ALT My hand holding a small paperback book that's smaller than the length of my hand. The plain yellowish color has the title and author in black: Notes From The Road by Mike Ingram.

ALT Page 2 of Notes from the Road: I'd agreed to drive a friend's Subaru across the country, from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, where he'd taken a job as a staff writer for a new television drama. "You don't even like television," I said to him, the night he first told me about the job. "Do you even own a TV?" It's possible I was jealous. Not that I necessarily wanted to write for television. Not that I necessarily wanted to move to California. But I didn't not want those things. I didn't know what I wanted. That was one problem. The other was that I didn't know how to figure it out. My first night on the road, in a Super 8 motel just outside Knoxville, I drank a Bud tall boy and made a pro/con list for staying in my current job. I made a pro/con list for staying with my current girlfriend. I made a pro/con list for staying in Philadelphia.

ALT Page 81: I ate lunch in Tucumcari, at a restaurant that billed itself as Mexican-American, which turned out to mean Mexican food prepared and served exclusively by white people. It was ok, in the way that about eighty-five percent of life is OK. After lunch, I walked down Tucumcari's main street. I took pictures of murals, and old hotel signs. The Bluebird. The Apache. The Palomino. Before Route 66, these little towns were farming communities. Some of them were nothing at all. Now, thanks to the interstate, to the convenience of truck stops and fast food and chain hotels, most of them have reverted to their original states. The lucky ones can at least claim an exit off I-40, put up billboards pleading with motorists to stop. In fact, I'd stopped in Tucumcari largely because of its aggressive marketing campaign, which had gone on for... [continues in next photo]

ALT Page 82: [continued from previous photo] ...so long that I'd been worn down by its sheer desperation. Driving through these towns, you could start to see their post-interstate plight as a metaphor for America itself. Then again, after enough time by yourself in a car, everything starts to look like a metaphor. The rubbery hard-boiled eggs at a hotel's breakfast bar are a metaphor for the compromises of adulthood. The ruined husk of an abandoned motor lodge is a metaphor for the human heart. That you landed in Tucumcari you on the one day of the week when their kitschy dinosaur museum is closed is a metaphor for your entire goddamn life.