Me and Morgan went to Modesto to thrift and it was so fucking wack. Creepy redfaced fat rusty pig boys whispering fag in our ears flipping us off in a screechy pickup... women with painted faces discussing cigarette price chages at Valero, a town called Salida which I think means exit lies right next door to the town which means "modest". We drove twenty miles to find a hollow aluminum shed full of dusty deals... 49 cents for fucked up clothes that sucked. They gave me a nice seafoam green and denim blue floral bag for my cropped floral cardigan... why did I buy it, cause I wanted a souvenir to prove that the trip wasn't a waste, that the central valley isn't a black hole, that it's an underappreciated gem responsible for the poetry of Joan Didion and my mother, who climbed water towers to watch for enemy war planes in the 1950's when she was in high school, dreaming dairy queen dreams and feeling jealousy toward her sister who found two bucks behind the toilet once. The windmills follow the curves of the hills, spinning fast and ominous, and you feel very small and scared of them, as you are in the darkness of the valley, feeling encircled, almost ganged up on by hoards of mega lacerators. The clouds are black on the top sides and white glowing under belly, and the girls at wal- mart work their magic on you, informing you about one dollar rentals of popular movies, and it seems there is no room in her sentence to tell her you don't live by here or near any wal mart at all... the closest one is near the airport. It seems like a place where you might pick out a new shade of hairdye for some entertainment or get married, or drive a hundred miles an hour on the freeway. If you have ever in your life wondered who is enjoying all of the wonderful antidepressants you hear about, it must be modesto, where people would never think that their lethargy is caused by Carl's junior chicken stars and they don't want to get up in the morning because nothings new, Lady GaGa is still number one on the radio, T.I. is number two, and Kanye is number three, though depending on whose calling in what requests, the trifecta may re-arrange itself throughout the six weeks that the songs reign supreme, but I digress... orchards forever, that make your mind so blank that you are scrolling through a list of fruits and nuts, deciding what kind of tree is repeating itself into such an organized forest along the roads which are disorienting and sometimes deceptive, twenty minute drives toward what you thought was something, abruptly dead ending. Signs tell you depressing things about droughts and deltas. Modesto is the biggest empty that ever was.
