Merrill was tres Jimmy Buffett, and Jim, damn, all he needed was an eye patch to go with his sandy-bearded and weathered face and his 10-cigar voice. Merrill gave us all autographed CD's of his music, and not only gave Jim a book of my poetry but forfeited my Barbie towel to little blonde Sam. Hell, she looked a lot more like Barbie than I did.

Some other female reporter showed up from some other paper. A woman in her mid-fifties, she admitted to being somewhat afraid of what she might face when she got out of her car and walked over to check us out. I had to laugh. Hell, every new and different reaction we get from someone makes me laugh. This whole damn art car gig is a scream, one long and fascinating sociological crawl up the nostrils and into the brain of our absurd American culture. And that was it for Darwin.

Wednesday, July 23, Edgerton, MN

We eat like gypsy kings. We sail through seas of corn like pirate farmers.

Free pots of coffee from the Twine Ball Inn this morning. Horseshoes and hand grenades. Inner tubes and stiff nipples.

Interviews, the estranged wife, the CD gift, the painting, the bratwurst and potatoes, the lifting of the sauna to level.

Thursday, July 24, Route 268 out of Edgerton

I managed to write that much last night after dinner and before falling hard asleep in the quiet of a rare early-to-bed night for the gang. Got me a driver this morning so that for the first time I can type and roll along down the highway at the same time. The first time, ever, in fact.

Wow. After all these years of being a writer and then some 7 years with Duke, driving through rain and snow without a roof, look at me now. I'm hooked up, rolling down the highway past fields of endless corn typing on a 386 laptop in the passenger seat of the weirdest fucking car on the road surrounded by pictures and tokens of loved ones and the very real and safe-feeling presence of a caravan of friends with similar cars and similar creative interests and personal histories. It's a kind of magic I feel sorely inadequate to express, like there's no way you the reader could possibly comprehend this without seeing it. And then of course we have our film crew and each of us our own camera.

We pass a farm and I notice that the farmer is busily engaged in something with his tractor, something away from the road such that as we pass he doesn't even see us. That's funny. As much impact as we have everywhere we go, there is one man through whose world we drove directly without him ever knowing.

Just stopped for gas in Luverne, MN, down by the SD border. As is often the case, what could have been a ten minute gas stop turned into a 45 minute spectacle. This time it was a semi-organized display of the cars for the Minnesota tourism office across the street and a photog from the something-something Sentinel, the local paper. The reporter was a dark-skinned beauty named Ingrid, who during our brief conversation disavowed her small-town paper several times.

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Last update April 1, 2004