Fredricksburg/Fairfax, Virginia

::(NOTE: Most of this weblog is transliterated from a handwritten travel journal. Many of the entries contain personal illustrations in between the paragraphs for humorous effect. I'll upload a gallery of the drawings when I have the chance. For now I'll insert themed placeholder notations::)

Woke up at 7:30 AM this morning, changed clothes, piled some bags back into my trunk. After shuffling upstairs for some cereal that was offered to me, I said goodbye to Pat's wife and made my way back northeast into the Richmond. It wasn't until I'd gotten deeper back into town that I realized my interest with this city was still bordering on zero, even after all this time of living somewhat close to it. I had the option to either force myself to be interested in the sights and cruise the city aimlessly for an arbitrary number of hours or I could just find the road to I-95 and keep going. I chose to keep going - at least until I found a gas station/skeevy trucker plaza to park at and sleep for another 2.5 hours.

I goes without saying that the 95 road between Richmond and DC is for lunatics, truckers, and lunatic truckers. By lunatics I mean anyone who's time is money enough to forsake all reasonable speeds below 70 MPH and ride it balls to the wall on a regular basis, probably becasue they're late for a meeting or someone moved thier cheese or some shit. So aside from Truckers and those just passing through the concrete warzone hoping to survive, this lunatic group accounts for about everyone who drives that road, who qualify for the catagory just by virtue of the fact that they are the type of person who is commuting from Richmond to DC. Comedian Lewis Black comes to mind.

Although, I did get run up on by a slick new jet black Lexus with deep tints that turned out to be the personal vehicle of a member of the Virginia Legislature. #178 to be exact per the licence plate, which explained the otherwise contradictory menagerie of cross-partisan candidate-support bumper stickers pasted on the back - they were all the names of incumbents. Speaking of INCUMBENTS:

[Hand drawn political cartoon of Mugabe @ Zimbabwe elections: "Poll's Closed"]

I call this poem "Lol, Politics":

Actor A desires outcome Q
thus takes action W;
leading Actor B to hire Actor C
using X amount of money;
to force Actor D to make action Y
at threat of gun point;
influencing Actor E to vote
in favor of issue K;
catalyzing outcome Q
which could have been something different;
Had Actor A not been
a power hungry douche nugget.