Illinois has a way of making me feel completely isolated, and not in the good, pensive sort of way.

I want to run through the plains and through all the toddler cornfields and show them all that I am not as alone as they want me to be — that I am, singly, a complexly accompanied soul de triomphe.

I also would like to pave new highways, quite literally.  All this linearity, this driving for kilometers at a time in an unswerving line, is completely absurd, as if Midwestern humanity is trying to assert its differences from the animal kingdom: the bees, which delightfully skirr in sibilant doo-da kind of curves; the river otter, which follows its own effervescent and organic path, quite different from the carefully-planned pavement; the deer, who so clearly want to wander rather than travel in a single formatted direction, and they pay a dear price - innards skewed on the blacktop, and I briefly get to swerve, break through the dotted line, avoid splashing red on the tires or white body of my car.