I’m in the midst of reading “State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America” and I’m a little miffed.

When we got to Wichita one Saturday night, there were high-school kids cruising up and down the main drag, shouting things from car to car, and generally whooping it up. They really did that.

I’m pretty damn annoyed with the piece on Kansas by Jim Lewis. He fully admits only visiting the state once while following a band on tour, and it shows. Never, ever, have I found any “whooping” in my hometown. His piece continues its nosedive, fiercely first-person while eschewing any actual insight: “I want to tell you a story about Kansas, or rather, to tell you a story that Kansas once told about me.” There’s rambling about some “Kansas of the Mind,” many stories of stereotypical Midwesterners to belitte, and we finally reach the end: a bad imitation of Augusten Burrows or David Sedaris. Fooey.

Illinois, however, is fairly represented by Dave Eggers.

The slogan on all license plates in Illinois, for as long as anyone can remember, has been Land of Lincoln. Everyone in Illinois and all sensible people elsewhere believe it to be the best license-plate slogan of all the states in our union.

He winds through the history of Abraham Lincoln’s time in Illinois, reaching the logical conclusion that because of the great people who have originated from this strange state, our country would be unrecognizable if it had never existed. I tend to agree.

Fittingly, he addresses the mispronunciation of Illinois in “no nonsense” way: first offense, $50,000 fine; second offense, vocal cord scraping. And don’t let it happen four times, for execution awaits! Eggers ends his piece with a “kindness of strangers” anecdote, where he runs out of gas on the downstate jaunt from Chicago to Champaign, and the chills are replaced with warm, fuzzy feelings toward Illinoisans.

But my favorite so far is Alexander Payne’s entry on Nebraska. A close neighbor of Kansas, I was mostly a stranger to the state until my friend Micah moved there for a newspaper job. Now I’ve grown to really like the place; desolation, conservatism and all. Payne’s introduction:

The WPA’s Nebraska: A Guide to the Cornhusker State begins this way and is a good place to start: “The traveler crossing Nebraska gets an impression of broad fields, deep skies, wind, and sunlight; clouds racing over prairie swells; herds of cattle grazing on the sandhills; red barns and white farmhouses surrounded by fields of tasseling corn and ripening wheat; windmills and wire fences; and men and women who take their living form the soil.”

That the first words invoke the traveler rather than the Nebraskan himself captures how Americans have been thinking about the place for over 200 years – as somewhere to travel through, not to.

But that Unicameral legislative house, what a beauty! The only state in the union that went this unconventional route, a freak show in a country of  two-house political landscapes. That should be enough to send you running into Nebraska.

He fully admits that he’s writing with the perspective afforded from his hometown of Omaha, which could arguably be the same as writing about America from New York. But Payne is all-in, gung-ho about the positives despite facts that gambling is prohibited and strip clubs must require pasties. He’s proud and does his best to show the essence of Nebraskans.

If only Payne had grown up in Kansas. We deserve a better entry.

My faux Christmas trip to Nebraska should now be cozy memories of friends, good food and late nights. And it was, really, with a dump truck full of inconvenience.

I suppose it all went sour when I decided to fly to Nebraska. Faced with driving across Iowa in winter – and a crummy Amtrak schedule – I decided to take my chances by hopping the short distance between Illinois and the cornhusker state.

Omaha’s Eppley Field is a perfectly serviceable airport. It’s small, with quick security procedures, and seems to offer a decent selection of flights. However, no one would confuse it for a city within a city. Amenities are lacking. Like last call at a bar, dinner hours are strictly enforced; don’t be caught hunting for food after 7 p.m.

So when a bad ice storm in Chicago cripples any airplane within 1000 miles, I’m left watching my departure time change every 30 minutes. A six hour delay now, and they still won’t cancel the damn flight. That connecting flight home to Peoria is a pipedream. I’m ready to rent a car, hop a train, anything – tuk-tuk isn’t out of the question.

We finally drop into O’Hare at slightly after 1 a.m. and I see that another group of weary travelers are waiting on the arrival of our plane to head to Des Moines at 2 a.m. My feelings toward United Airlines oscillate between admiration for pushing through and anger at the preposterousness of it all.

After a quick stop at the only (and I do mean only) Starbucks open after midnight in the entire airport, it was time to haul my granola yogurt parfait and oatmeal across acres of airport. Entire cities of airport, each decorated differently, with no shuttles running between provinces. Two, three, no – four men’s restrooms closed for service.

Terminal F, at last. There are many sleeping already, some with newspaper over faces, others cocooned in mini-cities with suitcase walls and coat ceilings. I switch spots several times as better locations open, like some sort of real estate shark, and finally end up horizontal across four seats with coats as makeshift blankets. It is a fitful few hours of slumber.

I awake to the sound of an angry gate attendant, yelling at her charges like some sort of sadistic second grade teacher. Time to break camp, freshen up and drag my ass to the correct gate.

My departure gate is the 3rd world of O’Hare gates, sitting in the basement of the terminal building with only sliding doors shielding us from the 4 regional jets parked directly outside. Hades is full this morning, and I park my disheveled self in a chair.

At this point, I’m feeling mighty handsome. I’m snotty (literally), a red-eyed demon, and I likely smell like a YMCA. A smile hasn’t crossed my face in 12 hours. And it is at this very moment that a pretty girl sits directly next to me. No, not even a seat to buffer between us. She is practically sitting in my lap.

She’s the epitome of cute – short brown hair, a foot shorter than me – and sporting a large Buddhist tattoo on her neck.

“Are you going to Peoria,” she asks, slightly shy but meeting my eyes. And with that, a conversation is struck and we share brief histories of our lives. It’s first date material, but my constant fear of flying is diminished and I soon find myself on the plane, switching seats to sit next to her.

“Do you need a ride when we get back,” she asks, still friendly and adorable. I wistfully tell her no, I have a car in the parking lot. Hindsight has me offering HER a ride, as she was without car. And without cell phone, curiously enough. She claimed that she had no desire for one – “I don’t like the idea of being reachable all the time.”

Megan? My mind is a cheese grater at the moment, and I’ve had to ask her name again twice. So it’s not Megan. Morgan?

The flight to Peoria is a scant 20 minutes in the air, an amount of time that’s both sinful and silly simultaneously. We land, but walk together to the baggage claim, and I bid her adieu.

I leave a business card with her, instructions to reach me for a night out. Her idea, honest, but not meant to be. The connection was never made, and I felt mopey about it. I replayed scenarios in my head, ones where I actually made plans or asked how I could contact her. But then I remembered that these things happen all the time, random collisions of humanity that have a very specific purpose at a very specific time.

And so, Megan/Morgan, if you ever stumble upon this, I apologize for blathering on about you. 800 words may be overdoing it.

Really, who gives a damn about the Golden Globes? I didn’t watch and the list of winners has confirmed my feelings on the event. Just seeing “Avatar,” James Cameron and Sandra Bullock on the winners’ list makes me retch. From the Los Angeles Times:

When he won the directing award earlier, Cameron said he was ill-prepared to give an acceptance speech because he thought ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow was going to win for “The Hurt Locker“…

Right.

Thankfully, Jeff Bridges won best actor in a drama with his role in “Crazy Heart.” There were also TV awards, but all were safe and boring choices. We have the Hollywood Foreign Press Association to thank:

The New York Times reported that the HFPA “functions like an exclusive club, admitting a maximum of five new members a year, though more often…accepting only one. Any single member may object to a new member, making it extremely difficult to join.

But enough about that. The big news of the evening – as far as I can tell from my couch this morning – is that ensemble director Christopher Guest has been commissioned to create a five-part Census Bureau ad campaign. The first part of the series debuted during a break in last night’s Golden Globes. This is the first time Guest has directed since 2006’s “For Your Consideration” and I’m pretty damn thrilled. Part one of “Payton Schlewitt’s Snapshot of America“:

Last night I sat on my couch after a nice evening outing, watching episode after episode of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” then realized that I could be killing myself doing just that and went to do the dishes. All fine and dandy, a Monday night in apartment D.

I check Twitter during all of this fracas and see that all but two* of the trending topics are inane gobbledygook. In other words, millions and millions of idiots are participating in poorly worded discussions.

Examples included: #sheprobablyahoe, #imnotsaying, #omgfacts

I take great offense at the first example, not because of actual whores being potentially offended, but rather because of the etymology of the word itself. “Ho” is the preferred slang of whore, NOT “hoe.” So to all those whippersnappers out there in Twitterland, I give you my hoe and tell you to bring me back a fine selection of winter potatoes.

And Richard March Hoe would not be pleased. You know, if he were still alive.

*full disclosure: both “Miep Gies” and “Anne Frank” were also trending last night.

I leave you with a worthy palate cleanser from The New York Times. A 104-year-old strongman from Brooklyn was finally brought down by a minivan.

Joe Rollino once lifted 475 pounds. He used neither his arms nor his legs but, reportedly, his teeth. With just one finger he raised up 635 pounds; with his back he moved 3,200. He bit down on quarters to bend them with his thumb.

Note: I received this many months ago, but I’m working through a tremendous backlog of blog posts. Blame the “drafts” feature in WordPress.

From a small home in Lawton, Okla. comes a small brown package. A postal worker exchanges money for a series of stickers that guarantee passage through the wily Midwest. And just three days later, it rests on top of my mailbox in Peoria.

The package is undressed, and a cylindrical canister appears. “Adams Old Fashioned Peanut Brittle: a real nutty surprise,” it reads. I’m hungry, so this is good news. The lid pops off the antique metal container and three long SNAKES propel themselves across my living room. Says Mr. Harrison Ford: “Snakes… why did it have to be snakes?”

I remember this; my dad and I rummaging around his childhood home, him handing me the can and these fabric-covered springs jumping into my face. And now I’m a proud owner of a 1930s “snake in a can” from the famous S.S. Adams Company. Thanks to my aunt Anna!

“God Himself became an irrelevant ice cream vendor
slowly scooping a ball of lemon sherbet
from horizon to painted horizon.”

It Was So Cold by Whitman McGowan

With the weather at a bone-chilling 10 degrees since Christmas Day, I figure it’s high time to post a few winter photos. You know, before it warms up again. (all photos by Adam/Journal Star)