My car is dead. Long live my car!

Busy, frustrating ten days, illustrating my love-hate relationship with Iowa.

On yet another !#*$&!% trip back, this one for a family reunion June 17, my car broke down on US20 in the middle of nowhere, where even wads of cash can't get you a tow truck on a Saturday morning. It took three days to get it towed and another two to get a diagnosis: I could spend $2000 on a car worth $450 in working condition, or I could send her to the Wide Open Highway in the Sky. So long, dear Edna.

I was able to borrow my dad's car for a week to return to MKE on the condition I return it this past weekend. I was thoroughly panicked about trying to get a new car, since I have a lot of unpaid bills from prolonged unemployment and my current job is a finite contract, but when I called the bank in the town where I grew up, they not only loaned me the money, they gave a check to my brother two hours later and told me to drop off the paperwork when I drove through on Sunday. Try that in a metro area...

Corey Taylor from the band Slipknot once gave an interview with a trade mag where he explained his love-hate relationship with Iowa. I saved the clipping but I don't know where it is...the gist of it is that "Iowa is a very conformist, normalist culture, and it's just hell on anyone with the least bit of creativity or unusualness. But if we hadn't all suffered there, we might have been well-adjusted kids with pleasant childhoods, and we never would have gone on to write our music. So in a way, we owe a great deal to Iowa." I identified with that statement so much...I just wish I was a better artist so I could express it better.

Or as my friend Jason (born in Fort Dodge) puts it, "Iowa is a great place to be from. And the key word is 'from'."

Anyway. I've lived in Milwaukee for six weeks now, and I've driven back to Iowa five weekends. That shit stops NOW.