crazy in the thick

I'm on my way to see my sister and her family in monroe, new york, and to get there I've traveled about 150 miles through the thick before deciding that the scenery was simply not worth the sacrifice of driving 45 mph behind horse trailers. route 6 through the thick is full of ruined houses and barns, homes with doors that open onto the interstate, and grand, majestic buildings that probably once had panoramic sweeps of all the master owned but are now a mere driveway away from the abandoned trailer someone simply left by the side of the highway. it is full too of towns that appear suddenly in your windshield and hang for too long in your rear view mirror.

I've been thinking of things that have happened in and around austin since I arrived a week and a half ago that put the lie to everything one assumes--or at least that I do--about the dullness of a town in the thick. some local boy turned 21 and when the local bar refused to serve him, saying he was already too drunk, he drove down the street and backed his car into the town's cola machine, knocking it through one of the few unbroken plate glass windows of which austin could boast; this same boy led the local cop on a chase down multiple roads until he happened to misremember one was a dead-end, so if he was going he decided he was going big and switched back around to ram the cop head-on. apparently no one was injured. another boy, a 2-year, was air-lifted to the emergency rooms of one of the closer big cities, probably scranton, after being kicked in the head by a horse. my father says he remembers when such things didn't involve hospital visits. I came across a tabloid called the sovereign while in olean, an odd amalgamation of classic libertarian/right-wing paranoia and far-left resistence hackery that, for $4, promised to tell me what was Really Going On. I had more time than money so I sat in a comfy chair and read it cover to cover. there was not a single thing in there I hadn't read a hundred times and 20 years before only with the addition of "9/11" and "obama" where I remember "bilderberg" and "reagan." if I seem less than enthralled with the material, it was probably the comfortable chair that put me off. I might have appreciated it better if I'd been sitting in a straightback cane chair with my top collar button fastened. to get the full effect of how I'd put it if I could, as always, listen to james.