Cripes, oy and other vocative terms

I am a bit depressed. I can't seem to focus on my job hunt, which shouldn't have taken this long.

I wound up driving around the Northeast for a week. I will be telling this tale over the next few entries to make up for being incommunicado for too long. If anyone wants to get together for dinner, lemme know.

I stayed at quem98's parents' summer home on an island next to Atlantic City. Her parents must love to gamble because the four of us got comped for a $45/person buffet at Caesar's.

This is singly the most luxurious meal I've ever seen. It's not that any one piece of food was the best I've ever had (not even close) but that you had every possible breakfast and dessert option in the history of America staring at you. Giant slab of roast lamb with mint jelly? Oh yes. Mussels in olive oil? Yes please. Two kinds of caviar? It's salty but I'll never have another chance to try that much. It was food and a view of the ocean.

So I drove away that evening and got a hot turkey sandwich in a diner in south Philadelphia. That felt more emotionally rewarding because I got to talk to the regulars. I was reading Mastering Algorithms with Perl and one of the waitresses asked me: "honey, I keep seeing that word 'algorithm'. What does it mean?"

"The steps to solving a problem," I said. She was relieved. She really liked it when I explained that anyone who has survived waitressing long enough could write a book about multitasking and diplomacy that would sell like hot cakes. That got her thinking. I love dropping those mental bombs.

I headed up the road and wound up thirty miles south of Scranton at a travel plaza on Interstate 476. I slept in my car for six hours. I also learned that the Pennsylvania Turnpike Authority maintains excellent toll plazas where you don't even need to slow down, decent roads and not very clean bathrooms.

It was now Monday morning and I got to Scranton handily. I went looking for a record shop I knew from my college years, Electric Mindshaft. It was still there and the selection was decidedly not changed by much. I was amazed the guy had stayed open. So was he, it turned out -- most of his business was online and he was uncertain how long he'd keep this store front. To keep his costs down, he only took cash in the store.

I wound up at an ATM across the street in the Mall of Steamtown. This mall has a pedestrian bridge across the neighboring train yard to the Steamtown Historical Site, a pork barrel project that cost a congressman his job. He wanted to get a monument to the days of coal-fueled, steam-powered trains in his home district. The train lines that still serve the town (which are in the hands of New Jersey Transit for some reason) can no longer handle those locomotives, so they wound up bringing old engines into the place by putting them on flatbed trucks. Yes, really.

There is a nice part of the museum but it's not worth getting there once you've seen its back yard. There is a jumble of rusting trains from various eras. If you're actually a traction buff, it triggers all sorts of twitching and no fetish feelings. This is because the jumble makes no sense: there was a long-distance electric trolley car jammed in between some coal hoppers. It had a pantograph, the metal pole that extends to an overhead power line. This is like seeing a Vespa at the dead center of the line of Harleys.

I headed back out of the downtown with some records and made a couple wrong turns trying to get to a non-contiguous artery called the Central Scranton Expressway. I wound up in the lousier west end of town, so I walked into a Walgreen's to find a map.

"Oh, we don't carry maps!" the lady behind the counter smiled back. She acted like it made no sense for me to ask. She then gave convoluted directions to a news shop somewhere else. I left.

I saw a gas station up the block, so I walked in and found a city map. Some guy saw me and said "oh I know this town so I can help you."

I explained that I wanted to get on 81 north. He then described the most ridiculous circuit back through downtown to get me to the south end of the city. I was following on the map as he talked and realized this guy was too used to some old way of getting around.

"That would put me about ten miles out of my way. I'm already north of there," I replied.

"Yeah, but it's nine traffic lights if you take the direct route," he retorted. Nine lights versus ten miles, folks.

I wound up figuring out a far better path on my own. This only involved five lights, no backtracking, few other cars and a simple shot onto the artery I wanted and then 81 north.

-next stop Binghamton, Dante