Thirty miles south of Madison on I-90. A rust-red barn, squat and firm on the horizon. A stainless steel silo glinting, implacable, in the crisp day air. The first snow came and went early this morning, leaving an achingly bright Wisconsin afternoon. The sky is sharp blue, cracking blue, with frosted jet contrails looping gently across it, like garlands iced onto a wedding cake. The ground is a mottled olive-brown with sparkling gilt edges. I have the specific sense that, were I to stop the car and wander into one of the ploughed-under cornfields and plunge my hands into the earth, the ground itself would yield up stories upon stories of work and pain and love, tales of the men and women who haunt this delicate, hand-hewn place.

No time for Midwestern romance today. Driving at ninety miles per hour, the leafless trees are upraised hands, waving hello and goodbye, both in one instant.

After a while, all cities in the United States begin to look like one another. Toll roads, twists of cloverleaved Interstate highways, twenty-four hour restaurants, skeins of power lines slicing a blustering gray sky. I flew into Chicago O’Hare half an hour ago. The overhead lamps in this restaurant are festooned with plastic twists of pine and red bows. A color-coordinated set of teddy bears loll on a high shelf to my right, next to a patchwork Santa with beady black eyes. To my left are four jars of syrup that look exactly like the four jars of syrup on the table next to that, and the table next to that, and so on, stretching in a complete chain of pancake restaurants, all the way to San Francisco and back again. Butter pecan, blueberry, strawberry, boysenberry. You take your choice of exactly four focus-tested, shelf-stable, can’t-go-wrong flavors. America!

I found an unopened envelope buried under a pile of bills. Contents of the envelope: Two five-dollar gift cards from the Mission Bay Food Company, a ten-dollar game card from the Sony Metreon, and two five-dollar gift certificates to the Loews Cineplex.

I had forgotten. Maybe that’s why people have been avoiding eye contact with me in the halls at work.

Blueberry pancakes and coffee as the Beatles burble over the AM radio. A gray and fine San Bruno Sunday morning. I’m surrounded by empty cardboard boxes and Ikea furniture assembled by my hands. What time is it in Sweden?

A food court in Seattle-Tacoma International Airport: Burger King(TM), Cinnabon(TM), and an anonymous corporate bar. The thought of food is appalling. The Japanese coworkers and I ate at a dim sum place called Noble Court(TM) yesterday. I munched on oil-covered noodles, drank oil-laden soup, and took a massive bite of a chicken leg that was still frozen in the center.

Last night was tough. I woke up at two a.m. swaddled in Seattle Westin’s(TM) so-called Heavenly Bed(TM), lucidly dreaming of skiing at warp speed down a mountain covered with red snow. Freezing, I stumbled out of bed to the thermostat and the temperature of the room instantly rocketed up past four hundred degrees. The walls of the room ceased to be foursquare, and the bed slowly turned on an axis somewhere deep within the guts of the building. As I lay there in bed, awash in alternate waves of heat and cold, my mind began to dissociate from my body, and thus my skin started to separate from my muscles, tearing into loose sheets and folds. It peeled from my body like the skin on an overripe banana. Things became interesting.

I decided that the correct choice of action was to make coffee. In retrospect, I acknowledge that perhaps making coffee was not the optimal course of action, but we are simply documenting the facts here. I got out of bed, hauled my miserable ass to the coffeemaker, filled the carafe with water. I installed it in the coffee maker, put the ground coffee in the filter basket, and waited. Nothing happened. I stood, my legs failing underneath me, for about eight weeks before realizing that I had failed to actually pour the water into the coffee maker.

A delayed flight later, I’m home, sweating under a down comforter. Aspirin and steady love from my wife has my bug under control.