target was pretty unique to the northern mid-west). A funnel from the known to the new. And, a need to respond to an email about work, and one about a requisite signature for my rented place in TO, and a call about community response to bp's illness, and a nagging realization that I haven't responded to stuff about the orphans. Hard to lose myself when I have destinations, no time to just roll free, the wifi hook.

I think that tomorrow and sunday I'll just undo it all and try for that decompression. Being with the people who care about me at the beginning of this trip was invaluable... and now I think I need to just drive until I'm done, and not talk. Hurt and hope are still washing over me as I go, punctuated with license plate bingo, gratitude, the voice of david sedaris, the two or three songs iconic of this trip so far: AC Newman's Ten or Twelve, Arcade Fire's Keep the Car Running, Alison Kraus & Robert Plant's Gone Gone Gone.