"Motel Checklist" (latest)

[mnaz]

1. Drone of eighteen wheelers in your window. 2. Bonus, within earshot of a restless train. 3. Deduction if train shakes the room. 4. Some mixture of cracked plaster, singing pipe, sloping floor, peeling paint or fuzzy bare carpet from the Carter years, worn patterns like parched riverbeds, splintered table and splintered chair, whiskey snifter, antique air. 5. Noisy fan to drown it all out. 6. Authentic neon along Main. 7. Bonus, if letters missing. 8. Literary places, faces nicked, echoes of fine, haggard craftsmen if lucky, tales from sturdy, grim early days when workmen sawed majestic boards, built huge casings around doors under twelve layers of paint, against open road irony. 9. High country on the edge of nothing, offsets too much of everything.

10. No keycards and click-slam doors. Well, unless a cut-rate casino. Depends on the trip. Six-fifty at the buffet powers a whole day. 11. Question gambling’s relevance if unemployed. 12. No keycards! Well, unless you conk at a truck stop on the interstate, on/off-ramp, two-story box, ten-story gas station sign, tractor-trailer drone, fade, never a better chance to hear it (if you ignore cable). You could walk miles of pavement to the gas station for a processed meat snack, past muscular, idling diesel. 13. No abnormally large parking lots.

14. Find Route 66, if nearby. Find the old streets. They’re tricky to find. Everything’s for sale or demolished. 15. Look for a time before the giant earthmovers and blasters with large federal contracts gouged mountains and straightened curves, made it easy to go a hundred miles, or nine hundred. 16. Two lanes by your door, stoplights if more. 17. Walls you might want to converse with, one story in general. 18. Did I mention neon? Neon’s tricky too. A few space pads out on 66 were restored—sterile new essence beside fresh paint on quirky neon flourish, Americana perched on corporate jaws. We couldn’t build Route 66 today; it would look like divided highway, three-story click boxes and ten story Shell signs.

19. Did I mention 66? Doo Wop Space Age neon free-for-all. Where big cars with jet tailfins zoomed past giant tiki gods, rockets, flying saucers and loud polygons into the open sun flare West on their way to Tomorrowland. Yes, the atomic coffee shops, upswept roofs, plate glass, huge boomerangs and arrows, everything in motion, hung from the sky, and it seemed they might fly. 20. Yes, find 66 if nearby, but be advised, much of it is a forgotten scar, a tumbleweed sun. 21. If not 66, find Route Something, the old road, where a few battered classics survive, and you can fill the tank with high octane grease, proper road fuel. 22. Yes, Doo Wop architecture if you find it—exotic beside a road into empty deserts, though both were similar in possibility.

23. The main rule is you sleep when it’s dark, narcotic excursions aside. You might even take (wheeled) escape further—past the last fast food box and feed store, past broken asphalt strips and boneyards on the edge of town—tires, radiators, V8 blocks—onto rutted trails to No Place, the rolling motel. No neon, but stars. And a little whiskey to ease blessings of solitude. 24. Sleep in your truck. 25. Or a motel on the edge, beside broken asphalt and rutted dirt, where you might slip between worlds more easily. A grail of sorts. It might have a twisted sign hit by Jim’s pickup in 1973, with fluorescent plastic atop, faded, cracked, canted, barely standing, poor Jim. 26. Bonus, if letters missing. 27. Bad pavement in the lot. If pavement is fresh you pay. Yes, bad pavement. Or no pavement.

btw, here's a good link on Googie/populuxe/DooWop/Space Age architecture... http://www.spaceagecity.com/googie/

[Steve Plonk]

I can't forget old Route 66. I went on a portion of it in 1972 when I was hitchhiking back from Big Sur, CA., and again in 2000 when I went to meet my brother close to his fiftieth birthday and not far from mine.
It was nifty because we were both fifty. We met my nephew in St. Louis and had a rollicking great time there trying out a few local beers and listening to some great blues...Yes, I believe you may still get your kicks
on old Route 66...just like in the song.

[stilltrucking]

Thanks for the link to googie
I never noticed how the comic strip Zippy uses it as the backdrop in so many strips.

This from your link

Googie was about the past, the present and the future -- But mostly the future. It was part of the popular culture, which reinforced a unified vision of a utopian future built on mankind's work and ingenuity.

Like most art forms that told a story or inspired with optimism, Googie went out of fashion in the mid-1960s. It died when the story of our grand future died in the hearts of Americans.

[Lightning Rod]

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