Route 96

Why hasn’t this been in a Robert Rodriguez movie yet? There’s a highway through the New Mexico desert called Route 666! We’d seen it marked like a prophecy on a huge road map on the wall of the Elvis Diner in Memphis, and we resolved over fried peanut butter and quaalude sandwiches to drive that [...]

We were totally unimpressed by Historic Old Town Albuerquerqueequegque, which is basically an adobe strip mall featuring historic T-shirt vendors, historic discount liquors, a historic pawn shop (we loaded up on historic $2 CDs), and the historic Montoya Cafe, whose fancy Mexican crackers were served with melted historic Cheez Whiz.

Besides UFOs, New Mexico is also near and dear to our hearts for a little something called the Manhattan Project, the birthplace of the bomb. The National Atomic Museum is on an Air Force Base with checkpoints and military police and everything, but is actually owned and operated by Sandia Corp–a subsidiary of DOW Lockheed [...]

Peter: “Use your head, Derek.” Derek: “I’m gonna use it to break the bridge of your fucking nose if you don’t drive me somewhere I can get something to eat!”

New Mexico: It’s The Newer Mexico Do you think they ever get tired of jokes like that in New Mexico? <–The picture they don't want you to see: me witnessing an alien autopsy, or Jonathan Frakes hosting a crappy special on Fox? You be the judge… (Don’t Go Back to) Roswell You may not consider [...]

It took forever to get out of Dallas and Fort Worth. The two cities bleed into one another across the Texas plain in a great bland sprawl of strip miles and flat industrial buildings like a hundred miles of Mississauga. Finally we escaped on a little two lane highway going west through bobbing oil derricks [...]

By the time we entered Texas, it was clear that Brown Jenkin’s air conditioner, barely adequate at the best of times, had gotten one taste of Dixie in August and packed itself off to freon heaven. Hoo boy! Just in time for, let’s see: Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Death Valley, the Mojave Desert… Jack, Bobby, [...]

Enterprise Square, USA, on the campus of the Oklahoma Christian Bible College, is a Disney-esque (that’s being charitable) theme park dedicated to the glorification of free enterprise and the excoriation of government control. Visiting this spawn of big business and the religious right, built in 1982 and apparently not remodeled since then, was like taking [...]

So this part was written in 2006, not 1996. You can tell by the italics: my words are bent over by middle age, like myself. This seems as good a place as any to reiterate: I wrote all this ten years ago. That means the zine was the work of a much younger guy, a [...]

It’s not just the title of a Supertramp album, it’s a way of life. While New Yorkers and Californians pick away at their sissy little yuppie breakfasts of yogurt and double lattes, in the heartland a nation of truckers and farmers and people with two first names is mowing down acres of hash browns and [...]