Driving and eating, driving and eating. I've reached that point of a drive across this country where hunger becomes a source of dread. Finding no scurvifying food in this sea of french fries, hot beef, and American cheese has become increasingly daunting, something to be embarked upon not out of pleasure but mechanical necessity.

Brown, brown, brown.

Worse, the city girl me, especially the first-of-the-morning version, no longer seems able to hold her tongue about the sad water-coffee and the ubiquitous hazelnut-, vanilla-, and cancer-flavored creams. Even though I know, everybody knows, that coffeebs are the very worse kind of snob there is. They get the very roughest treatment in prison, even the pedophiles hate them. But, Jill, did you see this? It's grey, GREY." Jill, busy denuding her deep-fried fried thing of its bun, could only nod. Yes, I see it, I'm living it.

Food bitching and scratching aside, today I experienced a plenty-good BBQ pork and slaw sandwich and banana pie at Country Junction off 20 in Illinois, and tonight I ate with true green glee some asparagus and sunchoke soup and wine in a spendy place with a "Wednesday nights half-off wines by the glass" special in Chicago across from our hotel, and it was splendelicious. And then we tipsily returned to the hotel and I made Jill take pictures of my Snacks to submit to the Snacks gallery.

Wine and green food!

Meanwhilst: Today was another long, long drive, circa 450 (this time Jill took the bulk of it because she had the gumption today), but the two back-to-back days of extra driving have made room for two whole days in Chicago versus the originally sceduled one. This is very exciting news. We're going to eat some salads and wear skirts and lipstick this city up!

We did stop in the middle of today's epic drive for a tour of the Cedar House in Quasqueton, Illinois, where we discovered that Frank Lloyd Wright was kind of nuts, maybe. Not only would he design and select everything for his "complete design" homes -- the chairs, the curtains, the wafflemakers -- and not only would he forbid his home owners from hanging art (that's what the windows looking out onto the pretty wilderness is for), but he kept a set of keys to all his houses and would stop by for pop inspections to make sure the everything was all positioned as he had originally laid it out and that no un-approved items had been smuggled in. One woman who insisted on moving her furniture around finally so irritated Wright that he removed his plaque of "Wright House" authenticity. There are so many ways to go crazy.

Oh and one not+so+lucky thing (in a string of lucky things, sunsets and bears, etc.), I got a speeding ticket! 48 in a 30 zone, sad. $78! And I can't even work the point off my record by going to traffic school because it'd have to be done here, in this state. Maybe if I continue with the fancy free, unemployed lifestyle, I'll just travel back specially to take a class? That could be interesting, especially if it's one of those combo classes, "learn to drive, drive men WILD!"

I also came up with the big money idea of colored salt, so you can see how much you're sprinkling. We could tint it naturally, so as hippies not to anger the hippies, make it with beet juice. Beet salt! "Belt" we'll call it, "belt me" people will say. I was very excited about my big money idea when Jill told me that she had already thought it up years ago but decided its wisdom was unsound re: people don't really want to see the salt, that one of its core appeal swas its invisibility (perhaps out of our innate desire to fool ourselves, to hide the grim reality of our salt intake from ourselves?). But maybe if we marketed it as tasty food coloring, a way to redden mashed potatoes, to those puzzling people who like that green ketchup?

Wait, Bettie Davis has what it takes to make "pro blush" not "crow blush"? This are the things I rely upon you to tell me. Where were you?

Feeling Illinois.

(PS: My diary has officially moved over to my official evany.com website. Let's meet up over there!)

(PS: My diary has officially moved over to my official evany.com website. Let's meet up over there!)