after leaving the cape (the birth place of rush limbaugh, i couldnt help but notice reading from the many proud flyers, plaques, etc. on display about town) we crossed the mississippi for the second (and not the last) time into illinois, heading east to greencastle indiana. directly on the other side of the big muddy, we found a flea market cloister, manned by the most gnarled inhabitants we've found on that or any side of the mississippi. the atmosphere was nothing less than lynch like (albeit not separated from the atmosphere by the camera, like all lynch-lands/mindscapes). as cliche as it may be to label anything creepy or disqueting as such, this was it. after almost running out of gas in southern illinois (not much down there), we found greencastle. not as lush or regal as you would think, this town did boast a skatepark and some gas stations, a kfc and even a walmart. we conversed with some students about their town and the best advice they could give us was to leave it. and so, we eased on down the road to bloomington.

we met up with one jenn jameson (at a lovely restaurant, the bathroom of which is pictured above)

we story swapped, sauntered about her amazing town, ran into some poster slingers from a competing company that were selling at IU, made up new slang and co-op'd our foods for the next week (trying new nut butters to cut down on the farts).

the next three days we held a much more encouraging sale at depauw university. weirdly enough, this school seemed to be a repository for all of the chicago suburbanites that went to the school i worked at for the past year and a half. they probably think less of me now...


pictured above are the whispy, ghostlike, goldsworthy-ish sculptures that reside in the center of campus. birds were making their nests in it. walking the path through them, sipping warmth from thermoses at six thirty in the morning sustained us most of the days of selling...

a few more mornings and we woke up in chicago. this magnetic north drew the ryder in for a whirlwind tour of things and friends missed and loved. mr. forester-dehaan whisked us away to the many culinary and otherwise necessary destinations.

pilsen! friends!

lovelies!

josh showing us his back "deck."

my heart ached(s) to have to leave behind chicago for the second time. alas, slaves to the road, we made our way west. cornfields and cornfields and the impossibility of having the windows down too long because of the smells: IOWA.

So, it turns out that one whole week in the same place is not as fantastic as we thought it would be. . .

Cape Girardeau, Missouri. We planned ahead and booked a room in a nicer hotel, an "Inn", no less, to call our home away from home for the longest stretch of time since we moved away from Chicago. The Inn had a jacuzzi and an indoor pool, a complimentary breakfast boasting of 25 selections (I'm pretty sure they counted each flavor of "jam" as an option.), and free milk and fresh baked cookies every evening.

We thought we had it made, and we thought wrong.

Little did we know, students aren't as eager to buy posters from you on the spot when they realize you're going to be around for an entire week. Our sales kept dropping, and dropping, and dropping, until I dropped all sense of self worth, and made a sandwich board sign. On the front, it read: THESE ARE THE LAST DAYS! Poster sale ends tomorrow! And on the back it said: "Don't leave your walls NAKED! Get your posters while you can!" and then I wore said sign, and walked from one end of the very large campus to the other. (Un/)Fortunately, classes were in session when I chose to walk around with the sign, so a total of five people saw me (and each of them gave me a sympathetic smile.)

Later that evening, one of our bosses emailed us saying she noticed our sales weren't doing so hot and asked if she could help. We told her how low we had stooped in efforts to get our sales up, and she gave us the go ahead to run a special discount sale for our last day. We did and we came within a hundred dollars of making our sales goal for the entire week.

The highlight of the sale was when one of the students had me frame seven posters for him (only three of which he had bought from us), and he, his friend, and I partook in a lovely conversation about this that and everything over the hour it took me to frame them all.

We left Cape Girardeau feeling empty and low, having taken a long, harsh look into capitalism at its finest. Selling stuff people don't need, and convincing them to buy more of it. The same stuff that's rendered worthless if it gets folded, or a little torn. Fifteen dollars one minute, packing material the next. Selling stuff for the stuff. Frames made of plexiglass and cardboard for twenty three dollars, but we'll pop your fifteen dollar piece of paper in there for you for free! Selling image, selling identity, selling tickets to conversation, acceptance, friendship and meaning, so that we can buy our tickets to Europe. Staying at schools later than we have to, in hopes of selling more stuff. Staying up late to process the paperwork, getting up early to catch the pre-sale passersby. Heavy lifting, bruises, upon bruises, upon bruises all over my calves. Bagels with hydrogenated "peanut butter" breakfast and black, burnt coffee. Those are the lows.

But,

Traveling for free. Discovering little pockets of culture and beauty that we never would have seen otherwise. Feeling in your aching muscles that you've truly earned the money you made. Seeing so many different college campuses, and being a small part of them. Hearing the stories of students, so full of passion, hope, dreams and ideas. Sunsets in different parts of the country. Regularly being pleasantly surprised. Meeting up with friends along the way. Pushing yourself to your limits. Learning what you don't like, how you don't want to live, and what money doesn't buy. Showing your ugliest self to the person you want to impress the most and being forgiven and loved. Seeing, doing, growing, living. It hasn't been all bad, in fact, it's been really good at times.

poster tourage

pulling hundreds of pounds of posters (big, floppy, heavy piles of wood) and miscellany up a steep ramp, we had our first sale. amazing how excited kids get about it all. too many quotes overheard to notate. kansas city was beautiful and inviting. we explored its culinary offerings, ending up in the basement of a unitarian church, eating chik-un fried tempeh and greens and such.


the sale ended in a few days (nothing too note worthy. although, on the way out of town, we stopped by a place we were hoping to drop off our bi-weekly ups package off at, and we ended up exploring a mine shaft, cave thing turned storage facility owned by the owner of the new england patriots. somewhat nerve racking guiding our ryder truck about in there) and so, we traversed missouri's girth yet again, stopping at the same taco bell and arriving back in st. louis with resolve to explore the city museum.
(ryder truck in said cave thing)

(the city museum's exterior. it used to be a shoe/shoelace factory)

our memories combined of the city museum didnt do it justice. especially now that they have the roof open. theres a bus hanging off of it, and even a ferris wheel (that the dood running it said gets going too fast to stop sometimes, he just has to wait it out. he told us after we got off). i feel like there were areas i didnt get to explore last summer, in the six plus hours i spent there. we both got giddy/glassy eyed, ran aimlessly about, crawled up and over and through everything and its all beyond words so i will revert to pictures.













(i-melissa-couldn't get enough of these dead skin cell sucking fish. if only we had more time, those fish could have restored my hands to baby softness.)

after st. louis we headed a bit south, to cape girardeau, mo. stay tuned.

poster toooring

a few hours of sleep, and we were on the way to kentucky. morehead kentucky to be precise.
(the morehead beercave!)

(melissa wants to know what a beer cave is. . .anyone have a clue?)
we were the helper team for two lovely gentlemen at their sale for a few days before embarking on our own sale. the sale went well, it seems, for two said lovelies. quote of the sale (that i can remember. melissa and i wanted to keep a journal of the insane things people say at the sales, but it is too overwhelming), in response to the kiss (the scummy tatu version, not the kilmt one, but we also do carry the klimt one, in poster, postcard, and shower curtain form)"this is perfect! its small enough that i can take it down easily when my parents come over, cause, you know....they arent into that gay stuff." small town kentucky charm, calzones as big as our heads (i took a photo of them with my phone, im too inept to get them from my phone onto my computer. also taken with my cameraphone during this sale: a guy wearing a yoda backpack. it looked like yoda was riding on his back. i probably scared him a bit by how excited i was about it. also, a pink chevy geo with a unicorn painted on the hood) and late nights getting everything re-organized from our maryland truck swap debacle. the next day we hurried to get to lexington (to see the ever lovely roy harrison, pictured below, twice!)


louisville (to skateboard and try and miraculously run into friends we dont have phone numbers for)and finally to st. louis to go to the city museum, but alas, they arent open till 2am every nite. we spent time walking about downtown, instead. snuggled some bunnies and took in the mighty mississippi.
(snugglin' bunnies)


the next day we traversed the girth of missouri, ate at taco bell for the first time in years and arrived in kansas city, ready for the first sale of our season.

poster tour (post training) day one.

At five am we sat in a room with our new fast friends and waited for our team number to be called. We walked up, they handed us our keys, and that was that. We found our truck, one of many, in the parking lot, distinguishable only by the number 57 being taped in the window. We did the pre-trip inspection, and then we were off.

About an hour after leaving, we received a call saying that there had been a mix up and the publicity in our truck needed to be switched with another teams'. We were instructed to pull off the highway and get sandwiches to kill the time while we waited. And so, we did, and quickly found ourselves perusing the shelves of a Mediterranean market. Ted had a falafel sandwich and I feasted on toubouli salad and a spinach pie. We took a can of dolmas to go, and met our friends with the correct publicity soon after. We chatted for a bit, as they, a third year team, explained the ropes in greater detail of how to survive the poster tour. We exchanged gratitude and hugs and were off, again. . .
(waiting)


An hour later, we received yet another call from our employers, this one telling us that they "don't mean to alarm you, but you're driving illegally right now." and that it is imperative that we give them the fax number for our hotel as soon as we check in, because there is some "important paperwork" that we need to have in the truck with us.

And so, we kept on driving, amused, but unalarmed. Around five pm, we stopped for fuel, got back on the highway, the engine light turned on, and the truck refused to accelerate. Fortunately the next exit was on a decline, and Ted smoothly coasted the truck off the highway, and onto a street in the middle of nowhere and parked.
(our truck, melissa and our home for a solid ten or so hours of waiting)

We called Ryder and had a frustrating, and long, conversation with the operator, during which I had to spell "Baltimore". We were told it was going to be a couple of hours before a mechanic would arrive, so we made the most of it with Ted bombing a nearby hill on his skateboard over and over again, and me calling a few friends to catch up.
(calling friends, more waiting)

(the hill)

(bomb)

Our spirits were bolstered by all the kind passersby who stopped to ask if we were OK and/or needed any help (at least seven kind souls). One of whom stopped twice, the second time asking if we needed water. After we said yes, and he saw that he didn't have any to give, he sent his girlfriend over with a cooler full of water, the offer to keep it, and an invitation to the bar she works at just around the corner and up the hill. We thanked her and she headed off to work.

The mechanic arrived around nine and worked on the truck for about an hour, with no effective results. He was kind enough to give us his personal cell phone number and told us to call, no matter how late, if we ran into trouble, and strict instructions to not let the people at Ryder push us around. We spoke with them again and they tried to talk us into exchanging our truck for one twice the size, which we refused, and then they said the nearest truck was about two hours away and that they would send someone to get it and tow it to us, at which point we were going to have to unload our truck and load all of our stuff onto the new one. On a three way call, the tow truck driver grudgingly agreed to help us with the task and we hung up, coming to terms with the fact that we weren't going anywhere for another four hours. So we walked to the bar where the nice girl who's name we forget continued to quench our thirst and gave us a plate of peanuts (the dolmas long since consumed).

After speaking with Ryder, we called our boss to let her know what had happened and that we were going to be driving another truck around. Her response was, "So, you're flipping trucks. That's what happens." (The next day she sent out a mass email to all the teams saying that she's not a mechanic and not to waste our cell phone minutes calling her with our truck woes because there's nothing she can do about it.)

The new truck arrived around two am, and the tow truck driver told us he would wait in his truck and we needed to let him know when we were finished. In the darkness of the middle of nowhere some place outside of Baltimore, Maryland, it took us an hour to move our cargo from one truck to the other, and then we were off, yet again at four in the morning in search of a hotel.

The nearest hotel was out of our budget, so we kept driving and at five in the morning we were finally able to go to sleep and call it a day.

and we're off.....again

after the very much too brief respite of california, we were carted to our respective airports (fresno/orange county) in the wee hours of the morning to continue life uprooted. a day of flights and connections and more flights placed us in the bosom of the philadelphia airport (where we were entranced by this). the stories we had heard of poster tour people being easily spotted rang truer than i thought it would and soon we had handfuls of zines, headfulls of stories and theories and face fulls of anarcho-smell. falling asleep on our luggage, pacing outside, and our bus finally arrived to take us west, to the training grounds. hotel number one, full of poster people, excited and drunk at the in-hotel bar. arriving much to late to find any food vendors to satisfy our cross country hunger, we eventually fell into the loving and peanut-butter-and-honey giving arms of friendly florida folks. hand tattoos and big smiles, they didnt even care that we ate and ran to sleep and get up in a few hours. poster tour training was located on a university campus, where we were fed from the cafteria, thus giving the whole training week an overtone of crust-anarcho-hippie summer camp. stories upon stories upon stomach aches, it all seemed a bit unecessary but pleasant enough to be surrounded by such lovely people.

(anthony, up and over that pole)

(proud anthony)

the last nite of training (the week is quite blurry as we're more and more removed from it) we gathered up newly found, soon to be disbanded, friends to visit the wu tang grave (yes, the hotel is next to a graveyard, which has a gravestone brandishing the wu tang symbol) to drink warm champagne (well, most of us) and wave around sparklers. the next morning, with no training for the 16 foot long by twelve foot high 13ton truck, we were on our way to kentucky, not florida, which is the way of the poster tour.
(trying to spell wu tang with sparklers, failing miserably)

The Mothers' Land

Time in California was a blur of goodness. Good people, good times, good eats, good gracious. Highlights included, but are not limited to: Slumber party with Granny Chase, Grandpa (Ikeda)'s 91st annual celebration of life, tide pools and picnics, scoops!, family, friends, Visalia, Holland being another year older, the longest beach, scooching, game nights and crisps a la mode.

Here's a photo of one of many blog worthy things that took place:


Hammer Time.