So Close To The Caucuses, Complete With Playlist

I don’t even know what a caucus is. I don’t think anyone knows. They’re all faking it. Caucuses don’t exist. Maybe Iowa doesn’t exist. I’m gonna stop before I get in an argument with Rand McNally on Twitter and end up writing a diss track about them.

So I drove to this thing, which is about eight hours as the crow flies: From Nashville, I took the Great Road out of the Whispering Wood, across the Mering Stream and past the White Mountains to the River Snowbourne and the vast plains of Iowa, as ever under the watchful guard of the Rohirrim these hundreds of years.

At some point while I’m here, I’m gonna eat a PIE SHAKE. I’m trembling with fearcstasy.

But the reason I’m doing all of this (what am I doing with my life?) is to document the entire shebang for you, dear readers. I have my trusty camera and my trusty iPad mini 2 and my trusty cup of bad gas station coffee. I’ll have words for you, and pictures, and sometimes both, and it’ll be thrilling, every damn pixel of it. (I’m trying to option this trip for a book/movie deal, perhaps starring Judas Friedlander and Richard Ayoade as a couple of hard-boiled asshole rogue cops trying to make good on a bet they lost with their C.O. by driving to Iowa. This isn’t set in stone, and it needs a MacGuffin, but you get the idea.)

Here is my roadtrip-up-here playlist, anchored by a Brobdingnagian, nipple-scorching take on “54/46 Was My Number”, the forgotten Stills’ forgotten classic “Lola Stars and Stripes”, “Brooklyn’s Finest” because I’m almost sure the guy pretending to be Al Pacino on that song is still around pretending to be Al Pacino on Pusha T’s (incredible!) King Push – Darkest Before Dawn: The Prelude—and yeah, an R.E.M. track from Monster, because that record kicks ass. Fight me.

Temporarily Iowanally Yours,
B.d.