And the water goes the other way, too

North American toilets are weird.



When I first flew into LA, I was convinced that the first few toilets I encountered were flooded. Then after the first dozen, I realised that the water level is just really high.
There's no consistency with toilets here. The one above is in a train station in Chicago, and has a disposable seat cover dispenser. The impossibly-thin toilet paper, in rolls inside the one holder in the stall which had not been set on fire, was lying in strands (in the dry spots) and wads (in the wet spots) on the floor.
The flushing mechanism is usually a plastic lever on the left hand side. Sometimes it's a metal prong low enough to choose between pushing with either your hand or your foot. I haven't seen a top-of-the-tank dual-button flush at all.

Oh, and lightswitches are upside down: down is off, up is on; with sideways switches it's anyone's guess. Power sockets are called outlets, and if they only have two holes, my three-prong plugs are shit outta luck. There is only very, very occasionally the opportunity to recycle anything.

Howdy howdy

When I ask for directions, it's far easier to make myself understood if I use a Texan drawl. Thus "Fort Worth" becomes "Fairt Wirth". The problem I had before was that the New Zillin accent is itself a drawl, and I had to use a loud English accent to make each word clear. Even then I had to repeat myself even louder, which made me feel like the ugly American abroad. Hence the Texan drawl. It's low and quiet and kind of fun, because everyone becomes Sir and Ma'am. To complete the look I really need a horse and a hat to tip.

Yesterday I went out to Fort Worth, mainly because it's there and I heard there were some actual cowboys there. There weren't, but there were some old guys wearing cowboy hats who looked too fat to ride horses, and also a black cowboy. 'Blazing Saddles' aside, black guys were the ones being dragged behind the horses, not the ones riding them. The social order went thusly:
1. Rich men
2. Their hussies
3. Horses
4. Poor men
5. Longhorn cattle
6. Women and children
7. Animals larger than squirrels
8. Chinese miners
9. Small rocks
10. Black people
In Fort Worth, every single bus driver was black, and 90% of bus passengers were hispanic. White people drove cars, except me. I stood around in the rain because I caught the wrong bus, and pondered how I fell outside my genetically-determined modus operandi. As my shoes slowly filled with water, I felt the confusion of one who is privileged yet bereft. As I hunched over my bag of tiny portable electronic gadgetry, I considered that the excesses of the poor were as foolish as the frugalities of the rich. I felt sorry for myself, then pitied others for being immune to this kind of suffering, then stupid for having mistaken the #1a bus for the #1c bus, then resigned and sort of cold. I clutched my bus schedule as it flapped damply in the wind. I looked at the puddles and the sky and the road, and the corner where the next bus might come from if the gods of public transportation smiled on me. I was a long way away from anywhere I recognised, even further from my travelling bag of stuff, and I realised that, for me, for a long time now, there was no place called Home.

Dallas

Northern Texas is green. It is as green as Tauranga, as flat as Waikato, and as humid as the West Coast. The train took me past farmland and swampy forests, mixtures of spindly trees splodged with greenery, and pastoral Constable scenes.
At Union Station some guy hit me up for a couple of bucks. Note to self: don't ask black guys questions unless they're wearing uniforms. I caught a local high-speed train to Irving, part of the depersonalised suburbia that made necessary the location "Dallas-Forth Worth". There is no break between, but city passes into city.
I arrived, hot and sticky, to the worst-looking hostel I have ever seen. The doorbell yielded no response, so I stepped around the scarecrow, the mildewed toy cat, and assorted vegetation to the side entrance, where workmen inside were ripping up the vinyl, hammering like grim-faced 250-lb two-year-olds. I eventually got the proprietor on the phone, waited an hour for him to show up, and checked in.
The hostel was a regular house at one point but had descended to the level of a Hamilton second-year flat. While not squalid, a sense of grime and dust permeated the rooms. The bed were covered in thick plastic sheeting, generating a muffled crumple with every toss and turn.

The next morning I saw why Dallas was so verdant as a sudden downpour erupted outside. With little warning, angry drops spattered on the roof followed by the shrill white noise of heavy rain.
Today I shop for contradictory items: the lightest of white shirts and an umbrella; it's like I'm entering a wet T-shirt contest while harboring extreme doubts. I went to the Gap and got a tee for $3, then took a cantakerous trolley up to the West Village. While downtown is all high towers and lowlifes, the Village is upscale and may stay white for as long as ten years. I stopped in at the Dallas Museum of Art on the way back, but it didn't compare to standing on the grassy knoll, shooting a picture of the spot JFK was assassinated. (And also a few snaps of the 6th floor of the Book Repository Building, from the car's point of view.) Is it morbid? Sure. But everyone there was grinning like a Cheshire Cat.

You hear about all the fat people in Texas, and there are quite a few; about one person in ten that I see, including children. There are also a lot of regular and thin people, but few who are merely slightly overweight. This is the land of Creation over evolution, so one wouldn't really expect transitional forms. If you fat, you fat. Most are fat like partially-inflated tires, but some are fat like bags of gravel. No-one is fat like a balloon. That only happens in the movies.

Chicago

The hostel offered a great breakfast: bagels, muffins, orange juice, coffee and tea. The bagel-toasting machine was Dr. Seussian, with revolving tracks and odd little noises.

The main sculptural drawcard in Chicago is the Bean in Millennium Park:




There is also a ton of shopping on the Miracle Mile, a little north of downtown, but I didn't find staff to be of much use. Competence is on the decline:




With four hours until my train, I took a bus north to the Lincoln Park Zoo. It is one of the few free zoos in America and, though small and a little dilapidated, was entertaining for a morning's touristing. The penguin house smelled of mackerel; the dromedaries' humps were half-deflated; the big cats paced with grim determination. I had that feeling, familiar to most who visit zoos, that these places are the halfway--houses for the raw and the cooked.




At the ape house, a machine mashes soft copper pennies into trinkets.




Look at the sun bear! He thinks he's people!



After a few hours I took a bus back downtown and walked over to Union Station (confusingly, all major train stations are called Union Station).
I brought five salads aboard the train and other healthy snacks. My jeans, which required a belt last August, now groan when I bend to put on my shoes. I don't know if I will maintain my resolve in the deep-fried South, but I do know that if I buy new pants, I'm travelling too light to keep the tighter pair.

There has been no snow south of Minneapolis. I wore a T-shirt this morning in Chicago, and southern Illinois is less a prarie than slightly grizzled farmland. The freshly-plowed fields are covered with the shredded, spiny remains of the corn harvest. We are far enough south that colour has survived the winter and green grass lines the roadside, with skeletal rows of elm and spruce everywhere.
Just as night falls we ride into St. Louis, a rusted-out city with a magnificent arch made of stainless steel.

Late at night I witness an All-American party in the dining car. In attendance are Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, the dopey obese football player from every Southern film ever, and black women in each size: hilly, mountainous and Vesuvius. As they drink more and more it is impossible to interpret anything they say, but their spirit is unmistakable. "I am great. There's nothing wrong. Fuck y'all."

Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois

Staples looked exactly like Hinuera. I arrived a little early and read for a while, but then began to nod off. As the prospect of sleeping through my train pickup in Staples went beyond pointless to the level of a Beckett play, I started to pace the small station to keep myself awake.
The train was delayed by one hour. At 4pm this would not have been a concern, but between 4-5am, my body wanted to shut down. My steps became staggers, and my eyes drifted gently in and out of focus. This was not helped by the suspicion that the train may never come and I would live out my days in a two-store town, weaving like a punch-drunk boxer.
The train was great for sleeping. Although distributing pillows and blankets at night-time rather than 11am would have been a good idea. The entire line was business class, with deeply cushioned seats that reclined without pinning the person behind like a stick insect caught between two marshmallows. Unfortunately, there was the food.
When the intercom announced that the dining car would stop serving breakfast soon, I scuttled along the half-kilometre to that part of the train, and ordered coffee, scrambled eggs and grits. The coffee was bad, but in America this is to be expected; it is seen as fuel, not as art. The scrambled eggs were depressed. Their malaise had turned itself inward and the eggs appeared to be imitating boiled silverbeet in form. There was no egginess to them; they knew not themselves. But the worst thing on the plate, besides a fairly plastic croissant, was the serving of grits. Like the hideous love-child of mashed potatoes and oatmeal, it was the kind of gruel that even Oliver Twist would have left unfinished, convinced that the malevolent borgeoisie were tricking him into eating a serving of paper glue.
The bill ran to six dollars, and I added another dollar for a tip. Alarmingly, others at my booth were leaving two and three dollars for a similar meal, leading me to believe that (a) they believed humans routinely ate things like this, or (b) the lunch lady who microwaved our ancient endives should be encouraged.

We eventually got to Chicago about half an hour later than expected. The city was typical of American metropoli; a sparkly center buffed to a high mirror finish, surrounded by miles of crappy old warehouses and buildings in advanced stages of collapse and decay. It's the American ideology, baby, where you let the devil take the hind-50%.
Despite a few attempts to book online or via telephone, I still had no reservation by the time I got to the hostel. They hit me with a $40 rate, so I booked a ticket to Dallas for tomorrow. The hostel is currently full of Girl Guides who seem to have applied their first forays into makeup with a shotgun.
Chicago isn't much of a tourist destination. There are several large museums and galleries and odd art in central locations, but Chicago isn't a lifestyle town. The hotspots were filled with XXXL Americans squeezed into XXL clothes who seemed happy enough, but to me the holiday offerings here were about as authentic as kissing the back of your hand. I went through Millennium Park, Navy Pier and the Miracle Mile. It took maybe four hours to walk. After that I went searching for a Chicago deep-dish pizza, but the only local spot was closed for a party so I went to Pizza Hut instead and bought a pizza about the size of my fist.

My one regret is not spending entire days in the vast museums in Chicago. Unfortunately my extra two days in Minneapolis left me a little museumed out and it's difficult to imagine dragging myself through another American Modernism retrospective.
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