like the decapitated head of Lincoln summed up so many things about America the massive and seemingly unending cornfields and open plains of Kansas made me think that this too was just as poignant of a summation about the real United States of America. And I’m not even sure why. Maybe there was some kind of weird American spirit that infected you when you drove out this way. Maybe it was the fact that after awhile it seems like these flat fields take up the entirety of the country. Or maybe I unconsciously identified corn with America. I’m not sure why that would be the case though. It was everywhere out here. I had never seen so much corn in my life so I had to take a closer look which turned out to be completely unnecessary because as it turns out, a cornfield looks exactly the same no matter how far away you were from it. This trip was turning into quite the learning experience. I think half the reason I even bothered to stop was because the emptiness of the area was getting to me. There was just nothing out here except corn and I had even made the attempt to use it to keep me entertained and failed. Clearly I was going to have to do something…so I called my parents. It’s always funny to hear the reactions people have to whatever it is you have to tell them. Whether they’re happy or sad or angry or enraged, how people react to what you have to tell them reveals something about them and about what they think of you. It can actually be quite enlightening because their reaction will reveal what they think about you as well as tell you all you need to know about them. My parent’s reactions to me moving back to Chicago just reinforced them
as the true cynic and optimist that they were although these kinds of issues are never quite that simple. My mother was happy to hear I was headed somewhere familiar and asked if I needed any clothes while my father grumbled about the fact that I still needed to figure out what I was doing with myself. I just told him that this whole thing was a
learning experience and not just in terms of decapitated heads and cornfields. This was the kind of stuff I envisioned I'd be seeing and experiencing when I left LA because it was giving me perspective. But the truth was that being out here wasn’t giving me perspective so much as it was changing it. So many Americans have this concept of being these independent, free thinking people who have and continue to work together to establish something great. It certainly wasn’t a ubiquitous perception but the fact is this was how many Americans, especially ones out here, wanted and were happy to be perceived. But the thing that stuck with me most about this area was the fact that everything was very spread out and the only stations coming through on the radio were gospel talk and country music. Rather than working together and thinking for themselves it seemed like people’s priorities were to keep their distance from one another