Old Route 66 and The Modern World

Here is a patch of the old Route 66, the famous highway that
runs from St Louis south through the great deserts and finally
ends at the old Santa Monica Pier here in Los Angeles.


If you ever read the famous traveling chronicles of the
beatnik age, On The Road By Jack Kerouac,
you will recognize Route 66 as the backdrop for much of his
wanderings. That was in the 1950’s. In the 1960’s, it hadn’t
changed much. Then came the great Interstate Highway
systems, the Eisenhower Roads, sinuous threads of smooth
high speed concrete stretching from the east coast to the
west coast, looping around the great city centers, and
carrying not just explorers, but ordinary families,
and teenagers, and salesmen, and fleeing illicit lovers,
and Greyhound buses, and eighteen wheel trucks
in increasing numbers out into the heartland of America
where they found vast housing developments, shopping
centers, drive-in movies, and cheap motels. And with this
fracturing of our solitude came the end of the old two lane
highways, the soft winding roads that wound through
towns both small and large, that were flanked by
garish billboards advertising the end of the universe,
that supported run down diners of weathered clapboard
serving fast cheeseburgers prepared by a former
Marine Ginnery sergeant whose memory of the south
Pacific are slowly fading; Where cars traveled slow
enough to read Burma Shave Signs, and where families
tired from a long day’s drive, could pull over and have an evening
dinner in roadside picnic areas.


Alas, like most things of value, much of old Route 66 is now
gone, paved over and replaced by modern eight and ten lane
super highways. Gone are the little roadside cafes, the picnic
areas, the rock shops, the fossil stores, and the tumbled down
and poorly maintained zoos with underfed bison and
cages of tired rattlesnakes. Gone also are the little Indian
Villages that sold authentic Apache rugs (made in Columbus, Ohio)
and ancient arrow heads (from boxes of freshly chipped
points created each night with a hammer and a wet towel).

(more comments follow)

Our Place in History

George Santayana --
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. 
Life of Reason, Reason in Common Sense, Scribner's, 1905, page 284 

In the process of rummaging through some old boxes I found this newspaper article from 1994. Since it is now roughly 15 years later, I thought we might find its perspective on where we sit in history interesting. The year I graduated from high school (1964) is now closer to the election of Calvin Coolidge as president and J. Edgar Hoover's founding of the FBI than it is to us.

This is one of the very few images in my web log that is copyrighted (when a copyright still exists) by someone other than myself. The article is (c) Christopher Caldwell and is used without his permission. Even though I have included the entire article, I hope that Mr. Caldwell will consider this as fair use since I am using it as a jumping off place to begin a discussion on our place in the events of Western Civilization.  If not, of course, I will gladly remove this image.

In My Native Universe

Here is Earl in his role as Chief Topology Enforcer
In the 219th precinct of the three dimensional
shape police (temporarily located in an abandoned
refrigerator factory just east of Hoboken wedged
between the third and fourth dimensions.)


On the vast Plains of Geometry,
under a congruent moon of dissimilar lights,
equilateral rhomboids live in a state of constant fear,
worried that the shape police will discover their deceit
and transform them into Teflon particles: unsticking
quantum devices of amazing complexity through
whose convex windows pass the remains of tomorrow
and the befuddled DNA sequence that, on odd numbered
months, causes the metamorphosis of indifferent house flies.

And so here we see Earl reacting to the stress of his
intoxicating responsibility, falling apart under the necessity
of making decisions that will effect the Euclidean conformity
across the known universe. One lapse in judgment and
future geometers will no longer be able to trisect an angle
or approximate the value of Pi to seventeen positions
or elucidate the ineluctable axioms of parallel lines,
or proclaim a self satisfied Quod Erat Demonstrandum
after a weary day of theorem proving,
in a quiet moment over a glass of stale red wine,
In their sparse kitchens when the wife and kids
are asleep, and the house is so very quiet
except for the ticking of a distant clock.

More unimportant revelations to follow.

Chief Topology Enforcer Drawing (c)2008 Earl Cox

Xynthapus the Astrologer

Here I see myself as Xynthapus the Magnificent,
sometimes mystic King of the Mayans, who
as their chief astrologer, was famous for  once
forecasting the coming of the Spanish, the arrival of
the next ice age, and the thirteen hundredth
eclipse of the sun on April 10th of 1964. Only in the
past fortnight have my original powers returned
and I have started standing every evening
on the corner of Sunset and Vine  predicting
the times of the next low tide, the number of
hours in a day, and the necessity of the
aurora borealis in the pollination of avocados.

Once more women are fascinated by my manly
powers and my ability to mock them in spite
of their great beauty.  But I will refuse to tell
their fortunes and touch their lush bosoms
until they can recite the names of my bedroom
walls, guess the number of stars in orbit
around two undiscovered planets, and
help me finish translating the twenty-eighth
book of the Iliad.

 
Sigh, the world will little note nor long
remember what I say here, but it can never
forget what I did here. I have changed the
meaning of causality, abolished the effects
of the uncertainty principle, &  invented a new
alphabet whose ideograms cannot be used
to form gerunds and past participles.
Tonight the street women have ignored me.
So? I can do without their gravity-defying
anatomy, I am content to decode the hidden
messages of traffic signals while spending
my evenings as god intended, in my cardboard box,
with my bottle of Premium Boone’s Farm Chardonnay,
in the rain at the corner of Sunset and Vine,
hiding from the evil spirits of ancient Peru
who are searching the city for my
pristine spirit.

Xynthapus drawing (c)2008 Earl Cox

The Real Me

Self portrait of me as I am usually seen by my
neighbors - standing on my terrace watching the
night sky for the return of the Mother Ship, in whose
warm oxy-benzene tanks I will be carried back
to Jomlear IX, a tiny planet of insufficiently
evolved plants and air breathing fishoids,
orbiting Bernard’s Star in the lower
Sagittarius arm of this pitiful galaxy.

Real Me Drawing (c)2008 Earl Cox