West Lafayette

There's a pedestrian bridge that connects Lafayette and West Lafayette. When the sun begins to set you can find what seem to be lovers huddled along the dark edges of the bridge, but I've also heard of some stabbing incidents there, so I walked over the bridge briskly. The bridge concludes into a shopping mall, replete with a Borders, Panera, and Starbucks, giving you the impression that West Lafayette is a kind of commercialized suburb of Lafayette. West Lafayette has a resident population of 28,000 people, mostly associates of Purdue, which during the academic year floods the town with its 40,000 students. Still, West Lafayette does not strike you as a college town, the only thing college-like about West Lafayette is, well, the actual college and the strip of bars and burrito and burger joints.

Purdue University is located on top of what is known as Chauncey Hill. The hill is small and steep, but to get to the actual campus you have to walk through a bar-lined strip of State Street. Purdue has one of the largest fraternity and sorority communities in the nation, a fact that becomes supremely apparent as one muscles through the Greeks that seem to constantly pour out of the college bars, Jake's, Harry's, Where Else? Bar (my favorite title), and Brother's. I was getting thirsty again, so I decided to go to Where Else? because, well, the name rings true. My visit was quick, I went in, ordered a bottle of beer, and received an aluminum bottle. A fight broke out between two frat guys near a pool table, and I left, having immediately realized that the aluminum bottles were perhaps a legal issue, as the clientele of Where Else? are liable to hit each other over the heads with proper bottles, if supplied. I decided to get on with my intended tour of Purdue, and so I excused myself through the red-faced guys in pop-collared polos and the blonde-haired tube-topped sorority girls all the way to campus.

The first of Purdue's buildings I went into was the Union, it's suddenly handsome, lots of dark wood and white pleated curtains. Some non-fraternity students were walking through the high-ceilinged wide corridors, and some were studying in the big chairs of the Union's lounges and halls. Most university ceremonies and conferences take place in Union ballrooms, and it doubles as a university hotel. The Purdue Union is one of two good looking buildings that Purdue's campus has to offer, the other one being the Neil Armstrong Hall of Engineering, Purdue's most architecturally innovative building, which is located at the other end of campus. In between the Union and Armstrong hall are several rows of ruddy brick boxes that, when surrounding you, begin to take on the aspect of government housing.

Now, I'm not saying that Purdue's campus looks like the projects. But if you dropped me into the heart of Purdue's campus without telling me where I was and asked me a kind of survey question, say, whether I thought I was in A) a prison, B) government housing, or C) a university, I might have chosen B. Of course, it's clear that it's a university, there's really no other reason for so many people to be walking around with backpacks in prison or in the projects. It's just not immediately clear that it's a university in comparison with east coast universities with their ivied brick or southern universities with their oaks and limestone. Still, in a way it's appropriate for a largely engineering and agriculture school, as I imagine the practical engineers are practical about their buildings and surely no one cares what the agriculture buildings full of dirt and shit look like.

What's strange is that they actually do care: when ivy began to grow on those ruddy brick boxes, making them ivied ruddy brick boxes, Purdue scrambled to tear the ivy down because they didn't want to resemble an 'ivy league school'. I don't think Purdue was ever near the terrible danger of being thought of as an ivy league school, but I'm also happy to know that there's a movement to keep Purdue's campus ugly, lest it begin to take on the aspect of Harvard, because, let's face it, no one wants to be associated with Harvard. In any case, after wandering through the ivy-proof ruddy brick boxes for a couple hours, I began to get a little sleepy, and since there's nothing like getting out of the hood, I decided to leave academia for some coffee.

There are two coffee shops on Chauncey Hill, Greyhouse and Vienna. The shops are next door to one another, and both shops offer outdoor seating, but Greyhouse's patio is more attractive, so I decided to have a macchiato there. Walking into Greyhouse one feels as if they're in a Barnes and Noble, not because of the size of the place or the books, but just the general vibe of that class of place. Everything is comfortable in Greyhouse, everyone seems strangely happy, it's the kind of place that would make an appearance in the blog, "Stuff White People Like," alongside New Balance shoes and ugly sweaters. I would later find out that Greyhouse is owned by Campus House, a Christian organization of Purdue, and this makes decided sense. At first, I didn't recognize the comfort of the place as that of the religious variety, but retrospectively it's clear that the clientele doctored their coffee and chatted in big black chairs with the particular comfort of knowing that their souls were going to spend eternity in heaven.

I took my macchiato outside with my map and notebook, taking in the college scene, remembering my own college experiences, four tender years followed by the post-collegiate trauma of having to go into the real world. Eventually nighttime arrived and brought with it a swarm of revelers and, oddly enough, a handful of Evangelists set for battle against the heathens, armed with loudspeakers to belt the word of God down the bar-lined pagan street. I didn't have much experience with such demonstrations until I came to Indiana, but in Indiana, at least, the demonstrators employ adorable little smiling blonde haired girls in red dresses to deliver their pamphlets, which makes perfect business sense because no one can resist adorable little smiling blonde haired girls delivering pamphlets. Still, it's a bit of a strange experience because you get a piece of paper stating, in caps, "You are going to hell," from a rosy little girl, which can toss you into a bit of an existential crisis in front of a five-year old. In any case, the mosh-pit block of revelers were far too steeped in senseless debauchery and reckless abandon to notice that they were at a crossroads between heaven and eternal damnation.

I was a little sleepy from the day's adventures so I decided to turn in early to my hotel in Lafayette. The wilted lettuce from LBC had kept me from eating anything all day, the way a stomachache keeps you from eating. But on the trek back across the river the stomachache subsided, and I decided to hop into a pub for some late-night fare.

I went to DT Kirby's, a local Cheers-type pub where the regulars all know each other and the bartenders greet you and make small talk when you come in. The bar doesn't play music but the drinkers are loud enough watching televisions broadcasting sports, so it's a lively place. The menu offers hotdogs and burgers of all sorts, in fact the only kind of burger that isn't on the menu is the Luther Vandross, a bacon cheeseburger with glazed Krispy Kreme donuts in lieu of buns. Nonetheless, DT Kirby's has its own creative take on burgers, exemplified by the 'grilled cheese cheeseburger', a bacon cheeseburger shoved in between two grilled cheese sandwiches. I'm not sure why I decided to order it, maybe I thought possible slogans for such meal, like "hurts so good," or "sometimes you just need something gonna do you wrong,"but in any case I went for it.

The rest of the night is foggy. I do, nonetheless, remember being surprised by the weight of the basket when the server handed it to me. The burger itself was around nine or ten pounds and had apparently been dipped in the deep fryer, as the first bite I took caused bacon grease to spurt two feet in front of me. I kind of remember the feeling of my arteries getting clogged, and the work out of lifting the heavy burger and lifting a great mug of beer to try and wash it all down. Beyond that, however, all I have left to report is the first black-out from a burger I've ever even heard of, much less experienced. Notwithstanding, one thing is clear: DT Kirby's is a lawsuit waiting to happen, for the following reasons.

The establishment of DT Kirby's opened in early 2008. Since early 2008 the heart attack and obesity rate in Lafayette and West Lafayette have increased substantially. Now, I'm not saying that DT Kirby's is making people fat and prone to cardiac arrest, I just juxtaposed two plain facts. But if we begin to work under that correlation, it seems safe to say that DT's will eventually have to hand out their deliciously greasy nine pound burgers with cards for a cardiologist. Or perhaps just print some cardiologist information on teh wax-paper-made-transparent-by-grease that sheets the burger basket, perhaps something along the lines of, "If you've eaten this much, call this number..." Maybe also include some information for nutritionists and dietitians, perhaps a weight-loss specialist. I'd just hate to see such a friendly place sued by the township of Lafayette for criminally increasing town obesity and cardiac complications.

Needless to say, I woke up from the food-coma, as one does, hazily, lethargically, and needing to take the most monstrous ten pound shit of my life. I struggled toward the bathroom with my newly acquired girth, and emerged in a transformed state, ready to leave Lafayette and West Lafayette for Bloomington, the town surrounding Indiana University's flagship campus.

Lafayette, The Indigenous

Main Street is by far the most charming and walkable street in downtown Lafayette. It's a street lined with curiosity shops, restaurants, bars, apartment buildings, and during Oktoberfest, wrestling rings for the mentally and physically impaired. Although it would seem that midget wrestling stands out as the chief attraction of Oktoberfest, the wrestling ring is actually in competition with several eating contests (bacon, hot dogs, corn) and cover bands. Luckily, the town staggered the times for the wrestling matches and the eating contests so theoretically you can participate in three different eating contests, depending on how disgusting you are, and still catch some disabled wrestling.

Now midget wrestling and bacon eating contests are riveting curiosities, but I found my attention captured, for the most part, by the indigenous of Lafayette surrounding, and I mean surrounding, the spectacles. Of course, some students from Purdue had made the trek across the river to witness the sights, but the bulk of people, and I mean bulk, were indigenous, who can be identified by certain distinct features, most notably size, apparel, and gait. In general, the indigenous prefer to have three or more chins, wear sweat suits of primary colors to accentuate their shape (mainly pear, but also pumpkin), and lumber about town bandy-legged and belly-out. Of course, there are variations on this general theme, some alternate colors of sweatshirts and sweatpants, sporting red or grey sweatshirts tucked into orange sweatpants tucked, in turn, into an unknown brand of hi-top shoe, and I have also seen them display Hawaiian shirts with jams (still in vogue in Lafayette) and other articles of clothing that cater to those of the oversized persuasion. During Oktoberfest, one might find them lumped up and down Main Steet, clutching bratwurst or hamburgers, and frequently both at once, washing it all down with some mead-like beverage, supplied by the local brewery on Main and Sixth St. I was a little hungry and thirsty myself, so I decided to hop in for a taste of the local cuisine.

The Lafayette Brewing Company is a large dimly lit mess hall that offers a variety of ales and food pairings (mainly burgers, but beer nuggets and wilted salads as well). Although the facade of the brewery is windowed, no light comes into the main dark-wooded, dusty room. In fact, it seems that the dank wood siphons in whatever sunlight attempts to shine in, and as you walk in you experience a little of your own soul sapped by the gloomy room. There are no flowers and few vegetables in the place, on account of this phenomenon, as they would wilt and die upon entry. I sat at a table and ordered the 'Black 'n Bleu Steak Caesar' along with the 'Tippecanone Common Ale' [sic]. After five minutes, the server dropped a pint of some cloudy liquid in front of me, and after thirty, a platter of browned iceberg lettuce.

There are certain kinds of intoxication that correspond to certain kinds of liquors: there is a mean whisky drunk, a jazzy gin drunk, a sensuous wine drunk, and there is also a Lafayette Brewing Company drunk. The beers are cloudy on account of the yeast sediment floating in the pint, and the brews are imbalanced and unintegrated as well. Perhaps because of this, the pints hit you sideways, and after only a couple you feel like you've just drunk two forty-ounces of malt liquor and smoked a blunt of bad marijuana. I looked around and noticed that everyone around me looked lost, as if they had came into the brewery thirty years ago and had forgotten what happened to their life since. Realizing I had inadvertently stumbled into the land of the Lotus-eaters, I immediately requested the check, and realizing that it would never come, I threw some cash on the table and promptly shoved my way through some zombies toward the exit.

Don't get me wrong, I like a bad meal as much as the next person. But in the Lafayette Brewing Company, you receive a depressing meal in a depressing restaurant, and so behind the depression there's just more depression. William Thackeray once wrote, "Despair is perfectly compatible with a good meal, I assure you," but let me assure you that despair is also perfectly compatible with a despairing meal. Whenever you see people eating mediocre meals, no one is talking, just like people walking out of mediocre movies are never talking. There's nothing to say about the mediocre. But the bad, one can always talk and tell stories about the bad, bad meals or a bad movies. In fact, sometimes a bad meal or movie is to be preferred over a good one; I, for one, am always excited to conversation when enjoying a bad meal, ringing up all terrible details that contribute to the badness. But a depressing or despairing meal, no one should have to suffer through that. I ascended the pit and graduated into the warming sun, and it seemed like the first breath of high-fructose corn-syrup factory air that I had ever smelt.

I wanted to get as far away from the Brew pub as quickly as I could, but I felt that I was drawing the attention of some of the zombie-lost lumps outside, and then it dawned on me that I was actually running. By the time I slowed down, I found myself on Third Street near the river, in front of a sports bar named Chumley's. I wanted to get the bad taste of the LBC out of my mouth, so I decided to hop in for one of the hundred beers they boast on tap, or one of the fifty in bottles.

I sat down at a table among the Indiana Colts jerseyed crowd standing around me, and when the small waitress finally squeezed through several large wobbling bodies, I ordered a glass of water and a favorite dubbel boch of mine. She returned, emerging this time from underneath two thick legs behind me, with an empty glass and uncapped bottle of the dubbel boch. After the run, I was hoping for some water, but I didn't want to trouble her and wasn't exactly sure what kind of acrobatics she would have to perform to fetch the forgotten water anyway, so I just poured the beer and took a sip of what tasted like nail polish. I sat there for awhile and imagined simply walking out, but I didn't let the increasingly disgusting taste in my mouth dictate my deliberations. So instead, I walked toward her with the skunked beer and informed her that it was bad. She confessed to me that she couldn't offer me a refund without having to talk to her manager, and further confessed that he was an asshole and that she was afraid of him, and so I offered to let him know the beer was skunked myself.

A man completely clad in Hurley attire approached me and asked me if 'I was the man with the beer'. I looked around and noticed that everyone in the bar beside the waitstaff was a man and that all those men had beer, and then replied, "yes, the bad beer. But I'm not upset, I'd just like a different beer please, perhaps an Indiana beer you might suggest to me." He told me that I could, in fact, lucky for me, order another beer, but that I would be charged for the dubbel boch and the additional beer as well. I gestured the glass of ethyl acetate toward him and told him that the beer was skunked, that it tasted of nail polish and tin afterwards, at which point he smelt it, contorted his face, and in all sincerity looked at me and told me that the beer was good. I stared confusedly at him for an vague period of time, certain that I had been thrust into a world of unknown dimension. I decided to imagine that our exchange hadn't happened, and told him, once again, that the beer was bad, at which point he presented me with the following argument: "This beer can't be bad, we get it in all the time."

I thought several thoughts at once; I wondered if he had ever heard of a non sequitur, if he had engaged in a cost/benefit analysis and decided that the meager cost to Chumley's bar incurred by taking the beer back especially outweighed the clearly more lucrative consequence of my continued patronage, if I had seen him in the wrestling ring just earlier that day, he seemed physically able, but mentally...? In any case, one thing was certain, I did not understand the logic of Lafayette, so I handed him six dollars and walked out of the vomit plastered joint, turned the corner, and walked into a classier looking pub called The Black Sparrow.

At last, I felt I had finally landed at a decent drinking fountain. The Black Sparrow is a well furnished and kept bar with hipster clientele and a cabaret atmosphere. I plopped down at a bar stool, ordered from an attractive tap list, and enjoyed a pint of Indiana made Bell's Two Hearted Ale. I quickly finished the satisfying pint, de-escalated, and took in my new environs, watching people dart from circle to circle, cackle, and couple off upstairs. But as I was eavesdropping on the conversation of neighboring stools and tables, I suddenly had a strange realization: everybody in the Black Sparrow genuinely believes they're in New York. They refer to the local Fifth and Sixth Streets, which intersect Main Street, as 5th and 6th Aves., and their conversation flitted between talking about upcoming shows of bands that I had never heard of. As far as I know, Lafayette lamentably does not have a proper music venue, and neither does West Lafayette. But further eavesdropping clued me into another facet of this pub, namely, at night they shuffle around some tables and cramp a local garage band into a corner of the pub, and the clientele actually consisted almost entirely of members of the different local garage bands talking about their upcoming shows. I noticed another couple walking upstairs, and so I decided to see if there was a view of the town from an upstairs window, but as I followed a couple up some stairs, the bar staff told me to come back down, while the couple calmly continued their amorous ascent. All night, couples would go upstairs for half an hour and come back down, rosy-cheeked and exhausted. Later, I would find out that the owner of the Black Sparrow is also the owner of a smoke-house and Chances Are, the town strip club next to Carpetland, and I wondered if he might also be a pimp, given as he already managed beef, strippers, and liquor. In any case, I am not a musician myself, and neither could I convince myself that I was nor that I was in New York or any other city for that matter, and so it was clear I didn't belong to the theatre of the Black Sparrow. So, my mouth wet and my belly full of lettuce, I decided to finally make my way across the river, like a salmon, to West Lafayette and Purdue University.

Lafayette, The Descent

Most people that write travel blogs or travel books talk about the places that everyone wants to go to. But some people talk about the places that everyone especially doesn't want to go to. Bill Bryson, in his book, "The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America," admitted that he was from Des Moines, Iowa, and I believe he wrote that in Des Moines, everybody works at the Firestone factory, marries a girl named Bobby Sue, and has children that grow up only to work at the Firestone factory and marry a girl named Bobby Sue.  I've never liked that book more than I do now, not only because its subject matter is small town America, where no one wants to be, but also because it recognizes that although America is known for New York, New Orleans, Chicago, and other cities that Hollywood travels to or makes sets of, America is actually made up of small towns. Small towns are, for better or for worse, the heartland of America. And driving through small towns in Indiana, one recognizes these towns as the small motors that run this country's cities, growing their food, making their corn syrup. But this is all to say that driving from Indianapolis to Lafayette, you see a lot of small trucks and factories, and you can't help but wonder if the woman driving the small truck past you towards the Firestone factory is one of those Bobby Sues.

So here's the story. After landing in a cornfield, I drove a car north from the airport through I-465 towards the first of the college towns I would visit, West Lafayette. Lafayette and West Lafayette are adjacent towns separated by the most polluted section of the Wabash River. A few bridges connect the two townships which presumably aren't unified because West Lafayette and Purdue University want to keep the money and school district from the clutches of the blue collar factory workers kept at bay by the river. But in order to get to West Lafayette, you have to plow through Lafayette first, birthplace of Axl Rose, who referred to it as a shithole.

 I-465 is a highway that loops around Indianapolis, but most of the time you can't tell the difference between it and a parking lot. Regardless, it's the highway you take to leave the airport, and you might say that although the Indianapolis airport is nice and new, the roads out of the airport are the second most depressingly overrun roads in Indiana, the first place title being reserved for the roads leading from Gary, birthplace of Michael Jackson and a town deserving of its own blog, to Chicago. In any case, leaving the airport one gets the peculiar feeling that people have died on the northbound voyage, trying to get to Chicago or Canada.

The hour long drive on I-465 from Indianapolis Airport through I-65 leading to Lafayette offers enough possible small town travels to keep you occupied for a week or a month, depending on how quickly you get sick of Cracker Barrel. The first town you might turn into directly from the highway is called Zionsville, and I was tempted to don a Yarmulke and stop in that town first. Still, I persisted in my deliberation to visit the town that housed Purdue University first, the school that Neil Armstrong and Emelia Earhart attended.

Almost immediately after reluctantly passing Zionsville, however, I was relieved to find even more diversity in Indiana, as the next highway sign advertised two more melting-pot towns, Brownsburg and Whitestown. If you turned left off the highway, you would end up in Brownsburg, and if you turned right, Whitestown. It warmed the cockles of my heart to know that in Indiana brown, white, and Jewish people could all live in towns so nearby each other. And since the very next town I passed was called Lebanon, I had to concede that Indiana was one of those rare places where brown and white and Jewish and Muslim peoples had effected a rapprochement along the east and west sides of I-65 North. There were other towns along the highway too, Crawfordsville, Thornton, Sheridan, Attica, Frankfurt, but I already knew that Zionsville, Whitestown, Brownsburg, and Lebanon demanded visits.

Finally, I saw a billboard advertising the entry to Tippecanoe County, home of Purdue University. I had the moonroof of the car open, and as I noticed the sign I also noticed that the air had changed from the air of highway industry and repair to something even worse, a smell of burnt chemicals and rotting vegetables. Only later would I realize that Tippecanoe Country is not only the home of Purdue University but it is also the home of two A.E. Staley factory plants which alone account for nearly 23 million pounds per year of air pollution emissions, in addition to being home to several other factories. The factories, now Tate & Lyle owned, have been and remain to be in the business of manufacturing high-fructose corn syrup, a process that mixes hydrochloric acid with a ton of corn and heats the mixture under pressure, giving off one of the most foul odors known to man or god. David Hume, looking for a constant in what seemed the most varied of human faculties, taste, said that men from different cultures might have various preferences regarding taste, but they could all be in agreement on what was completely disgusting, and he provided the example of sour milk, postulating that no man from any time or culture has ever liked the taste of sour milk. He might have added the smell of the emissions from a corn syrup manufacturing plant to sour milk for more emphasis. No one in human history has liked the smell of the emissions from a corn syrup manufacturing plant, and for good reason, it's one of the most vile, wicked, evil smells to which I've ever been exposed.

And that's what you smell descending into Lafayette. I wonder if the 56,000 Lafayettians know that they're home when they smell the vileness, like I recognize the city that I'm from when I hop off a plane and breath in the sultry air. I wish I could have been sincere when I said 'descend', like Dante descends into hell or Odysseus descends into the underworld or Socrates descends into the cave, but I can't strictly speaking say descend because the earth from Indianapolis to Lafayette is strictly flat; and so you can see the thickening particulate odor stagnating in the sun over the brown shucked corn stalks for miles in any direction. Most probably because of the smell, there's not much to see northbound on I-65 once you arrive in Tippecanoe County, the chief monuments are a Subaru factory, two water reservoir towers, and a large hospital, curiously located on the outskirts of the town across the highway from an R.V. lot.

The exit to get to Lafayette is State Road 26, an exit well lit by Best Western, Baymont Inn, Harrison College (a motel), Comfort Inn, Cracker Barrel, Bob Evans, Dennys, Motel 6, and a McDonalds. SR 26 is the main thoroughfare of Lafayette, but instead of being flanked by neutral grounds it's flanked by fast food joints, franchises, and depots. You pass by a Walmart, a Target, a Hobby Lobby, a fireworks store next to a strip club named "Chances Are" that offers parking in the front of the club facing SR 26, which strikes you as a little indiscreet given the size of the town. After the strip club you see a Carpetland and a Steak 'n Shake crossing Highway 52, a boundary that marks off the residential part of the town from the commercial.

Sliding into the residential district of the town, you get the feeling that this town might be charming after all, in a small town Indiana kind of way. The road narrows into two lanes, westbound and eastbound, and it's flanked by faded World War II homes with bright new American flags proudly hanging over small meticulously trimmed plots of grass. After a few blocks of this, however, you pass Home Hospital on your left, consisting of a series of old large grey boxes with a billboard in front of them stating the hospital has been closed for all medical services. Across from the abandoned hospital is what appears to be an abandoned park. It looks as though at one point in time there were a few businesses near the hospital, because in front of the other empty buildings there are signs that say "For Sale," or "We've Moved." Eventually you punch through two firestations (one in service and one that's for show, with a statue of a dog in overalls, which appears to be a crossbred dalmatian/bulldog, given the maculation mixed with the enormous girth) and a liquor store into the Downtown Lafayette Historic District.

The chief sight to behold when arriving into downtown Lafayette is the center placed courthouse square. Courthouses are a hallmark of small towns in Indiana, and Lafayette has one of the most regal courthouses of Indiana. But just as you begin to think that the town's charm has been distilled into the historic downtown area, you notice that the old downtown buildings also seem abandoned, for the most part. There are a few people walking around, but you get the distinct feeling that if you walked into one of the nondescript edifices around you, all you would see is a man or a woman at a large reception desk with a ceiling fan slowly turning above them, some dust motes falling, a door creaking, and life passing.

First impressions are often wrong, and you can add this one to the tally. Lafayette is far from being an abandoned Kafkaesque bureaucratic ghost town, but it would take a local festival, Oktoberfest, which surprisingly takes place in October, to show me otherwise.

Hi, let me tell you about small town Indiana

If I were a person that needed to have reasons for doing something, I would probably begin this blog by way of introduction, letting you know why I've decided to write about small town Indiana, and apologizing in advance for what, in several instances if not most, would constitute an offense for the people of Indiana.  And if I were a person that needed reasons for doing something, I'd be in a tight spot because there really aren't any reasons for the existence of this blog, and it'd be really hard to make one up because there really aren't any reasons for the existence of the subject matter of this blog either. So in a way, I'm the man for this completely reasonless job. Still, I'd feel a bit cheated if, having spent so much time in small towns in Indiana, I would come out of that strange place without having reported about the...well, about the wonders and curiosities that I've witnessed. So in an effort to help me feel better about spending time in Indiana, I've decided to detail those wonders and curiosities for your reading pleasure (and I mean just pleasure, because there is nothing, I mean not a single thing, edifying about this blog). In what follows you'll find what I found in Indiana: midget wrestling, corn, fat white people, drunk sushi chefs, factories, bacon eating contests, corn, "I werk at tha cracker barrel," abandoned factories, very few teeth, farms, corn chowder, basically, a lot of poor uneducated white people.

This is not to say that Indiana is completely devoid of charm. There are charming small towns, small towns with moments of charm, and small towns with no charm which nonetheless have their charm, like those pigs covered in filth and shit have their charm because from a certain angle it kind of looks like they're smiling, which I guess isn't simply charming but rather stupid and charming at turns. Before I came to Indiana, I hadn't been exposed to small towns, or to stupid people in small towns, the stupid people that I met all lived in cities. One difference between small towns and proper cities (and Indiana has none) is that in cities stupid people are in pain because they're so stupid. So I always thought that stupid people, in virtue of being stupid, were also in pain. For example, the teal deep v-necked part-time model at the American Apparel register who took twenty-three minutes (I timed nineteen and estimated four minutes before I started timing) to ring up a woman's purchase, he looked like he was in pain because all the meager calculating faculties at his disposal working at the peak of their abilities were still insufficient to accomplish the simple task of ringing up a three pack of jersey tap panties. I suspect he was going through the same motions, mainly because he looked like he was going through the same motions, hoping that the next time, miraculously, he would get it right; and in the end, he was miraculously right, probably on accident, but now I believe in miracles. In any case, he was genuinely in pain because he had somehow stumbled upon an awareness of his stupidity, and he thus gained the ability to say to himself, while going through the same motions, "God I'm so stupid it hurts!"

In small towns, on the other hand, no one seems to know that they're stupid, and so they're happily stupid. So given a similar situation, but moving from the American Apparel in L.A. to the Cracker Barrel in Gas City, Indiana (R.V. and bus parking available), we find a person at the register in the general I.Q. range of the part-time model, somewhere in-between a chunk of styrofoam and a flap of cardboard, but you can tell that she's happily stupid because she laughs at herself, covering her mouth with a large hairy paw but already having revealed her set of three-and-a-half teeth (an incisor, canine, molar, and something too rotten and oddly placed to recognize), confesses to you, "Aw shucks dear I done messed it up agin', I's so silly thas why errybody says 'Charleen yous so silly' thas wut errybody says hup hup!" Somehow, even after the terrible feeling of having recently consumed 'Momma's french toast' from the 'Pancakes 'n such' section of the menu, it's hard not to be charmed by the three-and-a-half toothed four-hundred pound wonder laughing at herself and asking you for nine dollars. So don't let anybody tell you that Indiana is completely devoid of charm.

They call Indiana the 'crossroads of America' in all sincerity, as if no one could think of anything better to say about the state. But somehow the name feels right, because flying in all you see are roads crossing the state, some windmills flanking the roads, and more cornfields than you've ever seen before. And the people there are all in cars, racing across the roads of the state to get, well, across the state.

There are two colors in Indiana, blue and tan. The sky is blue, preternaturally blue, like a Magritte painting, which probably contributes to the surreality about the state. The ground is a burnt tan in March, covered in dead corn stalks and shucks. If you count the roads, some are asphalt black and some are various degrees of grey pavement depending on whether or not it's rained recently. But mainly, there are two colors at any given time, blue and white in winters, blue and tan transition seasons, blue and green in growing seasons.

I flew into the bumfuck center of Indiana in October of 2007. Crossing into the state, I got the distinct feeling that the pilot almost kept going, until it happened upon him that he might land to drop some people off. I wondered where he would decide to land, however, because there didn't seem to be anything to comfortably land on in what I'd seen of the state so far from my windowseat. I saw cornfield after cornfield (they were separated by crossing roads), until, finally, we landed on one.

After landing near Indianapolis, on the bumfuck middle cornfield of Indiana, I deliberated upon the first bumfuck city I would visit: West Lafayette, Indiana, home of Purdue University, in Tippecanoe county. And I suppose that's where I'll begin this blog, in the first shithole town that I visited, and I'll try to continue to post my travel notes, going from shithole town to shithole town, from Lafayette to Gas City to Floyd's Knobs, reporting on the sights, the flora and the fauna, focusing, however, mainly upon the indigenous that I encounter, the wonders and the curiosities.