Eastward Stranger Fiction

I kid, I kid. But seriously,
it'd really help me out.

So I recently completed the three and a half-day vehicular coma that is the cross country drive from the Bay Area to my hometown in Western-Upstate-New-York-ish and it was bo-ring. Look, I mean no insult to anyone who lives in Real America, but holy fly-overs Batman, there's like 20 or 30 states I could swear were exactly the same place. Maybe in the interest of simplicity, we should consider merging some of the more obscure ones into one giant state. You know, for my convenience.

This was my week.

Pictured: Jerks.

It's sort of a blur now, but I'm pretty sure I spent a night in Salt Lake City, which I was convinced would be the Saudi Arabia of the U.S. This proved to be pretty unfair of me since not a single person tried to hand me a pamphlet about how I'm going to hell. In fact, everyone I met was super-nice...maybe a little too nice, but nice none the less. Of course, I'm still pretty pissed at the Mormon Church (not Mormons per se, just the organization) for their totally wrong support of and interference in California's Prop 8 bullshit.

I wanted to find the LDS HQ in SLC so I could ask them how they retained their tax-exempt status despite clearly being a political organization, but failed. I did find Disney's Magic Castle, and that was pretty cool. I didn't know they had a park in Utah, but there it was.

Does this comparison make me sort of a dick? Probably.
But at least I didn't campaign to rob people of their civil rights. Oh burn!

They're not likely to have one
of these in Utah any time soon.

There is hope for Utah as Salt Lake City-ians fed up with the state's conservative politics held an underwear run thus totally sticking it to the man. Good for them. Next thing you know, they'll be dancing. Of course, this happened the same weekend as San Francisco's Folsom Street Fair (it's a big leather and BDSM festival where people totally do it in the street, just so's you're aware before you click) which makes the protest look adorably quaint by comparison, but still, it's nice to know they're trying.

Although this woman did
drop the C-word while asking
for a refill on her decaf.

Anyway, as boring as the drive was, I'd like to think I learned some things. Mostly I learned that next time, I should fly, but I also learned that people are pretty much the same everywhere you go. Like, I stopped for breakfast at a diner in Nebraska where I was waited on by a, get this: born-again belly-dancing grandmother who, in her spare time, runs an erotic cake business. That's right, erotic cakes. In Nebraska. Who would have guessed? Yeah, I totally had to eat my preconceived notions of mid-westerners along with my spinach omelet. Lesson learned. Also, not a single person was screaming hey m-ef'er, I want some more iced tea.

And while I'm sure that Rayleen's erotic cakes are the finest in all of
Lincoln NE, does anyone else think erotic cakes are kind of a weird idea?
Like, who looks at a cake and says: "Hmm...That's nice, but what if it was erotic?"