U.S.A., South Dakota

It’s nearly the Fourth of July weekend. Americans love their flags. They’re everywhere. Saw a pick-up on the Interstate with min-American flags duct-taped to it, flapping in the 75-mph breeze. I even have an American flag sticker in the corner of the windshield of my Buick. It was there when I bought the car. Which is a good thing; otherwise I would have had to find a flag sticker myself.

I rolled through Kansas City at twilight in the last hours of June, 2000. I listened to a KC radio station deejaying and broadcasting live from a club in the city. They were also being simultaneously web-cast. So people watching the web-cast would e-mail in stuff like, “Who’s that girl in the pink dress?” And I blasted on through those bright Kansas City lights into the plain, listened to the club scene till I lost it, flipped the radio and on it was Elvis Presley.

A Greyhound bus passed me and I was glad not to be in it and instead in my own little futuristic highway module. A mile later the bus was pulled over on the side of the Interstate; someone must have been raising a ruckus.

Riding through the wheat here, I can clearly see the stars of the Northern Hemisphere.