I have been half-assedly working on sketching together a non-fiction book proposal about riding Greyhounds, which I've done far too many times in my life. The sample part of the proposal was fairly easy, though I could probably tighten it up, or maybe rewrite it from a different segment of bus travel in Oklahoma City that's just as notable and interesting to read. It's all that proposing part that I stumble with.
So what I've invariably been doing is pulling out the atlas, and plotting all sorts of strange paths. Sometimes off-the-beaten paths through the south, sometimes following long former U.S. highways that have been replaced by sterile interstates and clogged up with suburban sprawl and stoplight cluster crawl. Other times I draw out giant shapes across the country with itineraries that take about 5 hours of ride time a day (ideally, which is rarely how a bus rolls), and imagine all the bullshit I'll experience. Plus plotting out shapes makes me think of that kid in Iowa that was trying to blow up mailboxes and leave a smiley face pattern as if Detective Freamon and McNulty were gonna use thumb tacks to chart the crime scenes on a bulletin board.
But I've been spending a lot of time looking at atlases. I briefly entertained the notion of making "collages" over state road maps, using an exacto and my shoebox full of clipped pictures from magazines to cut out perfect shapes of little triangles or squares of tiny sections of states separated out by roads, but looking it over, it seemed like the final product wasn't gonna be how I wanted it to be. I need to get one of those in-depth state road atlases for a couple states and do a few pages together to make giant retard things using that motif. My early choices to do such a thing would be Vermont, Alabama, and North Carolina. Probably Carolina because the likelihood of me going down there and being able to actually buy a state road atlas are probably better than most. Then again if I go to North Carolina, I'd probably just try to find Vollis Simpson's compound of homemade whirligigs, go to a strange town's dirt track, get drunk, and try to figure out where one of my handful of old school homies who live down there actually live and if I could make it there without getting busted for DUI, or if I should just find a logging trail and sleep in the passenger seat of my truck.
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