PORN AND CORN

Here is a story I wrote during our cross-country soul-searching drive this spring. It represents the kind of things you think about long and hard, when you're stuck in a car for hours and hours and days and days.

June 2004
In the middle of the U.S., a mystery waits to be unraveled. We noticed this when driving cross-country recently.

Missouri, Kansas and Indiana grow enough corn to feed all the cows on earth and probably on several other planets too. Driving the interstate highway through these areas is boring, due to the unchanging scenery. Corn. Then a dirt road. Then a town with 8 buildings. Then more corn. For days.

The mystery glares from nearly every exit off the interstate. Billboards all across the states announce the proximity and convenience of something I’d never realized existed: “XXX Adult Superstores”. We didn’t see a single “XXX Adult Superstore” in any other state. Maybe we just didn’t look in the right places. No prominent billboards, anyway.

I personally don’t care whether or not these super stores exist. I’m sure they fill a niche. But what’s with the quantity and overblown stature of these places??

We came up with a couple of theories.
1) The farmers are really, really bored. All they can see stretching before them, til the day they draw their last breath, is an eternal parade of identical green shafts, identically spaced, growing identically slowly. Little skinny green soldiers, marching, marching, marching, marching in perfect formation, going nowhere. Marching, marching. With little yellow tassels on their hats. That spectre in my future might drive me to an XXX Superstore myself.
2) Or maybe the residents feel that their states have nothing of sufficient interest to bring in tourist dollars from the interstate traffic. They may have heard from their road-tripping visitors that the monotonous parades of marching, marching, marching corn were driving them mad. Perhaps they dreamed up these Superstores in a desperate attempt to capitalize on the only other up-and-coming industry they could think of. Something dramatic enough to really take a driver’s mind off of corn. Porn.

They just go together, don’tcha think? Corn and porn. One boring, one not. One fills the need to sustain ourselves physically. The other fills the need to see and think about something more interesting than endless identical green stalks. Porn and corn. A match made in heaven. Or not.
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