July 2-4: Wisconsin

Phil 'n' Max Hit the Road
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

…annnd that title carries an additional meaning, aside from being an incredibly obscure reference to adventure games from the early nineties. The “Max” can only be referring to Maximum Verbosity – and since I’m traveling solo this year, that, I suppose, refers to the audience, crew, and billeters that I meet along the way. It’s been pointed out to me that, despite the fact that I’ve traveled all over the world, I’ve been practically nowhere within the actual country of my birth. Looks like the next couple of months are going to represent my opportunity to remedy that.

To recap: I’m currently on my way to open a brooding military drama in our nation’s capitol. Right now, I’m spending the night on a farm in Wisconsin, courtesy of an old colleague – the woman who played Elspeth in the first production of Libertarian Rage, back in 2006. She has, to my bemusement, swollen into expectant motherhood, greeting me at the door with freshly baked bread.

The last town I passed through on my way here – I didn’t catch the name, but for the first several blocks, each lamppost was decorated with a single American flag, and a banner welcoming me to the home of the world’s largest cheese curds festival. When I mentioned this to my hostess, she asserted that this was, indeed, a major event, which people would travel great distances to experience.

I…can’t imagine cheese curds representing a significant event in my life.

In any case, the place wasn’t hard to find – the GPS system in my car displayed, for several miles, a single, perfectly straight, unbroken road, surrounded by void on either side. As I pulled up – singing along to, appropriately, the soundtrack to Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog – I was greeted by a barking dog and a cat giving me just about the iciest stare I’ve ever received from a mammal. The animals seem to respond to me with about as much enthusiasm as I have to encounter them, and their owner derived visible amusement from my discomfort as she thrust various creatures into my arms.

(I dunno. I know that, statistically, I’m in exponentially more danger living in a city – from ten thousand things, not least the fellow members of my own species – but as placid as any of these various quadrupeds may look, I can’t forget the fact that any given one of them could kill me, like, really easily. And the only reason they don’t is that they think they’re not supposed to.)

(Okay, so not all that different from my own species.)

It’s not like the place is all that isolated – there’s a set of next-door neighbors with seven dogs and a surly teenage boy being yelled at by his mother, perpetually and with great volume. I mean, I’ve *been* to isolated – places like Alice Springs in the Australian Outback, a bubble of civilization surrounded by dry, cracked earth. This is nothing even close to that. But I’m a bundle of anxiety and compulsions – spent several days leading up to my departure in a series of panic attacks, anticipating the various things I’d forget – and metropolitan city living caters to that kind of neurosis. Meanwhile, out here I’m frantic because I can’t pick up a cell phone signal.

Every electoral map of the country tells me that, ideologically, this is the kind of place I should be living, rather than the left-wing population centers I’ve devoted my career to. But while I think I can see the appeal of this kind of life, I’m a city boy at heart. And I can’t imagine living in a place like this.

God of the Gaps
Friday, July 3rd, 2009


I wonder how many households in America have "Raising Dairy Goats" next to "Living Wicca"?

Okay, so I’ll confess that – once the fairly alien experience of waking up to cocks crowing and cattle lowing has worn off – and I’ve shoved enough antihistamines down my throat to keep from choking to death on my own mucous – sitting out here is pretty cool.

And as soon as I wrote that, all seven of the neighbors’ dogs started barking. Awesome.

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One of the more curious developments of my sister’s cancer is that, when the cancerous bone in her arm was removed, it was replaced with a cadaver’s bone, under the assumption that it would, given time, regenerate. Several years later, she began having complications, and a cursory examination revealed that she did, indeed, have a dead person’s bone rotting away inside of her own flesh.

I still remember, when she came home from the surgery to have it removed, she was carrying a plastic baggie of the items they had used to hold the bones together. As I recall, they consisted entirely of metal hinges, screws – y’know, stuff I would pick up to build props with Ace Hardware.

I don’t really know what I was expecting – some kind of high-tech process involving, I dunno, lasers or something. But a lot of medicine doesn’t rely on much more than basic engineering. And a lot of surgery has more to do with carpentry than science fiction.

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Oh, that’s right. I loathe insects. I forgot.

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As my hostess showed me around yesterday, she greeted many of the animals, by name and with considerable affection. On our way back to the house, she casually gestured to a small enclosure and said, “Oh, those are the ones we’re probably going to butcher."

Huh, I thought. So you do distinguish between the ones you develop long-term relationships with and the ones you eat?

That’s the thing about things like, say, freshly-squeezed milk – sure, it’s nice, but I can’t really forget the fact that it just, y’know, came out of something. Which applies to pretty much everything we consume, but it’s harder to pretend otherwise when you encounter the immediate reality of food production.

I guess it’s my own version of the God of the gaps fallacy – I choose to believe that everything I can’t see is governed by some mysterious, almost divine process, whether it's medicine or agriculture. The messy reality is more than I’m comfortable with knowing.

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Which is partly what was going through my mind when the dog bounded up, eagerly and with tail wagging, with a decaying goat’s spine clutched between its teeth. Awesome.

Saturday, July 4th, 2009

Here I sit again, staring at the single road running past this place. Yesterday, I counted a grand total of six cars driving past, one of which was the neighbors’, and one of which was a school bus dropping off the neighbors’ kid.

In retrospect, this stopover has been exactly what I needed – I spent the days leading up to my departure in a state of pretty much constant anxiety, and the isolation here has enabled me to catch up on a lot of publicity. But while my mother may have grown up in a place like this, I am, as everyone is at great pains to remind me, my father’s son, and I find myself growing restless – I miss the constant stimulation of my usual environment. (Which may be, at least in part, why I chose the manufacture of entertainment as my profession.)

I’m profoundly grateful for my time here – but I’m ready to hit to the road again.

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Okay, I take back all of my snide remarks about the cheese curds festival, because as nearly as I can tell over half of the towns I’ve driven through have championed some kind of cheese variant as their defining feature. And her I always thought that the depiction of the Wisconsinite obsession with dairy products was a pop-cultural exaggeration.