Travel to Project One.

Mon., Nov. 10: We leave Denver at 9:00am, the first day of our three-day trip to New Orleans. The unit leader says we're supposed to be ahead of the bad weather, but he's wrong. We stop every two hours to switch drivers, and at the first stop, we have a snowball fight. In New Mexico.
Lunch at Subway, we move into Texas and it’s like the snow was never there. The sun’s beating and we pass solemn-looking oil drillers that look like dipping birds. Chris remarks that they look like sad, like they’d start attacking us if only they could break free of their masters. We pass a road that looks exactly like the road from the end of SE7EN. Check-in at the Days Inn at 10:00pm. Dinner at IHOP; I had nutella crepes, bacon, sausage, and eggs.

Tue., Nov. 11: Breakfast at the Days Inn is actually pretty good: biscuits & (iffy) gravy, scrambled eggs, waffles you cook on a little iron, english muffins, toast, PB&J, oatmeal, fruit, milk, juice, coffee, tea. I'm starting to feel like Wednesday in American Gods: eat your fill and love it every time, regardless of how bad it might actually be. We drive about 500 miles and spend it all in Texas. Texas is an endless expanse of level, straw-colored grass and dust. The sky is completely clear, completely surrounding, and the world feels infinite. Scale becomes meaningless: a tiny silo on the horizon begins to looks like a giant ant waiting for your approach to pick you up and take you down into his hive.

Lunch at McDonald’s, dinner at Applebee’s (the lead truck had a sense of humor, though, and drove into the IHOP parking lot next door first, leading to much swearing and horror from our truck until we’d realized we’d been duped). Jeremy and I went for a run, the first run since our leaving Denver’s elevation, and I ran easily three times what I normally ran, felt like I could do plenty more. It drizzled a little towards the end of our four-plus-mile excursion. I listened to Joanna Newsom for the whole of the run, and the chi was good.

Wed, Nov. 12: This Days Inn breakfast left something to be desired: oatmeal, danishes, fruit, coffee, orange juice and milk. We traveled into rainy Louisiana, past a swamp that reminded me of the swamp temple in the Super Nintendo Legend of Zelda game. A thin pool of water and trees growing out of it as if it were soil. A few bridges, and telephone wires stretching across a lake towards New Orleans. Glooming, looming clouds.

Because of the elevation, all the gravesites are mausoleums (so the caskets don’t come up and float away when it floods), and the expressway overlooks three blocks of them. You pass right by them, tightly packed, the blocks surrounded by brick walls. Water from the flood means ivy grows on the tops of the mausoleums, the houses. Nature’s creeping in, reclaiming this dense urban nest, and it’s beautiful to look at in an odd sort of way, even if you wouldn’t want to live in it. Some of the houses are painted garishly, many are wood-paneled, and all are worn and dirty from the water. The fleur-de-lys is plastered on EVERYTHING out here: shirts, banners, storefronts, trash cans, port-a-potties, bandanas, tattoos, stadiums… It is a city of contradictions. Regal but poor, carefree but dangerous, uncultured but with culture, it lends it je ne sais quoi. I would take a million pictures, if I could stop the car whenever I wanted.