Excuse for an Alibi

I should use the voice memo function on my phone. I seem to always come up with brilliant, pithy posts while staring out my windshield. My writing is remarkably mediocre, my typing skills are poor at best, and I am among the most inept texters (is that the word?) ever, so trying to compose while driving is a non-idea. Besides, I will not even talk on my phone without my bluetooth while driving, so really there is no other option. I could pull over, but I would never get from here to there and back if I stopped every time an idea popped into my head.

I-70 has to be the most boring highway in all of the miles of the nation's interstate system.  It travels straight and smooth like a belt around the country's midsection.  It crosses some of the flattest, most fertile farmland in the world. Other than its eastern and western ends, scenic it is not, unless you love the subtle breaks of farms and fields interlaced with the occasional small copse of wood or ravine. I do. Unless you find the hidden beauty in the way the sunlight plays on the clouds dotting the distant horizon, you will not find I-70 endearing or lovable. I fear future singers and poets will never pen stirring odes to old number 70 as they have her curvaceous cousin Route 66.  The I-70 roadway cuts through the cities of the heartland: Pittsburgh, Columbus, Indianapolis, Terre Haute, St Louis, Kansas City, and Denver to come to an inglorious end in the mountains of central Utah. Its path is as straight and unimaginative and as devoid of character as the cities it cuts on its journey westward.  She is a perfect thinking man's highway.

I-70 is the road to dream of your future, to ponder the past, to compose blog posts to your heart's content. Her multi-lanes of concrete and blacktop are the perfect medium to play mental gymnastics with syntax and humor and political truths. Then you arrive home, weary from the day. You hustle to the store, make supper, watch TV and sleep.

This morning I am awake once more. I stare at the keyboard, trying in vain to remember the brilliant words that spun in my mind yesterday as I raced homeward on the back of Interstate number seven-oh. Instead of wondrous stories and biting commentary, I have naught but a flat nothingness in my head reminiscent of I-70 and a very long excuse for lack of content.