Cashed out but buying back in with champagne bottle in hand

OUT OF ATHENS AND INTO THE MAELSTROM
Hello Cleveland! No seriously, it's good to be back. Where have I been? Sit back and allow me to regale you with the tale. A tale of not two, but three cities.

Rewind some three months ago and we find our strangely charming but flawed protagonist on the eve of leaving Athens, Georgia (the scene of his most uncomfortable comfort zone) in a state of melancholy and poverty feeling worthless, penniless, hopeless, and some other words ending in a similar suffix. For some odd reason he had it in his head that this departure would be nothing but a brief sabbatical before he returned to this quaint Southern college town. However, like any other great Greek drama it seems the Divine Fates had other plans in mind.

And so now I am on the road pushing ever westward and ever northward towards a destination and a destiny I have yet to comprehend. For the moment I sit shotgun, sharing the bench with my mother who sits to my left, piloting this beast of a UHaul across the asphalt spiderweb that covers my American landscape. I now remember what I had forgotten in my teenage rebellion and youthful isolationism: my mother is a great woman, perhaps the greatest woman, a woman built of kindness and quiet dignity, but maintaining a ferocious strength about her.

In my hand rests a book, a novel of fitting and ironic significance. In the darkening light my eyes scan line after line of the wandering adventures of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty as they criss-cross the very same earth that I am writing my own tale into. My brain begins to think in the prose of Kerouac and I cannot help but think that the old man would approve of my own journey, my own tale of the road. But this is not a rehashing of old events; the yellow headlights illustrate something new, a fresh and inviting story that has yet to be told. And with that in mind we race towards the purple bruise of the sunset, eager to beat it, and wondering what secrets it holds in store for us. A succession of states fall in eventual turn to us; a pair of unstoppable conquerors who arm themselves not with torch and sword, but with gasoline and the American highway.

We pass through cities, great American cities, and into the bosom of the American plain. She opens her welcoming arms to us and even grants us passage over her magnificent waterways, including Old Man Mississippi, the river of my birth. For me this is the heartwater of my nation and it is no surprise to me that a man who plied these noble, muddy waters would be his country's greatest spokesman. And that a man so tied to them would be our greatest leader. But my travels continue away from this mighty artery and into the Midwestern prairie.

Wisconsin. This state shares great concerns as I pass through her hills. A land of sunshine and simple, green rolling land. My Teutonic ancestors would have loved this place; a land of green pasture and simple desires. What a strange thing to hold her in such high regard as I try to outdo her. Minnesota fails in that regard; a grey, slow land that wishes to be more but restricts itself in several sad tales. This is not home. And so I come to Boston. A friend has a job opening and I am suddenly where I have wanted to be for ages. I was in Minnesota for a paltry time period and now I must remove myself to a more cosmopolitan arena. Boston and New England call to me. This is a place I have longed for since an early age. For now I am content...