3/21/15
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
As I now smoke my 2014 Christmas Pipe, the last Christmas Pipe I will
smoke for the season, there is some sweet irony going on. Most of it will have to be delegated to my
personal journal, but suffice it to say that I do not define winter by the
calendar or the movements of the sun. It
starts the first time I smoke my 2006 Christmas Pipe, and it
end when I smoke the last Christmas Pipe of the season. This will be last “winter” trip. When I go to Florida, I will Officially begin
my summer of travel, even if it’s only April.
A very enjoyable part of my life, which I believe has come to an end,
very neatly fit into what I defined as the winter season, and, as I smoke this
2014 Christmas Pipe, I am prepared for it end, just as I was prepared for
another aspect of my life to end when I smoked my 2014 Christmas Pipe in Buenos
Aires. In both cases, my mindset was to
transform it into something worth keeping or let go of it. I think I am being sufficiently vague here,
but my readers who truly know me should understand. Anyone else who is interested is welcome to
ask for clarification.
The last time I
was in Baton Rouge, two years ago, I was starting to fall in love with someone
from the Israel trip. I still love her,
and I get a kick out of it every time we exchange a couple of Facebook messages
or she likes one of my posts. We dated,
but we had no chemistry. She rejected
me, and I resolved to become a better person (not in the common sense of the
word, more like a person who was true to himself and did what he needed to do
to be happy). That was two years ago
today that I started down that path.
Today I made another life decision, to eliminate all the toxic
relationships in my life and only keep the mutually beneficial ones. Reader, if you find yourself cut out of my
life, well, I’m not sorry. Okay, enough
about that. It has been a whirlwind day,
and I am very tired, so I have heavy doubts in my ability to properly record
everything, along with the philosophy I want to include.
I’ve Got a Dream. That is what I have been teasing on social
media all day. When I was 16, I had a
dream. How often would I fall asleep
thinking the three wishes I would request if Robin Williams magically popped
out of a lantern? One, a career I
love. Two, a wife who loved me. Three, a son to follow in my footsteps. That was it, so simple, and I had hoped to
achieve those by this point in my life. I’m 0 for 3.
In fact, I am no closer than I was when I was 16. When Will My Life Begin? (To my astute reader, no, the phrase, “Mother Knows Best” will not show up later in this entry.) My dreams now are more grandiose, to travel the
world in a very specific way, 17 specific groups of sites before I’m 30, more
for the rest of my life.
One of my
former coworkers asked me about a year and a half ago how I would value
“marrying the perfect woman” in with my travel goals. The answer was that it would trump all of
them. I had such a perfect woman in
mind. I have come to realize that she is
not perfect, that I might not be happy with her long term. Yes, physically she’s perfect, but I would
quickly get tired of that. Again, my
astute reader should know whom I mean, and anyone else is free to ask me. How many people get to travel the world the
way I do? Almost no one. How many people marry someone they view as
the perfect woman for him? A lot of
people. I would trade all the travelling
in a heartbeat to marry the perfect woman.
I’ve got a dream. It’s to live a
simple life. What now about the people
who, 200 years ago, were denied even the simple pleasures of life? Here in Louisiana, where the Best Picture
winner “Twelve Years a Slave” was set and which I bought on Blu-ray today, I
can speak to that question. Of course, I
have no idea what it’s like to be a slave, just as I have no idea what it’s
like to be raped. Rand would probably
say that slavery is the worst crime that a person can commit because it takes
away a person’s ability to think. It
forces them to answer to the whip and chain instead of logic and reason. Rand viewed the destruction of the mind as
the greatest of all evils. I’m not sure
where rape would fit into that.
For
starters, she had some, shall we say, interesting views of sex. Basically, anyone who would capable of rape,
which requires both the initiation of force, a big no no, and then having sex
outside her proscribed views of sexual attraction. The basic theory is that a man of unbreached
self-esteem (her type of hero) would never want to have sex with someone who
would not want to have a sex with him.
To add to that the element of force makes it far worse. However, I’m inclined to believe that she
would view slavery as the greater evil due to its wider reaching effects, though
she’d probably find the rapist to be the worse human being.
Alright, now for the events of today. I am tired.
I am cold, and somehow today was an incredibly busy day, though, when
I woke up I had only expected to visit the State Capitol and two battlefields. Instead, I visited the Capitol, three NHLs,
and 4 NPS Units (including the two battlefields). After I woke up, I headed to get breakfast,
appropriately enough at the Waffle House.
I got the works, bacon, eggs, grits, hash browns, coffee, and, of
course, a waffle.
After breakfast, I
decided that I would visit the three NHLs in Jackson, since there was no time
crunch, and it would just affect what time I arrived at my hotel tonight. I lit up a Flor del Antilles in the car and
was on my way. The first stop was the
Eudora Welty House, where some famous writer (Eudora Welty) lived for 80
years. I never heard of her. I took my pictures. They had a Plaque. That was good.
In fact, all three NHLs had Plaques. That was really good. It was raining all day. That was not good. The next stop was the Old State Capitol. It turned out they had a museum inside, so I
left the cigar outside and checked the souvenirs, nothing good.
Then came the Governor’s Mansion. Wait, where did “O! Brother Where Art Thou?”
take place? Yep, Mississippi. There were some scenes from that movie at the
Governor’s Mansion, weren’t there? Well,
I guess they all look the same. I guess
I’ll rewatch it this week. That was the
lot of them.
I had to finish my cigar
before I could do the new State Capitol, the Official one, but, due to the
parade, there was traffic and road closures.
I found my way to the Capitol and walked to the front, ditching my cigar
before I took the pictures and headed back to the car. My breakfast was not sitting well, so I
headed back to the Old State Capitol, hoping I could take an unofficial U
there. I could. After that, I think it was almost 11 AM, and
I did not wind up getting to Tupelo until 2 PM.
I put in the battlefield into my GPS and was on my way, lighting up my
Davidoff Nic Toro, always the first cigar of the first big drive of a
trip.
The soundtrack was, as it has
been, the playlist of my top 20 Disney songs.
I completely stole K---’s idea of recording herself singing Disney songs
in the car and posting them to Snapchat.
It’s a lot cuter when she does it, but “everybody’s Tad Hamilton to
someone.” I have a slight suspicion as to which of my Snapchat viewers to whom
I am Tad Hamilton. It is quite ironic,
since I believe three years ago she introduced me to the girl who is Tad Hamilton to me. Wait, no, she didn’t
introduce me to her. She warned me to
stay away from her saying that she was a bitch.
She is not a bitch. She is one of
the sweetest people I know, and I am very happy that she has been in my life
for the past three years.
I stopped at
Sonic for lunch. Alright, I am freezing,
so I will wrap up as quickly as I can.
After I ate, I lit up a Santana and ordered a Sonic Blast that I would
eat later. I made my way to Tupelo, and
I saw a cigar store in town. The only
thing they had that I would have considered smoking was an Arturo Fuente, so I
got two of them, one for today, one for tomorrow. I had no trouble finding the battlefield, but
something was missing. No VC. Uh oh.
No brochure, no stamp, no Official picture. I took a picture and found out about the
VC. It was 10 minutes away, and another
20 minutes to the other battlefield. The
battlefield sites were each about the size of my parent’s backyard. It was four hours later before I finally left
Tupelo and headed to Baton Rouge.
I went
to the VC, and I found out that they administered four NPS sites. I did not know if the four sites were counted
as four units, neither did the volunteer.
It would matter for my Instagram posts.
The four sites were Natchez Trace Parkway, Natchez Trace NST, Tupelo NB,
and Brices Cross Roads NB. The two
battlefields shared a brochure. I went
back in the car. All four were each an
Official unit. The parkway was right
there. The battlefields were 10-20
minutes in either direction. I wasn’t
sure about the trail. He said there was
a piece of the trail across the street.
Well, Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah, I would try to hit all four sites with a single
cigar. My Instagram and Facebook
followers would be treated to four very similar pictures with a rapidly
diminishing cigar over the course of about an hour and a half. It was still raining. The parkway was visible from the VC, so that
was an easy picture.
I drove across the
street, another easy picture, and I hiked the trail as far as it went back to
the parkway, about five minutes.
I
headed to Brices Cross Roads NB. Fuck,
it’s raining again. The Confederates won
that battle, forcing a union retreat and capturing a bunch of supplies and
weaponry.
I headed back to Tupelo NB,
getting the Official picture at last and finally announcing, “Mississippi
In the end, I found a
Chinese buffet, as extensive as any I have ever said and good quality
food. I only got two plates, more a time
thing than an appetite thing. The price,
with the drink, was about the same as I would spend at Hop Won if I get soup
with my meal. I was not surprised. I lit up an Ashton VSG and was on my way,
finally leaving Tupelo four hours after I first arrived. I stopped for gas after I ditched my VSG and
picked up a coffee. I was running short
on cigars, and I knew the coffee would hold me off for an hour or so before I lit
up my next cigar.
I’m debating whether
or not to include this bit in the published version, but I think that I can. She is really the only person whom I care if
she reads it, and, if she does read it, well, it’s not really anything bad. I guess I had just finished the coffee at this
point when I checked Snapchat. My crush,
my Tad Hamilton, had posted something with the hashtag #bored. Well, I was bored, too. I was almost half asleep at the wheel, and
the same 20 Disney songs were starting to get repetitive. Hmm, maybe we could amuse each other if we
were both bored. The post said one hour
ago, which technically means between one and two hours. Was she still bored? I saw that she was online. I sent her a simple text. “Still #bored?” If she responded, maybe we could chat on the phone for a bit. It would have been quite nice to her
voice instead of Ariel and Pocahontas. No response.
Alas.
Suddenly the idea of another cigar seemed less appealing. An hour
later, I got a phone call. Wait, was it
her? Did she read my mind? Nope.
It was Sokol. He needed cigar
advice. He said that he would call me
back after he lit up, so I finally lit up one, too, an Aroma de Cuba. I got Baton Rouge a little before midnight,
not long after I finished the cigar. I
had to find street parking, since the lot was full. I went up to my room, moped in bed for a bit
before I rubbed out my tobacco and headed down.
I went to the balcony outside, where I proceeded to write this entry,
which I will now close since my battery is almost dead, and it is after 2
AM. I guess I need go upstairs and do
the WIJG entry. Oh, fuck, I need to
publish, too.
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