Friday, September 08, 2006

Burning time

Waiting in Hanover for funds to find their way to checking. Strictly speaking, I'm in Lebanon, NH, a support community of minimum wage earners that make college towns like Hanover possible. It's every bit as bad as it sounds.

With shopping done, full of my first Taco Bell I've had on the entire trail, I am struck by how incredibly ugly strip malls can make a place. They make cars happy, I suppose, but the people inside them seem to live little better than cattle in feed pens, though most dairy cows I've seen seem in better spirits and have superior medical benefits.

The people's spirits are bowed in their labor, but do they realize that they are working for things they do not need, or even want? Why buy a throwaway digital video game for your child when you can have a grocery cart race instead? I love those. Children are a great excuse to act in the way we really want to, i.e., like we have the screaming meemies.

Anyway.

The good point of being stuck in Lebanon is that it has many avenues for escapism, such as a great comic book store. Good comics have been a guilty pleasure of mine for years, and I readily immersed myself in Frank Miller's "300" and "Sin City", Gaiman's "Furies", and the last installation of "Y: The Last Man", which I heard may become an HBO series.

"300" in particular was very stirring, in a manly sort of way, like:

"Come home carrying your shield or come home carried on it"

Hell yeah! Who doesn't love Spartans?
Or:

"Our arrows will blot out the sun!"
"Excellent. Then we shall fight in the shade"

This is the sort of stuff that makes good chest-pounding fun.

I'll contribute:

"Death or Maine take me!"

Huzzah!

This is another scatterbrained post, but I'll chalk it up to Spartan blood-madness. And the fact that I really want to get out of here, and into the Whites where I can really crank up the heart rate.

No comments: