The mountain and the motorcycle
My great-grandma's house was on the ass-end of a single stoplight town in the nowhere part of Texas.  I don't really know where it was or how to spell the name of the place because I always went there as a kid.  It felt like forever away and I had no sense of direction.  Maybe there were archaic and magical steps to get there--I don't know.  

The point I'm trying to make is that her dirt road was the kind of place that had an old blind dog sitting on the porch and staring sunward with one ear resting on the splintered wood and the other turned over on top of his head to reveal the crevices of his diseased ear canal.  The kind of place that had a rotting school bus in someone's front yard, just waiting for some neighbor kids to get tetanus playing in it.  Huge satellite dishes poking out of the red earth in front of each house.  Dusty broken-window sedans under carports.  We would go there and visit relatives I didn't know and they'd talk of how I'd grown.  Possums would crawl around under the house while I tried to sleep on an air matress in a dusty living room littered with ghosts.  People said nigger like it was any other word or with a sort of apologetic reverence for past sins.  Nobody seemed to have money or a job or even a working farm that I could tell.  But then, I have to fill the gaps with these living details because it's all slipped out of my memory.

But the real point I'm trying to make is that all week I've felt like that dead-end road of packed dirt the color of rust is as good a metaphor as there is for the life I've been living.  Anachronistic, forgotten, misplaced, the American dream ground into dust by my own and others' hands.  It's got me in a serious Thing here.

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This, though, always cheers me up, no matter how often I see it.