Trust any journey undertaken with my father to require at least an additional hour of time. Though it is true that this time we did not become lost in a cornfield, we did nearly make it to Wisconsin before a clue was got, directions asked, and we turned around.

The route we took passed through Gary, where it blends into Chicago, and the two - though once each separate, and though pride separates them by name still - become part of the same sprawl. Upon seeing this area, I have always felt a strange melancholy; a sadness of color, the ache felt by one who has not lived here, cannot imagine living here, and can only see from a distance. From a road which runs through, runs over, and rushes people who run along.

Church spires and telephone wires, factories stained with rust and wear. A gray sky hovers over a gray world. It seems that only billboards and casinos provide color here, where so many houses mingle in a state of dirt-laced decay. Everything - homes, factories, cars, roads, trees, the endless cheap franchises, the people whom I have never met and never will - all this seems to sag into itself, never escaping its fate, its perpetual cycle. We die a little every day and we try not to notice.