Better living through gargling? Or the view from the porch of a low cabin set squarely in a corner of a near-infinite and fabulously undulating prairie, on a good day when the leaves are whirling in a seamless early spring tornado. Like something out of a story by Neruda*, set in the Mala Strana of Prague with unicorns trotting down the street and impaling wayward burghers on their horns. A straight road drawn across a landscape whose red shift has been imperceptibly but really upped by the presence of dogwood, cornus, bearbrush, foxbush, sear holly and the massive canopies of Giant Dead Nettle; straight for a hundred and fifty-five kilometres NNE through towns wrecked by the accretion disk of local Wal-marts; past tennis courts abandoned with mathematical precision, the strange sulphur stink of opium processing plants on the far horizon and the low almost-below-hearing whump of a mechanism below that horizon, that we cannot see, as we progress inexorably north-north-eastward towards what, in all honesty, has to be described as a probably disappointing destination. Or something like that.
*that's Jan Neruda, not the other one. Although a crossover might be fun.
