The Mississippi River is the spine of the nation. This is not a unique observation, but a metaphor that is drawn again and again. Taken literally, it describes a country that has no head, one that is sprawling and overweight, that defacates on the lower Americas and shakes its fist at the Old World, all while sporting a curious peg leg in the lower right that keeps influencing the actions of the rest of the body. But of course, only metaphors, only metaphors.

We spent the last two days in Natchez, Mississippi, visiting antebellum homes and drinking too much, resting our weary arms. Paul Hendrickson came to visit and put us up for the night in the Days Inn, alternately interviewing us and drawing meaning from our travels, talking baseball, talking life, and telling us of the fascinating secrets Mississippi has to share. We visited the Rosalie antebellum home, which sports fine china from 1847 and glass chandeliers, and rugs over 150 years old. From the second floor patio, we looked out over a sprawling estate of oak trees and manicured hedges, a world of slaveowners and slaves, its reverberations still being felt all too strongly today. "Sit out here and have a cup of coffee, it's a porch," said the elderly tour guide. "If you have a mint julep, it's a veranda. If you don't have anything, it's a shame."

We took the advice to heart. After PH left, we sat in Fat Mama's Tamales, drinking stiff margaritas at two in the afternoon. Ryan and I played three separate sets of rock paper scissors to five, me ultimately coming back from two down to win in the final set, tearing up the driveway with my arms overhead, the crowd going wild. We progressed from there to the Under The Hill Saloon, whose owner, Andre, was nice enough to store our gear in his alley. We made it up to him by buying copious amounts of beer and feeding the foosball table with quarters. We went from there to drinking at dinner, and from there to drinking at Bowie's Bar and Grill, taking tequila shots and flirting with every girl in the place, me ending up dancing twice to the live band with an older lady in a red shirt who managed to catch her catch later, a spry, older man in a pink polo, who led her out by the hand like he'd done it a million times. But it was all too much. At one table, a woman asked me how old !
I was. "T
wenty-one," I said. She replied that she was thirty, and I asked if that meant she thought she was better than me. "Not better," she said. "Just smarter. Wiser." "Well," I said, leaning in. "In my opinion, a truly wise person doesn't lord their wisdom over those who aren't so wise." That shut her up pretty good.

You could see us falling apart, crashing. Kevin kept staring out from blood-stained eyes and running his hands through his hair. Danny went outside to talk on the phone. Ryan and I engaged a pair of waitresses all the way until closing, when they stood us up while we waited on the corner. The alcohol pounded through my head. We kicked around and made feeble attempts at shooting the shit, failed, and walked back to the tents, the comforts of the Days Inn already past and gone, the air conditioning nowhere to be seen, and the sun, in the morning, pounding unflinchingly through the screen.

We didn't get out of town until three o'clock the next day. We had to eat breakfast, and go to the grocery store, and get a ride there from a couple named Keith and Melissa, learning along the way about the Phat Water Kayak Challenge they organize annually on the river, and how one of these years they're going to get enough participants to shut the barge traffic down for the day . Our groceries purchased, they dropped us off. "Nice to meet you," Keith said. "Have a nice life."

When we finally got on the water, the world had become a sauna. We sweat from every pore, sweat rolling down our bodies and dripping into our eyes, beading in the creases of our postures, until it felt that we might just evaporate altogether and completely disappear. You sweat like that and it is oppresive, it is awful, but more than anything it is cleansing, everything pumped through and out of you, until nothing from before remains and you are left with the pure, real thing. We paddled twenty-five miles hardly saying a word. Natchez receded into the distance, the binge and the night before pushed back with every stroke of the paddle, until it was just the four of us again, paddling along in two canoes, living simply, simply living, a mere week of the whole thing left to go.

Dispatches from Mississippi:

Stop in Vicksburg for the afternoon and wander around. Originally, we had intended to visit the site of the famous Civil War battlefield that, in conjunction with Gettysburg, turned the tide of the war in the Union's favor. The site, now a national military park, features rolling fields of grass where Americans once fired upon and killed each other, as well as tributary monuments from 28 states - all of whom were represented in battle. We soon find out, however, that to tour the grounds you need a car. So instead we flirt with the cashier at the coffeeshop and check our email at the library. Oh to be twenty-one, and traveling by canoe.

Vicksburg is a quaint little town though. Its main street is made of cobblestone and is fully equiped with WiFi. There is a haunted antebellum home which was closed when we tried to visit. An old antiques and novelties store has a sex shop in the back (it buys back magazines), and nestled between folk art galleries, there is a swanky lounge straight out of New York City, bathed in cool blue light and adorned with flat screen tv's.

Along the river, several casinos sit in artificial moats, taking advantage of Mississippi's relatively recent waterfront gambling laws (ridiculous; too complicated to explain; a post in and of itself), and inside with all the blinking lights, you'd never know, or care, that Union ships fired on these shores before starving the city out for nearly 50 days. I knew about it, but I sure didn't care. I sat down in the poker room and lost twenty-five bucks.

Close to these cities, the barge traffic and pollution always picks up, but these influences are becoming increasingly noticeable in the wilder areas of the river. A week outside New Orleans, the Mississippi River is finally dirty. It was never clean, mind you, but now it is distinctly filthy, beer cans floating upside down, eddys of garbage and sticks and froth, smoke from riverside industry pouring ominously into the air. The water is so polluted, in fact, that it has turned the bottoms of my feet to a sort of worn, elastic leather, and between my right toe and index, the skin has split open, leaving a fissure that opens and closes when I stretch. There is nothing to do, however, other than acknowledge that it is there.

In general, we are knicked up, banged up. Danny's feet and ankles have been bleeding on and off for weeks now, the sores a combination of scratched mosquito bites, cuts from his sandals, and a constant resubmergence in the water. Fire ants spent a day or two building ultimately doomed empires in our canoes and food containers, and we all bear little welts from the warfare. And Kevin's shirt, which he has been wearing the entire trip, smells so bad that it rivals the cat, who pees on herself.

To distract ourselves from such trials, Danny and I kill bugs inside our tent. The way it works is this: we both pile our sleeping bags and pads inside the tent, and then throw ourselves inside, violently pulling the screen door closed behind. Then, we sit with our flashlights scanning the tent sides like strobes, anticipating our prey. There's a mosquito! we cry, and spring into action. One of us keeps a distance and holds the light steady. The other creeps up until their hand is only inches from the unsuspecting, inferior species. Then, when the moment is right, we kill, employing the pinch (thumb and index), the swat (with object), the clap (two-handed), the clap (one-handed; more difficult), the push (employing the tent side), the chopstick (index and middle), or the snap (self explanatory; relatively impossible). Once, we captured a mosquito and slowly dismembered it, wing by wing, leg by leg by leg by leg, and then stinger, and then abdomen, allowing it to flop helples!
sly on th
e ground, crying out, "Let this be a lesson to you all!" before finishing it with my thumb. Guts stick to our fingers. Juicy ones smear blood along the walls. The stains stick for weeks. You have no idea how rewarding this is.

The mosquitoes dead, we lie down and try to fall asleep. We do this in Vicksburg and the train rolls by, crying out with the romance of a different time. How thrilling that might be, I think, to climb inside that thing. But of course I am forgetting the year, and that certainly you would die, fighting for a boxcar perhaps, or strangled by a serial killer, or clubbed in the head by a sad, startled man. Maybe next summer. For now, paddle down a river instead.

Goodnight.

Some simple observations:

We are in Louisiana now. We crossed over from Arkansas yesterday. We have now been out here for fifty days, and have paddled through Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and now Louisiana. We will be in New Orleans in two weeks or less.

One thing you learn after a while is that the river always flows fastest around the outside of a bend. Even though it may seem faster to take a shorcut and paddle straight across, or hug the inside of the turn, it's almost always the other way around. This is something you simply come to accept. Yet even though we know this, we still will manage to mess it up. We stare across and the other shore looks so close, and we think to ourselves that if we just cut across here, we will save ourselves such trouble. And so we cut across, and the current dies, the other canoe flies past, and we relearn the lesson all over again. The interesting thing is that the person most likely to forget all this is the person steering in the back of the second canoe, playing catch-up to the first. They see the bend, and the first canoe so far ahead, and a chance to make up lost ground. And in doing so they fall even further behind. This is what is called a metaphor.

It is still humid, but slightly cooler now, balmy even, and there are pelicans, and you can feel the ocean in the air. You are getting closer! it says, you are so close you are almost there! Meanwhile, water levels have risen dramatically, to the point where most sandbars have disappeared, and bends in the river have turned into bays. The Arkansas River poured in at floodlevels, carrying the load of the thunderstorms down, the water a strict and muddy pink from the caved-in shore. We paddle alongside branches of trees, logs, the trees themselves, still living, bobbing in the froth of the current, and Ryan tries to climb one. He fails, but in his attempt he tilts the canoe enough that Mippi's cage slips off and into the water. The cat floats with a panicked look in her eye, wondering how she ended up with owners so stupid, bewildering really, and perhaps also if this is it, if this is how she is going to die, slowly and helplessly sinking into the Mississippi River, goddamn t!
wenty-one
year old idiots, keep me locked in this cage all day and can't even keep the cage out of the water, and now I am paying for their carelessness, with my life, no less, how horrible, how fitting and horrible, bastards... We fish her out and she settles down. In half an hour, she can't even remember what happened. And the tree keeps floating downstream.

P.S. to the Marrinin's: if you are reading this, please email danny so he can get his sweatshirt back. He appreciates this greatly! His email is danielprosenberg@gmail.com.

Hello everyone. Coming to you bright and early on the morning of our 49th day out here, Sunday, July 15th, 2007. We are camped at an RV campsite in Warfield Point Park, just outside Greenville, Mississippi, and it looks like it is going to be a quiet, overcast day. Mippi runs around, chasing after pieces of grass and sniffing in holes, as if to say, Check me out, I am growing bigger, I am becoming more self-sufficient by the day.

Last night, we found a ride into Greenville and went to Doe's Eat Place, a steakhouse famous for making its customers enter through the kitchen and being Bill Clinton's favorite. We met all sorts of good folks and chatted it up: a guy who'd moved here from Boston and liked it even though everyone is racist, an older woman who loved Kevin's blond curls and blue eyes, a pretty young woman who told me she was married. "What are y'all doing here?" one group asked another as we sat down to our table. "Taking my dad out," was the reply. "He just had open-heart surgery. Thought I'd treat him to a 32 oz steak."

At dinner, we meet two National Guard servicemen, Sean and James, who have served in Kuwait and Iraq. I ask them what they think about the situation, and James says he supports it, one hundred percent. "What else are you going to do?" he says, "When the Twin Towers fell, just let yourself get attacked and just clean the thing up? We had to go occupy somewhere." "I'm not going to say I'm a Bush fan," says Sean, "But what I admire about him is he's principled. He's not chasing this poll or that." I suppose that's true, I tell him, when your approval rating is hovering at 25%. "Hey, we'll judge it all in fifty years," James says. "Until then, there's no way to tell." He says he has bought three million Iraqi dollars as an investment for his children. "Well," I tell him, "It can't go anywhere but up."

We originally heard about Doe's two nights ago, when we pulled off the river looking for a cheeseburger and met a man named Frank Smith. "There's nowhere around for fifteen miles," he said, and explained that we were on the grounds of a private (and wealthy) hunting club, Catfish Point, whose members flew in via their own private airfield. "Come on," he says, smiling. "I'm gonna cook for you."

Frank's cabin has a beautiful screened-in porch, raised foundation to guard against floods, and a huge cabinet full of guns. While he barbeques chicken and drinks whiskey, we talk about his life as an investor, his college days playing baseball for Raleigh College in Florida, and how when we get to Greenville, we have to eat at Doe's. "Doe is my brother-in-law," Frank says, and he gets Doe on the phone. "Doe!" he says, "I've got four knuckleheads up here at Catfish Point who want to eat at your place tomorrow night. How long you think it'll take'm to make it in canoes?" "Canoes?" comes the response. "We've got motors around here."

Frank tells us to grab beers and says that in the south, meals are a social activity. We talk about the Mississippi River bottoms, how sometimes it looks like a certifiable jungle, how the cotton plantations of the 19th century have relented to the forces of the river and been replaced by corn and heartwoods: Pecan, oak, cottonwood trees. We talk about flood regulation and Frank tells us about the 1927 flood, when water from the river spread 50 miles east, 100 miles south. "It's bad for human beings, but we're not the main players here. We need to learn to let nature do what it needs to do and get out of the way." He tells us about his daughter, working in the PeaceCorps in China, and about the wild world he saw when he visited her, about pollution so bad in Beijing that you never see the sun. "The world is changing," he says, "And we'll see it in our lifetime - not necessarily bad, but not all of it good, and we'll have to get used to it as Americans."

After dinner, he says we might as well spend the night, seeing as he has four beds to share, and in the morning he is waiting with grits and coffee to send us on our way. "Well if you've got that sort of spirit, you can't keep it bottled up," he says, and wishes us all the best. We shake his hand and climb in the back of his truck, and he drives us back down to the river.

And on the topic of hospitality, did I ever tell you that in New Madrid, Missouri, a man named Joe Porter met us at the boat landing and invited us back to his house for dinner, where he cooked up huge steaks, texas toast, and beans? That is the whole story, there is hardly anything to it. I never reported it in the first place because of that simplicity, worried that for such a basic act you simply had to be there, a gem uncut, that such a thing could never translate through the internet wires. I'm still skeptical, but look! Joe Porter cooked us dinner and let us watch tv! And he didn't even know who we were! Incredible! Thank you Joe! And thank you Frank! Talk about restoring your faith in humanity! I mean seriously: restore your faith in humanity.

As Frank put it, "We've got a lot of bad eggs, but there's a lot of good people in this country."

And so we head south.

Here are some things to think about at home:

1) Hitchhiking in this country is still a viable option. It is easier the further south you go. In Helena, Arkansas, we hitched three rides and didn't even stay the night. One guy even came back to apologize for not picking us up. "You know," he said, "I passed you back there, and I got up here, and suddenly I realized, 'Gosh, those boys wanted a ride.'" Pick-Up trucks are best. And everyone is friendly. If they aren't, don't worry! They won't pick you up.

2) Mark Twain is dead.

3) That said, you can still read Huckleberry Finn. And you can still paddle down the Mississippi River. A majority of people, however, given the choice, would do neither.

4) Meanwhile, paddling is an act so simple sometimes it makes you want to cry. When was the last time you were moved to cry about anything? When was the last time you were truly moved to feel anything at all?

5) On that note, when was the last time you stood entirely naked outside the comfort of your own home?

6) It is so hot out here that it actually ceases to matter. You just sweat and sweat and give up on caring what it looks like. Also, after a while it ceases to smell. Then it is just you and your body, beyond the civilized world of image and social expectation, just doing the things that your body was meant to do.

7) Because of the heat, you appreciate the rain. The weather patterns that flooded eastern Texas and Kansas have now moved onto Arkansas and Mississippi, and huge thunderheads will roll through, lighting up the entire sky, raindrops as big as dimes splattering across the river, endlessly, until even your rainjacket is useless and you just stand there, entirely soaked, water dripping from your hair. People who have alternatives to being outside usually hate the rain. But when you just stand there and let it dump on you, there is nothing to actually hate. It is just water. And after a while, when the rain stops and the sun comes back out, you dry off. Invariably, this is a wonderful process. You were wet, and now you are dry! And the sun is so warm! Because of the rain, you appreciate the heat.

8) Perhaps you are now thinking, 'That seventh thing to think about at home was pretty (fucking) sappy.' But the eighth thing to think about at home is that every sappy river truth you've ever heard is actually true. Some examples: "The river of life has many bends." "You can never step in the same river twice." "No matter what, the river always wins." The United States Army Corps of Engineers has sunk millions, if not billions of dollars into the Mississippi by way of dams, levees, and flood channels, in an attempt to disprove this last fact. To an incredible extent, they have been successful. But then things happen. Take, for example, Hurricane Katrina.

9) Some people do trips like this to see how fast they can go. They climb Mt. Everest, swim the English Channel, they race hot-air balloons around the circumference of the entire planet in eighty days. To the best of my knowledge, people do such things to conquer them; to be able to say that the thing has been done. On an entirely unrelated note, some men spend their entire lives making sport out of sleeping with as many attractive women as they can. Draw your own conclusions.

10) One thing I like to do out here when I am upset is shout "Fuck!" or "Shit!" or "Cock and Balls!" as loud as I can into the air. I do this because it makes me laugh. And then I am not upset anymore.

11) On a related note, one thing you can do out here is whatever you want.

12) But back to you: let's play a stupid game. Ready? Okay: try to think of the last time you realized you were alive. Like you were just sitting there, maybe cutting an onion, or checking your mySpace profile, and suddenly it dawned on you: Gosh, I'm alive! When was the last time you did that? Out here, sometimes it's all there is to do. So regardless of how long it's been, let's do it right now. Think to yourself: Gosh, I am alive. Holy Fucking Shit!!! You're alive!

13) Well look at that.

- g

"I had a good uncle, my late Uncle Alex. He was my father's kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life-insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, or talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly exclaim, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is." So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'"

- Kurt Vonnegut

***note: this was supposed to post two days ago, but apparently did not. Apologies for the long delay, but we'll make it up to you with...back to back posts! That's right! Two posts for the price of one! And now without further ado...

We're back, America, coming to you live from the middle of a lightning storm, on the deck of the Memphis Yacht Club in Memphis, TN! We hope you've somehow managed in our absence, but we're again here to be your emotional crutch in our country's time of need. Let's catch you up! Let's catch you up:

We woke up early the morning of July 4th, intending to paddle quite a ways, 47 miles, in order to make it to Osceola, Arkansas for that evening's festivities. But after pounding out thirty miles, we decided to stop (just for a moment) to enjoy the holiday and drink a beer. Once we finished the first, we thought what the hell, we'll have a second, and after that we may or may not have had a third. This is great, we thought. We're drunk Americans, floating down the Mississippi River. What could possibly be better? While reveling in such basic freedoms, two guys in a pontoon boat pulled up and asked us if we wanted a cold beer. We shook our cans at them and told them we wanted a tow. "Well come on then," they said, and we paddled over.

They introduced themselves as Ray Webb and Bill something (can't remember; sorta drunk), and hauled us a couple miles downriver before pulling up next to several other motorboats, beached along the sand. Ray grabbed us beers while we mingled with the forty-odd people there from Ripley, TN, telling them as always about our journey and receiving more of the same exclamatory responses. "We're trying to make it to Osceola tonight," we told them. "Why the hell you trying to do that?" they said. "There's nothing there." Ray thought it was such a bad idea that he offered to drive us back to his house, 15 miles off the river, and let us sleep in his backyard. "We'll have a barbeque and everything," he said, "And you can meet the whole town." We thanked him for the offer and told him it sounded nice, but we really had to make the miles. "We'd love a tow though," we said.

Fifteen minutes later, we had our canoes tied up behind the pontoon again, this time with Ryan and I sitting in the canoes to steer and Danny and Kevin relaxing in the boat. Ray sat up at the steering wheel with his tobacco pipe and a younger guy named Ben, clamoring about this and that and generally bearing a striking resemblance to Robert Duval in "Apocalypse Now." "You ready?" he shouted, and off we go.

Oh for a second it's just great, riding behind that pontoon! We're going so fast, and sort of surfing on the boat's wake, and I open myself up a beer, not so much because I want it, but because I can. Mippi sits in her cage meowing viciously at me from the speed, but I toast to her and tell her to calm down. What great time we are making(!), and what a beautiful day(!), and God what a great country, America(!), where you can paddle down its biggest river in canoes and get rides from drunk pleasure boaters blowing tobacco smoke out the back. I take a sip of beer and smile foolishly. And the boat takes too sharp a turn and my entire canoe flips over.

"Damn, my beer!" is my first thought. It's floating upside down in the river. But just as fast there are packs everywhere, loose gear floating off, the canoe on its side filling with water, the dry bag with all my valuables caught upstream in the eddy, and Mippi's cage, submerged completely in water. I grab the cage and pull it up to the surface. She is crying out and frantically clawing at the front grate, trying to get out. I hold the cage out but it keeps going under, up and down, as I tread water and try to grab as many things as I can. Ryan throws a lifejacket toward me. It catches in the current and floats away. Danny jumps in the river and starts swimming after things, the pontoon slowly turning around, Kevin jumping into the other canoe with Ryan and shoving off, paddling furiously, reaching me finally and grabbing the cage, water pouring out everywhere and Mippi meowing lividly, completely drenched and shivering, eight more lives to go.

While we right the canoe, Ray and Ben fish our things out of the river. The casualties are Danny's lifejacket, my sandals, our cook kit, half our spice kit, our coffee maker, fry pans, tupperware, and about two-thirds of our food. "Damn eddy," Ray keeps saying, and offers me another beer. They tow us a couple miles further down, and drop us off on the bank. "Don't forget us now," says Ben, "Ray Webb and Ben Wilder. You better write that down."

The day, however, was not over. We finished up the paddle to Osceola, and paddled up a narrow inlet, where we threw our things down quickly on a sandbar across the channel from town. We decided to forget the whole ordeal over a good holiday dinner in town, but to get there, we had to ferry across the channel. We'll all just load into one canoe, we said, which was an extremely stupid idea with all the gear still in it, because we made it fifteen feet out and the canoe tipped over again.

We wade into shore and now everything is really soaked. My cell phone is broken, my wallet dripping, our pants and shoes covered in sopping muck. On top of that, it is getting dark, and the mosquitoes start coming out. "Fuck this, let's get out of here," we cry, and tear off in our canoes (two this time) for the other shore, thinking the absurdity cannot grow any bigger. It does though, because as Ryan and Danny near the opposite shore, huge fish start jumping out of the water in huge arcs, all around. They start jumping clear over the canoe, and smacking into Ryan's paddle. "Shit! Shit! Shit!" Danny is yelling, ducking and dodging with his head, and the two paddle as fast as they can into shore. Flying Asian carp. Who knew.

By now the whole thing is simply too ridiculous to really fathom and we're tired and hungover too and the mosquitoes are out and our things are wet, so Let's cash in our chips and get a motel, I say, and we start walking into town. On the way, we are lucky enough to hitch a ride, squeezing the four of us into the backseat of a car that is already carrying five, Kevin's feet sticking precariously out the back window. The car drops us off at the Judge Motel, where an old, first-generation Indian couple (how does an old, immigrant Indian couple come to own a rundown motel in Osceola, Arkansas?) gives us a $35 room with a leaking roof and blood stains on Ryan's mattress, men with prostitutes in the rooms next door, and July 4th, finally done.

Two days later, we pulled into Memphis and lit up the town. Alli flew in to spend the weekend with me, and the five of us roamed all over the place, reveling in our weekend of R&R. We watched the Memphis Redbirds play the Albuquerque Isotopes (baseball; triple-A). We drank Mint Juleps in the Peabody Hotel. We visited the National Civil Rights Museum and saw the Lorraine Hotel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot (dear god, this spot, right here), and spoke with the black woman outside holding huge signs that read "The National Civil Rights Museum Supports Gentrification and Ethnic Cleansing." We visited Graceland, drove past the Heartbreak Hotel, saw Elvis's planes (from the outside only; far too expensive to go into any of it- $30 - what the hell is wrong with this country), and learned that next year, 50,000 people from China and Japan alone were expected to visit Graceland, in addition to 100,000 Americans, in commemoration of Elvis's 30th anniversary (of his death). We!
ate at D
enny's, we saw "Transformers" (movie; bad), we walked along Beale Street, the night a swimming collage of tourists and blues bands and humidity, and did things better left unsaid (shoutout to Hope and Holly).

Now we are back to the river, canoes already like an exotic species, July 4th and Memphis there and then gone. It is the final stretch now, less than three weeks to go, and we can't thank you all enough for following us this far along. If you've been slacking lately, it's alright - so have we, but now it's time to ride this thing home. We hope you'll follow along, and tell your friends about us, and one day, hopefully, us about your friends. Looking forward to speaking with you all soon. Take care everyone, and goodnight.

-TMP

"...dead in Iraq. Elsewhere on this, our 231st anniversary of independence, people are hunkered down in trenches across America, waiting in line to purchase the new iPhone. And presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama continue to amass millions, to the shock and secret relief of the nation, further solidifying the inevitability of Democratic takeover in 2008.

"And now, for our special interest piece, we go to our correspondant in Tennessee, Crapper Reason. Crapper?"

" [chhhh chhhh chhk] It's actually Osceola, Arkansas, Bob! Or actually ten miles up, floating on the river! Motorboats are flying past, shouting 'crazy motherfuckers!' to us, and the project members are drunkendly belting Shenandoah. And I don't know what to tell you! They're being rather difficult...[chhh chhhhh] Utter mayhem... [chhhhhhhhh] ...taken me hostage... [chhhhhhhhh] It's hard to describe... [chhhh chhhh] They've come down through Kentucky now, camping on sandbars, and now there's... [chhh] [chhh chhh]The whole dynamic's become rather odd, as you can see behind me they're just sitting there shouting obscenities into the air, apparently as a means of entertainment... [chhhhhhh] Earlier they were swordfighting with foam swords and speaking in French accents, and dropping the cat in the water... [chhhhh chhhhhh]"

"You're breaking up, Crapper."

"Bob? [chhh] Bob? [chhh] Can you hear me? [ch] As I said, the project members are refusing to speak... [chhh chhhhhhhh] Holed themselves up last night in the tent and said they'd talk if I brought them women... [chhhhh] It's extremely difficult to tell if they are being serious... [chhhh chhhhh] One keeps talking about tolerance and self-satisfaction, and refering to them all as a Possible Generation... [ch] Nonsense, I suppose... [chhh chhh] They keep saying that there is nothing to say and too much to say, that what they are doing is far too simple and boring and good for the tastes of our time, not enough explosions and special effects, I think they said, especially for the internet, [chhhhhhh] which they seem to be hinting is the fundamental irony, Bob, [ch] their journey being documented on a blog, a medium entirely polar to what they are experiencing, essentially 'using the internet to talk to people about escaping the internet...' That's a direct quote... [ch] 'And th!
at's at d
oing it only every three days, for godssake...' [chhh chhhhh chhhhhhhhhh] The small-town adventures are a nice touch, but just one side of the coin, and at worst a distraction, and still not nearly enough to keep up with YouTube clips of 'Dancing with the Stars.' 'The shimmering water and moving meditations get sappy in print' [ch] ...that's Gabe speaking, and quote, 'we can't continuously serve ourselves up on a platter of excitement and grit...' That's another direct quote... [chhhhhhh] How frightening a prospect, a world where the Mississippi River hardly exists, except online...[ch chh] Oh, wait... [ch] Hold on, wait! We've got some action! [ch] One of them is standing up! It's Kevin! He's leaning forward... [chhhh] He's... [ch] Yes, he's doing it, he's picked up a beer...And yes, he is, as you can see now he is in fact sitting down to open it... [ch] I repeat Kevin has decided to open a beer! [ch ch] [ch]. We'll update this story as it continues to develop... [chhhhhh c!
hhhhhhh]

"They've asked me to pass along a couple notes... [chhhhh] although I can't say I understand them... [ch] They're asking everyone to, quote, stop asking about the damn cat, it's just a cat, and likely to end up eaten by alligators anyway... [chhh] They are, quote, still searching for the Snickers Well, and making progress, end quote. Also, quote, to those fuckers Peter True and Kevin Redmon, they should have pulled their pants up and gotten in the goddamn canoes. They don't know what they're missing, or maybe they do... [chhh chhh] And also, quote, America, fuck yeah...happy 4th of July, celebrating being able to do whatever we goddamn want, from the middle of everything, so far away. End quote. [chhhhhhhhhh] Back to you, Bob!

"Ah, thank you, Crapper. We'll keep you updated as this story goes on. In other news..."