A true story of the heart's upheaval shot and edited in the vernacular of the Great American Road Trip, there it goes, the fool of the heart, uncontainable down the canyons, bone-white over deserts, rawly blood-orange from the rim of the crater. Black coffee cheap and thin at the motel outside Barstow, we left the bed burning Valentine's Day because God knows how many times you gotta break the speed limit if you really want to escape the past down the byways of the mid-century imaginative. Back then cars were heavier after all, built for comfort, not speed. Sometimes bright and sometimes sad, sometimes nowhere to go but the sad house of the past.
My heartfelt thanks to the wonderful, public-use archives of the Internet, reminding me of the dread architecture's more generous, benign possibilities. Thank you to the videographers, nameless and named. It's funny how many of these films contain the same shots, like an entire culture compulsively repeating the same fever dream of escape or patriotism. Thank you to Wile E. Coyote. Thank you to my grandparents' Steinway and Roscoe for interrupting the recording with his jangly, twinkly dog collar. Thank you for watching.