June 5th, Portland OR: Back from Seattle, amazed to see giant “Appears to be” sign still up on I-84! Four days at 60 thousand cars per day and what - a five minute detour to take it down? Republicans gotta be the laziest people on the planet. Or maybe everyone’s just too busy and no one actually has five minutes to spare. Maybe this is why the signs stay up: everybody is ten minutes late.
June 6th, Portland: Portland and Seattle done. Now back to good ol’ San Francisco. Have arranged to meet with K. in SF. No pix from her or Columbus Ohio in over two months now and I’m afraid my army of six has been reduced to four: Los Angeles, Phoenix, Indianapolis and Denver. I don’t know that much about military stuff, but am pretty sure that when a third of your army goes AWOL it’s time to step in. I must do what I can to maintain the ranks and find out what happened to the others.
June 7th, Sacramento: When will the people rise up? Perhaps “Donald Trump is a traitor” is too strong. Must concentrate on more low-key observations. Twitter followers now above 7,000 - still waiting on Daily Kos…
June 8th, San Francisco: Met with K. outside the Trieste - she apologized, said she’d been tied up with school, but I knew immediately it was something else, something worse: she couldn’t bring herself to look me in the eye. We mumbled our way through small talk as long as we could bear it and I finally grabbed her hand and said “Look, we both know the deal - in or out, no questions no strings. But you were one of the best. I just gotta know: what happened?”
She made up some excuse about there being a “cardboard drought” in the city and that “they weren’t selling paint anymore…” but I let her know with a look that I saw through it. She sighed and spoke off to the side, the way people do in soap operas.
“It should’ve gone just like all the others… it was my regular overpass and I was hanging a simple two panel “Dump Trump.” I might’ve felt like something was off - or maybe just that everything was going too easy - but you know… you always get that. So I was just finishing up, stretching out a medium-sized bungee and then…”
“Then?”
“And then it just… it just sort of snapped. The little hook-thingy came off the elastic and it must’ve come up and hit me in the wrist - I don’t know, it all happened so fast…”
She stopped for a moment to collect herself but failed. She closed her eyes tightly and started shaking her head. “I broke…”
She struggled to get it out.
“I broke a nail.”
“Oh Jesus… Jesus God NO!”
“And I kinda got scratched a little too… on my wrist.”
“Oh Christ K… I’m so sorry.”
She gave me a brave but plaintive look before her eyes welled up and she hid her face in her hands.
“I know it’s just a nail,” she said, “But next time… next time it could be… well, another nail I suppose.”
I held her and let her cry it out. Sure, I could’ve lectured her about pre-stretching the bungees, but hell, none of us did. It’s like everything else we do - blindly, stupidly dancing our way through life thinking we’re special and that accidents happen, but never to us. One moment you’re on an overpass, putting up a sign without a care in the world and the next you’re staring down in mute horror at a broken fingernail and a scratched wrist.
June 21st, Kansas City Missouri: It’s the shortest night of the year but feels like the longest. I’ve met and done the best I could to boost the morale of my remaining troops: @thorbites in Los Angeles, @Scorchsky in Phoenix and the @DenverSignCrew. Good people, all of them, and they took the news of K’s nail with the mix of grim humor and stoicism soldiers have used to cover their sorrows and fears for centuries.
Now that I’ve crossed the Mississippi everything has started blooming: plants, grasses and trees filling every spot that hasn’t paved, mowed or cleared. The air is thick and heavy with humidity and the insects make a wall of noise in the night. The thickness of the air reminds me of younger, more desperate days spent in the jungles and war zones of Asia and Central America, back when I was freelancing and thought I could change the world with $100 articles for alternative weeklies. How naive those days seemed to me now.
Because once you’ve seen the light… once you’ve bathed in the healing waters of freewayblogging… nothing is the same. All other forms of protest seem puny and meek: the squeaking of mice compared to the lion’s roar of cardboard and paint on the freeways. Even as I write now I am still speaking to drivers in Portland, San Francisco, LA and Denver. I speak to multitudes, I speak to millions! Anyone can! And when they do, then and only then shall have our country back. Then and only then will the traitors be driven into the sea!
But staring out into the darkness from this balcony forces me to stare into an even deeper gloom within. All my life I’ve romanticized the shit out of everything - my past a topography of peaks and valleys with nothing but poetry in between. Every success has been a bonanza, every failure devastating and complete. All my friendships have been forged out of iron and gold and as for my love life… Oh. My. God. Nobody has ever loved harder, more completely or tragically than I. Every relationship a freight train of lust and emotion: beautiful and promising and doomed. I’ve had more heartbreak than Nashville, more faith than some cults and sex you could practically swim in: all of it woven into a fantastic tapestry of rapture and obsession, epiphany, loneliness, betrayal and despair. Of course, we all feel that way I suppose.
But it’s my ability to romanticize failure… that’s where I truly excel. I challenge you - any of you - to find me a man more self-delusional than I! My twitter followers are now over ten thousand strong, and yet, after more than 15 years of trying, I find myself the commander of an army of four, possibly five, driving to Columbus Ohio to find out what the hell happened to number six.
June 24th, Indianapolis: Met with @probablyelves and exchanged war stories. He said he’d gotten scratched once, and also had to spend several minutes pulling briars and foxtails from his socks, but nothing like a broken nail. I find myself impressed by his esprit des corps.
Driving through the heartland I am struck by how how beautiful everything is: lush, green rolling hills criss-crossed with a latticework of rivers and streams and sprinkled with picture perfect little towns. There were some closed-down mills and boarded up shops, but nothing like the post-apocalyptic wasteland I’ve been hearing about for so long. I’d been expecting ghost towns filled with opioided zombies wandering through hellscapes of shattered brick and broken machinery droning “Jobs… Jobs…” instead of “Brains… Brains…” Like the Walking Dead with MAGA hats.
Pulled over at a hilltop rest stop, gazing out over miles of rolling hills, fertile plains, rivers and forests, it came to me that yes, once this had indeed been heaven on earth. But times change. Back when wealth was measured by things like owning and farming land, horsemanship and hunting, there was no better place to be. But the paradigm of success had long ago shifted to the cities. The American Dream was no longer to be found in the agrarian splendor spread out before me, now it was simply money - and scads of it. Luxury and fame, limousines, entourages… just like you see on TV. In this new Gilded Age it didn’t matter what you did or where the money came from, just so long as there was an endless supply of it and you spent it foolishly and recklessly surrounded by admirers to gasp and applaud. There was none of that here. The more I think about it the more I feel that 24 hour cable TV has destroyed our nation.
June 26th, Columbus Ohio: I have arrived, and must admit am a bit giddy with anticipation. Dulcinea79 is a beautiful young woman with flawless skin, a thick mane of raven black hair and freakishly huge, blue sparkling eyes, at least if her cartoon avatar is anything to go by. She certainly knows her way around a freeway: overpasses, peripheral fencing, the backs of roadsigns, even retaining walls… she did them all.
What really made her exceptional though was her artwork. Even without a projector, her synthesis of duct-tape and free-hand painting was truly a thing of beauty - her mock helvetica, courier bold and even seraph-intensive fonts like Times New Roman were almost indistinguishable from the real thing. From the few e-mails and DMs we’ve exchanged it’s obvious she’s very intelligent, and in our brief departures from talking shop we seem to like the same music and many of the same authors. I suppose you could say I had a crush on her, the way one does from the alluring little scraps and tidbits we get from the internet, and that when her pictures stopped coming a little piece of me died. As much as I’d like to pretend otherwise, to a certain extent this whole trip has been taken as a pretense just to finally meet her, loneliness being the one battlefield all warriors know by heart. But I must also confess to a sense of dread - that touch of thanatos that always tags along behind the eros. Like K. described: an undefinable sense that things are about to go terribly, terribly wrong.
June 27th, Columbus: As this may be my last communiqué, I will be as thorough as possible. Dulcinea79 was more beautiful than I ever could’ve imagined - more beautiful than her avatar even. I think I may have literally gasped when she opened the door. Her skin was darker than I’d expected - her features more exotic - making the pure crystalline blue of her eyes all the more striking. I imagined her to be the product of some long ago Viking expedition into Turkey or the eastern Mediterranean.
Almost as breathtaking was where she lived - a luxury apartment 14 floors up, with a beautiful view of the Columbus skyline. From some unseen source I could hear the soft strains of Beethoven’s 3rd Piano Concerto, 2nd movement, as stately and romantic as Ludwig Van ever got. Some would point to the slow movements of the Emperor Concerto or the Ninth Symphony for this, but not me. I chose to live and die by the far less popular Third, and if she’d chosen it herself that was all I’d need to declare us soulmates. If, for our first meeting it was just playing on the radio by chance, then it was a declaration from God.
I instinctively scanned the apartment for any hint of a male presence, ending my search when I saw a pure white, long-haired cat on the sofa. “Dulcinea79 I presume…”
“Yes,” she replied, smiling. She had perfect teeth, of course. “And you are the famous Freewayblogger…”
“Yes, but my real name is…” She quickly held a finger up to my lips and said “No. No names. You are Freewayblogger.”
“As you wish.”
She walked me through the apartment, keeping the door to the bedroom metaphorically closed. When she offered me a drink I stuck to water and we sat down in the living room. I told her about K. and the bungee accident and she took the news with appropriate somberness. When I told her that she had the most beautiful lettering I’d ever seen without a projector she laughed coquettishly and in the ensuing silence we both became serious.
“So why did you stop?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Perhaps not. But still… I need to know.”
She sighed. A long time passed before she spoke.
“I love you, Freewayblogger. I really do. And I love freewayblogging… God… how I love it. Everything about it - I mean everything - it was just like you said it would be: the ease, the art, the sneaking around… the sheer joy of finally having a voice! I went a little overboard I guess. As Leonard Cohen said, I was blinded by the beauty of our weapons…”
“That’s one of my favorite songs.” It was too: First We Take Manhattan. Particularly that line. It was uncanny, like she’d been reading my diary.
“But I’d always thought of it in terms of the beauty of the weapons: the elegance and simplicity of the art form - and the sheer beauty of the First Amendment, but I’ve come to realize that’s not what he was singing about, Freewayblogger… he was singing about the blindness. I love you Freewayblogger, and it kills me to have to say this, but you’re fighting a lost cause.”
“Lost causes happen to be a specialty of mine.”
She smiled, then stood up and motioned for me to come to the window. “Look out there - tell me what you see.”
“I see skyscrapers, the river… cars.”
“Now look down - down into the freight yards. Look at the boxcars, look at the walls. What do you see?”
“Graffiti.”
“That’s right. Graffiti. Everywhere. And you know it’s not just those walls and those boxcars, it’s on walls and boxcars all across the country.”
“Yes.”
“Some of them are gang members, some are just tagging for the hell of it. And the big ones, the murals - those are the artists. How long do you think that takes, painting a whole damn train car like that?”
“Hours I guess, I don’t know. Days?”
“I don’t know either, but it’s a long time. And they don’t have the First Amendment protecting them either, as far as the law’s concerned that’s straight up vandalism, but they still do it. Thousands of them, tens of thousands. All across the country: 24 hours a day… How many people do you have freewayblogging now?”
“Five. Four, really.”
“And I was number six. And I was proud to be number six. But I got tired of waiting for the revolution to come. And when I saw the graffiti and realized what these kids were risking - for hours - whether it was for their gang or just for the sake of their art… that’s when I knew the revolution was never going to happen. You’re asking people to expose themselves for just a few seconds for the sake of their country, and even though they’re entirely protected by the First Amendment, they’re not doing it! They’re NEVER going to do it! I love you Freewayblogger! I love you and all you do but you’re wasting your life! It’s never going to happen!”
“No!” I shouted, “You don’t understand! They’re just… they’re just busy, that’s all! They’ll get around to it! You might not know this, but there’s apparently a big cardboard drought going on, and I’ve heard in a lot of places they’re no longer selling paint!”
“Give it up Freewayblogger! It’s Over!”
“NOOOO!”
She grabbed me by the arms and stared into my eyes shaking me: You haven’t listened to a single thing I’ve said. I said I love you Freewayblogger! I love you and I want to be with you and… and…” She sank into my arms and I held her, feeling her body heaving and jerking as she sobbed against my chest.
When she finally pulled away I asked her softly, “Then what’s the secret, Dulcie? What is it that makes those kids risk so much for their gangs and art while I can’t get people to risk almost nothing for their country?”
“You really want to know?”
“I’ve spent fifteen years on it…”
“It’s just like it says in the Bible Freewayblogger, it’s just vanity. Nothing more than vanity. They may tell themselves it’s for their art or their gangs, just like you’re tell yourself it’s for your country or the First Amendment, but all any of you are really doing is just tagging - marking your territory - painting your names and saying look at me! In the end that’s all any of us are doing and deep down you know it’s true. All is vanity… There is nothing new under the sun…”
Don’t believe the preachers when they say Satan blinds us with lies my friends: what Satan blinds us with is the truth.
“Please…” she said, “I’m so sick of it here. I’m so sick of Trump. We could run away. We could be happy. I have money - more than enough for both of us. We can go anywhere you want… Paris, New Zealand, Costa Rica… We could live on a beach somewhere and just eat mangoes and make love all day.”
One of the most beautiful and intelligent women I’d ever met was offering me not just herself but literally the world, staring into my eyes waiting for an answer. The Beethoven had ended and in the distance I could hear the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth rising in the background: another one of my absolute favorites and no more perfect piece of music for the moment. Having gone by beauty, lust, intelligence, politics and dreams and being failed by each, I was perfectly willing to use musical taste as means of determining my soulmate. The woman in my arms not only touched all the other bases, but musically batting three for three as well.
The Adagietto swelled into its first crescendo and we began to kiss. Closing my eyes I felt everything in the world spin away into blackness, leaving nothing but the music, the perfume of her hair and the soft ferocity of her mouth. For the first time in years all the noise and chatter in my head went quiet. All the voices I’ve relied on to distract me from the loneliness finally stopped. Except for one: the one last voice that knew it was all far too perfect to be true, whispering that the maxim of accidents in spy craft probably held true for music as well : “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”
I finally broke away from our embrace and looked out at the skyscrapers, freight yards and distant hills of the American heartland.
“You’re right of course…” I said. “It probably is all just vanity. But it’s not the sort that you’re thinking. It’s a very special, very specific sort of vanity, borne of a desperation you couldn’t possibly understand.”
“Try me.”
“See, the people who painted those boxcars and built those buildings… the ones who paved those roads and designed those cars… they were just about all men, and while they may have been intelligent and ambitious, I can guarantee you that one, they weren’t particularly good looking and two, practically all of them were in love with beautiful women like you… Wealth, respect, music, invention… everything you can see out of this window - it’s all just the vanity of the unattractive. In fact, my theory is that all of civilization is just the accidental by-product of men desperately trying to impress women who didn’t want to fuck them.”
She stiffened a bit and I continued: “I’m sorry darling, but there’s three things I know for sure in this world: Fire’s hot. Water’s wet, and women like you don’t just go throwing themselves at guys like me. You can tell your boss Vladimir ‘Nice try.’”
She stepped away and wiped at her face, the streaks of her mascara giving off an odd mix of both vulnerability and defiance. When she finally spoke it was with a soft, mellifluous Russian accent: “He likes you you know… That’s why he sent me instead of… someone else.”
“Tell him thanks.”
“It could be a very good life for us… Does it really matter so much that I am from Russia? Would my lips taste different? Does it make my body any less desirable? And money is money… Does it really matter where it came from?”
“Sorry babe, but that only works on Republicans.”
“He could also make things very bad too. For both of us.”
“Putin? Ha! He doesn’t scare me. Who does he think he is anyway?”
“A ruthless killer - the most powerful man in the world.”
“Okay - fair point.”
“Please…” she said, burrowing back into my arms, “Just tell me that you’ll think about it… I could make you so happy… You wouldn’t have to put up signs any more.”
“I enjoy putting up signs.”
“We could travel the world, stay or go wherever we pleased! And you could write!”
I’m sorry Dulcinea, but…”
“You could write about whatever you wanted! You wouldn’t have to write about putting signs up on freeways any more!”
She felt me falter, shivering at the sound of the words. Pressing her body hard against me she began kissing me urgently, voraciously, and I thought Oh temptress… oh foul, foul temptress… as once again the world spun away into black.
These are a just a few of the 200+ signs I put up in June and July.
Here are the twitter handles of people currently putting up signs against Donald Trump.:
@scorchsky — Phoenix
@TheCiscoKid2 — Fresno
@Thorbites — Los Angeles
@DenverSignCrew — Denver
@ProbablyElves — Indianapolis
@_DirkCalloway_ — Detroit