I want to use WordPress. For long-term business purposes, it would benefit me greatly to use WordPress. WordPress is a stylish, functional, and function-filled web-hosting platform that I'm already familiar with and that anyone seeking to go into freelance work would strongly consider starting out with.
And Blogger is...
Okay, you remember how in Die Hard Hans Gruber and Karl to shoot the glass in the construction site they were having a shootout in so John McClane would have to run over it to escape, and then John McClane did run over it, and he cut up his feet really bad and lost like four liters of blood while telling the dad from Family Matters that he was a terrible husband and didn't deserve a woman like Bonnie Bedelia, which--point of order--he didn't?
Blogger is the glass in Die Hard. It's the manacled foot in Saw, the gun with only four bullets in The Mist, the entire runtime of Cats. It's a portent of necessary and yet unspeakable horror, a terrible choice that must be made despite the pain it will surely bring about. It's the sound of inevitability--the sound of your death, Mr. Anderson (which means it's also the subway train in The Matrix).
Blogger sucks hard, is the point here.
But it's also free, which is something that WordPress technically can't boast for itself. So, until I save up enough to buy a real web domain and make a grown-up big boy freelancer website, this'll have to do temporarily. God help me, please let this be temporary.
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So first things first, a brief prologue: the MericaThon officially began just after noon on January 6th, 2020, when I left Oxon Hill, Maryland (a.k.a. National Harbor [a.k.a. the Earth's closest approximation to Biblical Hell*]) and headed north on I-95 in the general direction of New York City, New York, the first of 27 planned stops on the long winding road to Los Angeles. Of course, I didn't take 95 all the way up, as I am neither masochistic nor sadistic enough to do such a perverse thing. Instead, after a brief stop for toll cash in "Historic" Havre de Grace, Maryland--their word, not mine; all it looked like to me like Luray with somehow even more of an inferiority complex--I wound my way around Wilmington, Delaware on I-495, merged back onto 95 at the state border, stayed on that road all the way under the Ben Franklin Bridge and through Philadelphia, exited onto the New Jersey Turnpike where I drove in a straight line at a steady speed for about three days, got onto I-278 to pass through the Goethals and Verrazzano Bridges as well as Staten Island, and stayed on it all the way through a twisting maze of concrete that felt like a Soviet version of Mad Max to end up at my hostel in Queens.
And that's where I'm sitting now, typing out my first thoughts on this great, giant adventure I've set myself upon. And those thoughts are... pretty slim at the moment, honestly. It feels way too early to be thinking anything at all about this trip: I've only spent one night in a hostel, only driven one leg of over two dozen, only traveled about 250 miles out of a planned 7,000. Right now, I'm just trying to settle on a routine for freelance work and make sure my tentative budget for the trip works well enough to become a firm one--and also figure out what kind of options I have for food. Speaking of which, did you know that hostels don't always have ovens? I didn't. Neither did the $10 DiGiorno pizza I had to walk back and return twenty minutes after buying it.
Tomorrow will be my first day as an actual tourist, and likely a stingy one at that. Fortunately, New York isn't short of landmarks and attractions a person can walk his (hopefully only briefly) broke ass around and gawk at for free, but maybe this'll force me to actually experience New York rather than just pass through it. Even from just driving near it and walking through Queens a bit last night, this place feels different from any other I've ever been. Washington feels like chaos and Richmond feels like home, but New York City feels like it's alive, like I'm traipsing around the back of an unknowably large entity that lingers just at the edge of mortal perception, but remains somehow perceptible all the same.
It feels like there are stories worked into the sidewalk cracks, pounded into the bricks, rattling undernearth the rusty raised subway tracks here that I could claw at for years and never scratch the surface of--a whole subconscious tapestry of laughter and pain, ecstasy and despair. New York doesn't feel like it never sleeps, per se, but it does feel like it never stops breathing, even if parts are quiet or broken or glittering like false gold.
I feel like I could grow to love this place if I lived here, but I don't want to. Not right now, at least. Right now, I'll settle for just looking--just scratching a bit and seeing what it'll let me see.
(Completely unrelated note: this hostel is also a bar, and that bar sells $3 cans of American Light Lagers. Totally irrelevant to anything here. Just thought you should know.)
