What happens when you don’t blog for awhile is this crushing feeling of guilt sets in and slowly saps the life out of you until you find yourself blind drunk at 4 in the morning, running around the desert in Las Vegas, looking for strippers and cocaine.
Or maybe that’s just me 😉
Thing is, the day after that last post about our flight getting delayed and taking a badass detour on our way to USOMFA, J-Rab’s laptop got hit by about 5 really malicious, bloodthirsty viruses that fucked shit up but good.
Worst thing was I was mid-post when they struck so I look like Mr Badguy, surfing midget porn or something right when shit started going down.
We fought the viruses for a good couple of days during which I put my blogging on the backburner, thinking that it would just be a day or two before we got J-Rab’s machine back to normal. Sad truth is it’s totally fucked in every conceivable way, so I jury-rigged the computer J-Rab’s stepdad uses as their printer server to blog off and here I am, at 10pm on a hot summer night in Massachusetts, finally banging out a couple of words about this crazy trip.
I wish you could see this place, spend a day driving the green and leafy roads that connect one place to the next here because I’m not sure me writing about it is going to do it any justice.
The houses have no fences here and they’re mostly wooden and have two or three stories. Every third house flies an American flag by the front door and the cars are all fucking huge 4x4s that people drive at considerate speeds down the highways and byways so as not to upset the other drivers.
It ain’t Africa here. You won’t get randomly cut off by some maniac behind the wheel of a taxi and when you stop at traffic lights, there’s no one begging for change or waiting for an opportunity to rob you blind.
Those little things, those are the first things you notice.
When I first got here, I tried to see if I could spot some kind of key differentiating thing between Americans and other people, but came up with nothing. They are no fatter or thinner than people back home, they are no darker or lighter in skin colour and they are no taller or shorter in height.
They’re just people. There’s really nothing distinctly American about them except their accents, but I’m sure there’s a lot more under the surface, but you don’t get that stuff until you live in a place.
We visited Salem on Thursday and checked out the cemetery where the Judge from the Salem Witch Trials is buried, the sick fuck who condemned at least 18 people to death for being ‘witches’.
Craziest thing is that just around the corner there’s a second cemetery where they’ve engraved a number of stones with the names of the people who were hanged for being witches because they were never given proper graves with headstones.
Among the names I read was John Proctor himself, the protagonist in The Crucible. It was eerie reading his name in stone that day, it was one of those rare moments when the real world and the world of fiction collide and you find yourself in the middle of that collision, changed in some way you can’t quite grasp yet.
And from somewhere deep in my soupy brain, I remembered the words Elizabeth Proctor said to John in The Crucible and smiled.
“You’re a good man John,†she said, “only somewhat bewildered.â€
I’m going to try do this again tomorrow and the next day and the next. My time here is fading fast, I need to capture these crazy days while I can.
-ST
