Ch. 1b - Of Pop and Popcorn

Saturday was the big day, the day I had been anticipating all week, the day that I was sure would define my stay in Ohio. Mitch and I would be conquering the Marion Popcorn Festival, "the largest popcorn festival in the world"! I love the slice of life and livestock that is a good state fair and it had been a few years since I had been to one.. I was primed! Well, Saturday arrived and I have to say.. It was sadly disappointing. Maybe it suffered from my high expectations (clearly it did), but if this is the biggest popcorn festival, I'd hate to see the smallest! There was hardly any freaking popcorn at the Popcorn Festival for crying out loud!

I mean, we took it for what is was and still had fun, but we only had about two hours of fun.. and that was stretching it. It was just a totally generic street fair that could have been in any town U.S.A. and with any theme randomly attached to it. There was nothing that made it special. Anybody remember the Grady Squash Festival from the overlooked movie classic, "Doc Hollywood"? Well, this is what I was expecting.. this is what I wanted. A genuine old-fashioned Middle-America small town festival with lots of local color. There should have been all kinds of popcorn exhibits and popcorn related products for sale, there should have been a popcorn ride, there should have been people dressed in giant popcorn costumes singing popcorn songs, etc..What we got was three downtown Marion blocks of standard deep-fried fair food, rickety fold-up rides, and barking carnies. They didn't even have deep-fried popcorn (a so-obvious-it's-brilliant idea Margaret had).. sheesh!

We did eat our way through there, nonetheless.. I got kettle corn (the most "exotic" popcorn they had), a corn dog, and a pork sandwich... and a bison burger. That's right, three different types of meat. Don't judge me. The funniest/grossest/most awesome food item we saw there, though, was the above pictured "PorkTato" Fries. Say PorkTato out loud and you will giggle. Neither of us could bring ourselves to actually eat the thing but Mitch did have some other kind of grease and fries combination bowl.. worst part is, being a future coroner of America, he knows exactly how that will look on the inside. And yet he smiles... he's a strange man.

Pop-quiz: Quick, what do you say when you want a brown carbonated beverage?

I say coke.. any regular, brown-colored cola product is coke to me, even when it is not actually Coke. Not soda, not cola, and certainly not pop. Well, people in Ohio say pop, and at the popcorn festival I ordered a "pop" for the first time and it felt weird! It was literally hard for my brain to make my mouth say it. I was doing my best to blend in, though... somehow I think I still stood out like a sore city boy.

Now it is Monday, my last day in Columbus. I am doing laundry and looking up barbecue joints in Kansas City, MO, the next stop on my trip. Jesse told me I have to get a "burnt-end" sandwich, and I can't see why I wouldn't.

Ch. 1a - Working The Land

Now I have arrived in Columbus and for the last few days I have just been takin' her easy mostly. Unwinding and decompressing from all that pent up Jersey rage. On Labor Day, Mitch (who is my friend who lives here - he cuts up dead people for a living and just passed his final medical licensing test, woo!) and I went apple pickin'. The orchard was in Palookaville, or at least you couldn't prove otherwise to this city boy. I mostly ate, Mitch mostly picked, and together we stole one Pink Lady apple that was not supposed to be picked yet. Yep, we are bad dudes.

Then we stopped by the farmers' market on the way out, which was again quite the novelty to me. I pointed and took pictures of the natives and their quaint traditional ways. Mitch was *ahem* excited by the butternut squash. Excuse me while I whip this out!

The reddish apples were sweet, the greenish ones were perfect for pie.. So that is what we decided must be done. The next day, while Mitch was at work, I was a good wife and made a genuine from-scratch, homemade apple pie. I was particularly proud of the crust... deeelicious. Check it out:

Otherwise I am just hanging out, exploring the city, chillin' like a villain. This weekend is the famous Marion Popcorn Festival.. I am told corn is the thing to eat here (I assume in all its forms) and I am looking forward to it. Popcornfestival.com

Ch. 1 - Away We Go

And so, new philosophy in hand, I set out on the first leg of my trip from New Jersey to Columbus, OH. Happiness and immense relief immediately came over me as I pulled away from Jersey, and I didn't look back once.

Mostly because I couldn't! My poor little Hyundai was packed to the gills! Yes, that is a giant blue stuffed bear taking up valuable space behind the passenger seat. Anybody got a problem with that? The car still handles great and gets good gas mileage, and at this moment, that car is the love of my life! I try to treat her well. Her name is Foxy, by the way, named so because I had to buy her after my old car broke down on the way back from the Foxwoods Resort and Casino in Ledyard, CT. So, Foxy and I have been happy together since then and are enjoying our new life on the road.

The first six hours flew by on a wave of excitement and adrenaline. I wasn't tired at all and felt like I could keep going forever. Alas, I had to stop in Wheeling, WV. Why, you might ask would I need to stop in West Virginia? Well, you see, it had been some five months since I went to Foxwoods and I needed to gamble! You can take the boy out of Vegas, but not the Vegas out of the boy. Wheeling is home to the Wheeling Island Casino, which I had designated ahead of time to be an essential stop. It was actually bigger and nicer than I had imagined and it worked out great! I played poker for about 45 minutes, made some good hands, a couple of timely bluffs, and walked out of there more than $200 up.. more than paying for the first leg of my trip! Actually, I did not walk out of there.. I ran the fuck out! I had to get out of their before the local toothless realized a Jew just took all their money! In my mind this is what I looked like to them in their minds:

Am I being unfair to the people of West Virginia? I don't think so...

So, I won, escaped with my life, and after that it was two more hours to Columbus and I was looking forward to dinner and seeing my friend. It was not long after I arrived that I started to figure out which casino I will be stopping at during the next leg of my trip.

My Manifest (Destiny) Manifesto

I sit down to write tonight at my computer in Columbus, OH, some eight and a half hours from New Jersey, yet only at the beginning of my new journey. Before the end of the month I will have set foot in or driven through 15 states and gone roughly 3,800 miles. And I will be happy. I am already. So it is I return to this blog after a 7-month dormancy, with a new philosophy, a renewed spirit, and on my way west once again.

My new philosophy is the new title of this blog. This is how I intend to live my life for the next few years. It is both literal (as you can see in the picture) and figurative. Simplicity! Minimalism! Before I go any further, let me say that I don't have nearly enough self-esteem to presume that any of this or what I will say in the coming posts is important or original in any way. I don't pretend to have all the answers or even all the right questions. The title of this blog is really only meant to apply to me.. whether this idea is right for anyone else is up to them. I promise only to share my thoughts and experiences as I think and experience them... and believe me, it is very hard for me to believe that anybody cares to read those either!

I do want to say, though, that what led me to quit my job (a steady income, in this economy!) and split for the coast (the west one.. no offense to the Jersey shore) with only what I can pack in my sub-compact car is not as ill-conceived (crazy) as it may sound to most rational human beings. The decision has been a long time coming and I will elaborate on my logic in the posts to come, I'm sure. For the time being, let me say to those rational humans that I am one of you! And I am not stupid (well, not completely), I am not careless, and I am not irresponsible. Nor am I brave, courageous, or in possession of a large set of balls, as some others might think. Believe me, I am racked daily by fear and worry, but I have simply decided not to let that stop me. It is the right thing, at the right time, for me to do.. This much I now know to be true.

This new course of action, and the life philosophy that slowly led to it and is being shaped by it, is something I came to after long and careful consideration. Of course I could have kept thinking and plotting and saving more money in perpetuity, but there came a time where I could think no longer and the situation called for action. This is not bravado, this is straight-up fear and laziness, trust me. But this combination has always worked for me in the past. Fear is my biggest motivator... not so much fear of external things like plane crashes and bugs, but of internal things. My number three fear is boredom and stagnation. My number two fear is not being happy. My number one fear is not forcing myself to get out of an unhappy, boring situation for a long time. In my life I have been able to ignore these fears for a while (we all have to), but sooner or later I use them as a call to arms. Again, I have plenty of daily fears about normal things like money and death (and bugs), but I will force myself to make a change if for no other reason than just to spite my own fearful brain. And I always do my best work under pressure. Sometimes I just have to apply that pressure myself. Sometimes I just have to pack all my shit in a car and go, even if all the details aren't ironed out yet. Really, part of the fun is not knowing exactly what will happen.

In short, I felt I was becoming a shadow of myself in Jersey (seen here waiting for the train on my last day of work). I was not happy and I had to get out! That's all I've done so far...

Snow and THE Ohio trip

Hope everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving! I think it is probably my favorite holiday, if I could call any of them favorites. In general, holidays suck. Nevertheless, I found myself driving some 9 hours each way to Columbus, OH. This was my first time in Ohio, where both sides of my family are actually from. My friend Mitch, seen here in front of his house (clearly very happy to see me), is a pathology resident at THE Ohio State University. That's right, THE. If you don't say the "The" they will yell at you. Silly and pretentious? Yes. But the campus is nice and Mitch likes it there. He cuts up dead people for a living and gave me a tour of the morgue. I saw a split second of my first real dead person.. I saw something bright red that was probably some sort of guts and decided that was quite enough.

The drive went smoothly and surprisingly quickly. Along the way I made my first ever snowman at a rest stop in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania. He isn't very big, doesn't have a face, and is really pretty pathetic, but I love the poor bastard and was sorry to leave him behind. I'm sure I'll have more practice making snowmen in the coming months. Yesterday I woke up to snow falling outside my window. Sounds romantic when I put it that way, but I wasn't thinking romance at the time. I was just hoping it would be over by the time I got out of the shower. It was.. but it did stick a little and I took a picture of my car's first snow.The snow really is pretty to look at, and is still sorta a novelty to me, but I can't say I am looking forward to too much of it. It's cold! Although, I did get gore-tex shoes and feel I am now ready to kick winter's ass.