Minnesota? Ya Sure You Betcha
I've made a bad habit recently of travelling in the dead of night, like a fugitive. In some ways this is very convenient, since it means that you spend time that you would probably not be actually doing stuff at your destination or at home. The bad thing is that you are completely knackered from being up so late to even get to the plane, and of course there is the joy of neck and back stiffness when you arrive, coupled with the worst kind of puppy breath (yes, the kind that involves a puppy that's got into the compost heap, and has recently discovered the joys of eating his own poop. That kind). It's with this in mind that I was on a plane again, this time headed to Minneapolis to meet my family.
My family travels oddly, and frankly we'd be pretty suspicious if you tracked us. Occasionaly we all converge on a certain town, traveling from all over the world in a way that has to have the INS/CIA/Homeland Security upping the alert status. In the movie version of my family we are spies, terribly fashionable in our tailored dark suits or black turtlenecks. This being real life, I was dressed in a brown t-shirt and jeans with a ragged Kleenex tissue as my only accessory.
I was picked up by my mother and siblings at the airport and we drove directly into the prairie. The prairie is nowhere near as flat as I thought. Instead it's rolling and endless to the horizon, like a desert with grass and barns (so in that respect not like a desert at all). The land was dotted with these small farms and small towns with populations in the low three digits. As usual I wondered what it would be like to grow up in a place like this and of course the first thing I thought of was Lake Woebegon. I quickly discovered that the Midwest seems to be the Land of Oversized Things. Even tiny Rochester has more than its fair share of humongous corn cobs, paint cans and Brobdingnagian buffalo. It's an odd thing and I can only assume it's a way of making the prairie seem less vast.
Comments
You think that's bad. Just think how bad it'd be if you grew up in two dot montana. as in 2 dots, the bar and the post office. Yup, that's how the other half live.
Posted by: Sasha | April 19, 2006 11:07 PM
Sign me up! Can I jump a ramp & go into mech form in mid air & land with a cool 2 footed slide tearing up pavement while whipping out my force blade? That would make me smile.
Posted by: Sal | April 20, 2006 6:15 AM
Two dot eh? Do they have oversized cornbcobs there?
Sal, you've lost it.
Posted by: Lo Fat Mo | April 20, 2006 11:39 AM