Today’s big questions are:

Should I detour about an hour and a half to see Branson, MO?

Top down?

How long will my white T-shirt remain unstained?

Unrelated to physical travel, but completely related to mental separation, Jesus God, am I happy to be away from Boston Comedy.

Not my friends, mind you, who I am very happy to know and to have heard from since I’ve been gone. And, there were some seriously cool connections in my last days in Boston.

I mean the dinks. Like the ones who have sent some shit to Kathy Madigan’s website with my now dead email. Fucking idiots apparently don’t realize that in addition to acknowledgements being sent by the site, I’m redirecting my email.

And, likely the same person, the humorless, completely insincere douchebag who posted on the Comedy Studio site about a pool as to when I would come back east, as well as his pussy anonymous sidekick. (You know, the loser who’s too sensitive to discuss his debts.)

My apologies to hbeeinc.com and reverendtim.com. At separate times I defended that wanker. I guess I should have figured it out somewhere around the time he kept defending Joplin, even after Joplin had already apologized to me.

I can’t even remember one reason I ever wanted so badly to be part of the Comedy Studio “family.” It’s probably no coincidence that the people most nasty about my moving and the reasons for it are the ones with the dimmest futures (if future is measured by success and well-adjusted living, rather than, say, mastery of bitterness.)

A lot of shit was kind of almost today.

Like I went to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and I took the bus tour that goes around the track. Only it didn’t, because they are still resurfacing.

It was OK, though. Just me, the bus driver and the tour description on the tape deck. The driver was a friendly old guy, and we talked a bit about Fenway.

He was sorry he didn’t get to see it when he visited Boston, and he hopes it never gets torn down to make way for a new stadium. We agreed on that, and I guess when you are in the middle of a big track built in 1909, it makes sense.

Later, I detoured to see where Abe Lincoln’s famous, boyhood, Illinois log cabin was. There’s a new log cabin there (Well, not “new.” I think it was built in the ’20s or ’30s.) It turns out the original was moved around for some state expos and whatnot, and then went missing. How the fuck do you lose a house?

(Coolest, yet spooky road moment — As I was leaving Abe’s family farm, I had my iPod on shuffle. The song that came up as I pulled from my parking space, “Abie Baby” from the soundtrack to “Hair.” (Yeah, I fucking know. I like showtunes.))

Then, I figured I’d try to get a bite to eat in St. Louis, since a lot of barbecue places back in the Northeast seem to have St. Louis-style choices. But, I could not for the life of me find a place that looked tourist safe enough to park my loaded car AND had restaurants.

Seriously, I saw only four restaurants at all in that city and two of them were goddamn Irish pubs (or facsimiles) with names like Maggie O’McHarp’s. Fucking hell, not what I’d be looking for out here.

I looked for my usual city scene to spot the high-rent district and good, if not over-priced eats, name-brand hotels, twinkly lights in the tree and horse-drawn cabs. What I think of as the Newbury St./Back Bay look. I saw the horsies and a few lights, but no fucking food.

Although one almost thing that didn’t happen in St. Louis I’m happy about. I didn’t run out of gas while lost along the Missippi hard by the Illinois strip joints and adult bookstores.

I got detoured around a closed bridge, deeply lost and the one gas station I found had handwritten notes on the pumps, “No Gas.” I seriously considered stopping at a “gentleman’s club” for directions, but I made it out of the detour and into a Shell Station.

Never did get any dinner. (The plus side of no meal is that there is no plus side. Apparently, M. doesn’t want me to gain a couple of hundred lbs. on a road diet. Bwahaa.)

I almost made it to Springfield, MO but bailed when the trucks were making me too jumpy, and I realized I was a bit confused by crossing a time zone earlier in the day. I type this from a Drury Inn, which advertises free high-speed Internet, in some fucking place called Rolla.

Waffles.

There’s some kind of fancy make yourself a waffle grill at this hotel. The downside was “Breakfast Syrup,” aka sort of maple-flavored corn syrup. Alas, I miss the sugary, sappy maples of home.

Can’t decide what today is all about. Do I blaze through Indiana, Illinois and Missouri? Or, do I maybe detour over to Kentucky, because Louisville is so damn close to Indianapolis?

I do think I have to buy something checkered or NASCARed over by the Raceway Park.

Choices. With waffles in my belly, all things are possible in this the best of all possible worlds.

I guess for sure I will buy new wiper blades, what with today’s snow and all. (The weather on the news last night warned: There might be a full inch of accumulation. Pussies.)

Finally, I have my laptop getting the ‘net off my cell. Of course, the cost will end up crazy, no doubt, because who the fuck knows how many MBs are transferred when you do stuff like, I dunno, write bullshit in a weblog.

I started uploading some photos here, though.

My favorite pics so far are the ones of various grime in the Youngstown Tallyho motel. Tonight, I’m staying at some place called the Baymont Inn near Indianapolis airport. It’s a real hotel type of place with brand-name soap and towels worthy of stealing, and nothing veritably guaranteed to cause flesh crawl.

In Youngstown, I didn’t even throw my dirty socks on the floor. I kept thinking if life was a CSI episode, I’d have the spray bottle of Luminol and a black light, and I wouldn’t have slept at all in that bed.

I figure if I alternate between really shitty accommodations (short of camping) and halfway decent ones, I’ll end up with more stories/impressions for the same average amount of dough. Plus, if you stay in a room that’s $70 with an AAA discount, it’s so elegant and wonderful compared to a $30 shithole, you sleep like the princess sans pea. I’m getting up early for the breakfast buffet.

Indianapolis, Indiana, downtown, right now.

Yup. Hard by the Motor Speedway. Over 1,000 miles since finally leaving my house on Tuesday.

(And I detoured diagonally through Ohio to see a whole buggy-load of Amish (and some Mennonites).)

I made it to O – HI – O. Well, just over the border from PA, anyway.

After finally just saying “fuck it” about my house and taking at their word the friends and new tenants, who have said they are happy and willing to help me and clean the dump up, I just walked out the door. I believe they mean it, and so I left.

Of course, I came to that moment of destiny, when a cold rain was a-falling. That icy rain stalled traffic to, well, glacier slowness, so it took me hours to get to Worcester (about 60 miles out of Boston). I could have walked it quicker. By the time I got that far, to Sturbridge actually, there were white out conditions, and my wipers had become so caked with ice they were beyond ineffectual. I bailed on the driving and slept in Sturbridge.

At least, the psychological barrier of not leaving the house (like for the last 10 years) was breeched. I woke up to bright sun (and fucking freezing temperatures).

So, today I cranked out about 500 or so miles and made it from Western Mass through parts of Connecticut and Upstate NY and across the whole length of Pennsylvania. Now I sit in a pretty damn dumpy room at the “Tallyho,” whose motto is “Over 600,000 Satisfied Guests.” Makes you wonder about folks, who apparently unlike me are easily satisfied.

I had to pay a deposit for the key, the telephone and a remote with dead batteries. But, for 30 bucks or so and considering there’s coffee in the lobby, I’m more amused than anything. I love the fact that I paid deposits on various portable items of technology that are essentially worthless to me. Just signing the deposit form I had about 100 times more expensive technology in each pocket.

I almost came out of my room with my digital camera to snap photos of the broken stairs doorknob and the empties, including the cardboard Bud “suitcase,” surrounding the hallway trash can. I thought better of flashing both my ‘spensive toys and my detached irony.

Speaking of irony, I quelled the urge to buy a Confederate flagged cap at the “Buckhorn Family Restaurant,” outside State College, PA. I figured it was more momentarily amusing and actually buying it would be hipster douche-y.

Fuck, there is still so much stuff to take care of… but, I’m leaving.

By the way, if you ever find yourself relocating, stick to a major city. Whenever I mention San Jose, people just seem to lose any concept of geography. In conversation, I think people have decided I was heading anywhere and everywhere between Baja, Mexico and Oregon. Folks in the Northeast just got no idea about the west.

Here’s an extremely basic California primer.

San Diego is way south, near Mexico. It’s an easy day trip to Tijuana.

LA is huge (especially the county) including famous places like Hollywood, Beverly Hills and East L.A. It’s still in Southern California, but it’s north of San Diego.

In between LA and San Diego is Orange County, aka “the O.C.” That general vicinity is also what people are talking about when they say “the Valley,” as in Valley Girl.

There’s stuff in the middle of the state, like Santa Barbara and Fresno and Bakersfield, where you don’t want to go to McDonald’s, and Sacramento, the state capital.

Then, there’s Northern California, where I’m headed and where “Silicon Valley” and San Jose are located.

One of main features of the area would be the giant, much larger than any bays in Massachusetts, San Francisco Bay. It’s why it’s called the Bay Area.

It’s really, really big, though, so it’s not like say Boston Harbor, where you could walk from Neponset on up around the Mass Bay to like East Boston or something if you were so inclined in about a day.

It’s big enough for the Golden Gate Bridge, which is bigger and redder than anything we got here.

So, people talk about “the Bay Area” and then various towns around the bay by where they are located. San Francisco is right on the bay, Berkeley and Oakland are “East Bay,” wine country, like Sonoma and Napa valleys are north of the bay, Palo Alto, home of Stanford U. and kind of the start of the tech area and Silicon Valley is “South Bay.”

If you follow Silicon Valley southeast from Palo Alto you hit San Jose, which is inland and pretty near the redwood forests of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

If you stayed on the coast and went south, you’d hit Santa Cruz, where surfers and banana slugs come from. Below that on the coast, is Monterey and Big Sur and all those famous literary/hippie places to watch the surf.

So, I’ll be near San Francisco, but not in it. And I won’t be anywhere near, LA, Hollywood, San Diego, Mexico or Alaska.

Why did I waste time writing this out?