South Dakota 

I’ve started to think of Lasky as the Forest Gump of cross-country driving.  He just keeps drivinga and drivinga.  In the movie, Forest’s football coach yells a line when Forest scores a touchdown, runs through the marching band, and through the tunnel out of the stadium.  I’ve bastardized the line to suit Lasky and I think it whenever I jolt awake in the middle of the night to find him expressionlessly conquering dark country mile after dark country mile.  The line is: “He must be the dumbest son-of-a-bitch alive!  But he sure can drive without getting tired.”

Mount Rushmore is a tourist trap’s tourist trap.  I went through a period in my life when, for some reason, I was obsessed with Thomas Jefferson.  I probably read ten books in a row about him.  So, when I saw his huge head up there, I smiled a little.  But after watching the other tourists and seeing, a minimum of, fifteen red, white and blue fanny packs, it’s hard not to get cynical about a place.

Reading the various plaques explaining the history of the monument I was reminded of how people could become so stupid as to want a patriotic fanny pack in the first place.  Anyone familiar with the way American history text books are written would have recognized the vague language used to whitewash history and prevent people from developing critical-thinking skills. 

The plaques dedicated to Rushmore’s sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, were perfect examples of this educational strategy.  They all said ambiguous things like, “Borglum was outspoken about many issues” or “Borglum wrote and lectured on various topics.” 

Borglum was in the Klu-Klux-clan.  But we can’t have the dopey lady in the star spangled shorts reading that on her vacation, can we?

The real problem with Mount Rushmore, though, a problem that left revisionist history in a distant second, was Shit for Brains making me take upwards of six thousand pictures of him posing with the presidents.  He kept standing at different vantage points in the foreground of the monument and yelling unbelievable things to me like, “Now lets do some wistful ones!” or “Just line my nose up with Washington’s!”

He asked a simple-minded lady to take our picture.  She took the picture, looked at it and smiled.  “It looks pretty good.” She said.  It wasn't.  When Lasky looked at it he told her the composition was all wrong.  This was the first piece of art criticism this woman had ever heard that wasn’t from Simon, Randy or Paula.  She looked like she wanted to cry.  He gave her the camera back and told her to do it again. When he came back and stood next to me he muttered that the woman didn't know what she was doing.  I wanted to take the camera and smash it off his bald head.   

I consider photography to be a bullshit art form even when done at the highest level.  So, to me, the average jackass (Lasky) taking pictures of every damn thing with a digital camera is about as artistic as checking your email.  I have a joke I use; “Photographers are artists in the same way that race car drivers are athletes, we just can’t think of anything else to call them.”  I wrote that as a dig at an ex-girlfriend I never sufficiently got over, who I found out started dating a photographer.  But now, two years later, it works just as well as a dig at Lasky.  In writing, petulance is a gift that keeps on giving.

Another bungled attempt at picking up two girls found us sleeping in the truck again. 

Lasky’s face is starting to make me physically ill.

He played an old Bill Hicks album on his iPod as we fell asleep.  It was one of the albums Hicks recorded in the early 90’s just before he died.  He was ranting and raving about Billy Ray Cyrus, Jay Leno, and Arsenio Hall.  He called them demons let loose on the landscape to lower the standards.  “Who actually enjoys their work?” he barked.  “Where do those people come from?” 

I’m not sure where they come from.  But everyday of the year, I know where you can find a bunch of them.  Milling around the observation deck, staring up at those four giant faces.