I’m due for a second blog post this week and I’ll be over-the-hills and through-the-woods on the road to Grandmother’s house tomorrow. Long drive south.

I assume that we’ll be en route when the Mike Brown fecal matter collides with the oscillating ventilator. We’ve routed our trip so that we aren’t traversing Atlanta, where “empathy chaos” is a distinct possibility. Well, that and because Atlanta traffic sucks. Dong.

I’m a night driver. Enough caffeine and Shawn doan need no stinkin’ hotel! Hotels are for pussies! Unfortunately the lay of the landscape pits me against either the Appalachian mountain roads of Eastern Tennessee in the darkness or the fricking DARKNESS of unlighted Mississippi roads in the darkness. Crimeny. Those twisty backroads of Mississippi are nuts in the complete darkness. Knotted, loopy 60 mph blacktops with old growth forest brushing each shoulder and not a streetlamp to be found. It is black as half way up a mule’s ass. Kind of terrifying.

Then I lie low for a week in The World’s Greatest Mother-in-Law’s guest room. Perhaps I’ll finally catch up on my backlog of reading. It’s all on my cheap-o tablet. Better to read than to sit there poking at the tablet glass, playing some stupid Farmer Fucktown freemium game. Self-loathing. Playing video games instead of writing or reading triggers as much self-loathing as eating an entire tub of Ben & Jerry’s.

And yet… I do both with a depressing frequency.

I’m not in the proper headspace for this trip. Wish me well and safe travels. May you enjoy your Thanksgiving with your loved ones. And your Uncle Dutch, of course, that racist drunk.

Be well.