As long as I was in New York I figured I ought to pay one last visit to Di Fara, since I may never be in New York again and if I am it is quite likely that Dom DeMarco will be dead. I had two square slices that were less than transcendent since they'd been sitting around for a while and I thought, "Actually, this is good — now I won't miss this place so much." Then I made the mistake of ordering one more thing, a regular slice with peppers, and it was so much better than the things we normally call food that you just have to throw up your hands. This place has been hyped incessantly for five years now and yet it's still underrated. Anyway, so then I drove to North Carolina and stayed the night at the house of a guy I went to elementary school with and hadn't seen since 1989.

On the way down a song came on the radio that sounded familiar but it took me a moment to place it. You know how sometimes you can't think of the name of a song so you start racing through the lyrics double-time to get to the chorus before the actual song does? "Trying to duh-duh-duh, something something ground and then you say... 'I Think We're Alone Now'!" Not the Tiffany version, though. This was the original, by Tommy James and the Shondelles. And it turns out that it's actually really good! Unlike Tiffany's travesty with all the synthesizers, when the chorus of the original says "I think we're alone now," the music actually makes it sound as if they're alone now. That being, y'know, the point of the song and everything.

I went south before going west because it is December. I lucked out — I decided to take I-40, which was dry and relatively warm the whole way. One interstate north and I would have been stuck in the snow; one interstate south and I would have been pelted by severe thunderstorms. My timing was also good: one day earlier and I would have been snowed in back in New England, whereas a day later and I would have had to negotiate a horrible ice storm in the North Carolina mountains.

Here is a neat web page showing a bunch of different ways to define the boundaries of the South. I would submit that when you start seeing abandoned cars all over the highway, you're there.

Another sign would be that when the old ladies all look like prunefaced horrors straight off of those old "Smoking Is Very Glamorous" posters, you're there.

Because I was driving straight through and not interacting with the locals, listening to national radio programs, I didn't have any audio feedback to reinforce that I was in the South. Thus it was a shock when I went to check into a motel in North Little Rock and the prunefaced old lady there asked, "Kin Ah hep yeh?"

Radio is a horrible wasteland. There seems to be an endless supply of interchangeable venomous right-wing radio hosts, each of whom is convinced he is a celebrity: The Melvin Thistlebottom Show, The Elroy Funbun Show, etc. Often the only alternative to these shows would be Christian radio. I heard one earnest Christian host plead with her listeners to give up yoga, because you violate the First Commandment by letting Hindu gods into your body. Back on the hate radio front, at one point I came across The Laura Ingraham Show and she was talking about sharks and shark attacks and swimming with sharks in a sharkproof cage and such. "Sharks are mammals, right?" she asked. Getting this confirmed by someone off-mike, she smugly added, "I'm so glad I knew that." Score one for Intelligent Design, I guess. Sometimes there would be NPR. I listened to a story about how a young entrepreneur was setting up free wi-fi in rural West Virginia. He had just finished wiring a store in a little mountain town and the proprietor was very pleased. Why? Because now he could listen to podcasts by James Dobson.

As you enter Checotah, Oklahoma, you see a sign that looks like any other road sign: same color, same font, etc. It says: "Checotah, OK / Home of Carrie Underwood / American Idol 2005."

Later in Oklahoma I was extremely hungry and thought I might like to have maybe a scrambled egg or something and I saw a Denny's so I went in. The host asked, "Smoking or non?" I hadn't heard that question in a restaurant since the 1980s. Good thing, too. The air was unbearable. As was the food.

Then came Texas and then New Mexico. I was very relieved to reach New Mexico. Specifically, I thought, "If I die now, at least the notices will say that I died in New Mexico." I would much rather have them say that than Texas or Oklahoma or Arkansas or someplace. Later when I crossed the state line into California, I thought, "If I die now, at least I will have died in California." Actually, pretty much every time I've ever traveled everywhere I have in the back of my mind always been thinking about how I would feel for this to be the place of my death. Doesn't everyone?

There are some fine burritos available in the city of Albuquerque.

In Arizona near the Petrified Forest I saw a roadrunner flying. It was close to the ground, but still, I'd never seen that before. When I was growing up we often had roadrunners and quail traipse through the back yard but they always ran, never flew. Later I saw a big shaggy raven sitting on a barbed wire fence. Later still, west of Flagstaff, I saw one of the most gorgeous sunsets I have ever seen, and then that night I saw the full moon through a hole in the clouds that made it look like the center of a spiral galaxy. I had a camera with me but I wasn't able to get a picture of any of these things. To me, a photograph is all about the composition, and since I was moving and the scenes were changing, it was hopeless. By the time I could stop the van I would be at a different angle, and even if I could get back to my original position and just stop the van in the middle of the freeway, the clouds would have changed, the birds would have stopped flapping, etc. I guess fifty years from now everyone will have a Tivo hardwired into his or her brain and will be able to pause and save frames or video clips from everything he or she sees, like in Strange Days without the external hardware. That will be completely awesome. And not just because of the porn.

I saw a billboard for a Days Inn, I think it was, which boasted the following enticement: Free "Hot" Breakfast. I must say, I was more convinced by a later billboard advertising a hotel with a Free HOT! Breakfast. In Barstow I was looking at a list of local menus and one used quotation marks in such a way that I honestly couldn't tell whether they were being used (incorrectly) for emphasis or (more correctly) to undermine the claims being made therein. The menu described the establishment as serving Barstow's "Original" Philly Cheese Steak and went on to say that Our Rolls Are "Imported" From Philadelphia. Were they admitting that it is silly to refer to a Philadelphia cheesesteak shop in Barstow as truly "original" and confessing that the rolls are not really imported but instead just taste authentic? Or did they really mean to say that Our Rolls Are IMPORTED! From Philadelphia? And if the latter, would that actually be any better?

Finally, let me just say that after a week driving a large van packed with many hundreds of pounds worth of furniture, books, amplifiers and so forth, when you return to driving a regular empty passenger car, you discover that the brakes work REALLY WELL.

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