We are inside ‘Zeitgeist Publishing’ for an hour before I realize we will learn nothing from the people there. They couldn’t help us if they wanted to.

‘Preface

This is not a destination guide, reader. No one place between the covers warrants visiting on its own. This book shares more in common with the average trail guide than it does with any popular travel publication. It attempts to do the work of a trail guide for roadways, the half-mad cardiovascular system of America with all of its cracked, weeping asphalt and all of its cracked, weeping people. It attempts to describe the way between things and, in doing so, the book has become as mad and winding as the road.

I’m sorry, for this, but there is no other way.

I don’t understand how ‘Zeitgeist’ came to know about my writing or in what form they will publish it. I don’t understand what they want when they ask me to write a preface. This must be what a ranger feels when they are tasked with describing their park in short sentences for a single sign at the trailhead: entice the reader- and warn them.

Let me entice you.

Strangeness is inherent to the periphery. A speeding vehicle strikes a deer. The animal drags its body to the outer edge of the forest and succumbs to death. It becomes strange, there. Its shape changes. It fills with new life. It becomes a niche ecosystem for things neither afraid of the traffic nor of the woodland predators. It exists, for a short time, in limbo. And then it is forgotten.

The wayside attractions are much the same- repulsive and fleeting. To purchase this book, to follow it as a guide, is not to become the driver or the deer. It is to become the weird life that inhabits the corpse in the interim.

Let me warn you.

Carry water, always. Tell your loved ones where you are going and when you hope to return. Carry a blanket and a length of rope. Tell your loved ones when you are going and how you hope to return. Carry a flashlight and fresh batteries. Tell your loved ones how you are going and why you hope to return. Carry a shovel and something sharp. Tell your loved ones why you are going and where you hope to return. Carry a map- any map.

Carry water.

My limited understanding of German suggests that ‘geist’ is just as likely to translate to ‘ghost’ as it is to ‘spirit.’ My limited understanding of things unknown is that there is a huge difference between the two. The spirits of the forest. Team spirit. Fine spirits. Spirituality. There is nothing in these words to suggest menace. Or death. Ghosts, on the other hand, are always dead and often unhappily so. Maybe that’s why we lean on ‘spirit’ in our understanding of ‘zeitgeist,’ though my own experiences would suggest that lost time can be as bitter and haunting as the restless dead.

A preface is strange, reader. Like the ranger’s sign, it must be written by someone who has already completed the task it defines. It’s the reader’s beginning and the author’s end.’

There is an art to looking busy and everyone inside the small office that constitutes this branch of ‘Zeitgeist Publishing’ excels at it. I excelled at it in a past life, which is why it only takes me the hour to see through the charade. A man scribbles on a note pad and throws out the pages. Blank paper pours from the copier and a woman arrives to cycle it back into the machine. Several people appear to be mouthing silently at phones in the back and they end their calls as I pass on my way to the restroom. The man at the front desk keeps us waiting and, assuming that’s his job, he’s the only one currently performing it well.

The Editor is quiet and I take the silence as apprehension until she readily agrees to investigate on the way back from the toilet. We find her office, or, we find the editor’s office and her name is on the plaque. It’s empty until she enters and then she seems to vacillate between the Editor I know and the editor that she should be.

“I think I’ve been here before,” she says, opening a drawer and setting her gun inside, “Isn’t this where we started?”

-traveler

We arrive in a Zeitgeist hub town and as we coast around the corner toward the supposed branch’s address, I feel the Editor’s fingers digging into my sides. They release, suddenly, as we pass. It appears, by all accounts, to be open.

Of course, after weeks of travel, the Editor begins to lose her nerve. I see it in the way her hands shake at the gas station, rattling the ice in her plastic soda fountain cup. I hear it in deep breaths she takes when she thinks I’m not close enough to notice. The Editor, faced with the end of journey, is panicking. All of her work has been with things unfinished.

She jumps on the idea of taking a hotel room for the evening (“It’s getting late,” I say, “They may not be open much longer.”). She grips me again as we pass the branch on the way, straining her neck to catch a glimpse of… what? Another self? I look too but I see the windows of Zeitgeist Publishing are mirrors and turn back to the road before I can make eye contact with her. The door seems to be opening as we pass but I don’t see the person leaving and, if the Editor does, she keeps it to herself.

By sheer happenstance there is a Zeitgeist Publishing product catalog in the drawer of the hotel room (along with a phonebook, the Bible). It’s a slim pamphlet, made up entirely of esoteric travel writing.

“‘Check Under the Bed’: a Guide to Cheap Hotels”

“‘An English-to-Forest Translation Guide’: Make Them Listen to your Poetry!”

“Biting Insects Back: Alternative Protein Recipes.”

Finally, near the back, is Autumn by the Wayside, its subtitle playfully censored by exclamation points. Its description is as follows:

‘How long can you be lost on a circular path? Follow the curious traveler as he attempts to find out. Tag along on his journey into America’s living room, where he digs into the spaces between couch cushions to find things otherwise forgotten. Follow him, and tell us where you are. He has been gone so long.

‘Autumn by the Wayside:’ a travel guide for those who mean to lose themselves.‘

-traveler

‘A small, mid-western university, Prairie College, is renowned for two things: producing well-equipped students of agriculture and a growing monument to failure that spreads across its expansive campus dubbed ‘Academic Rigor Mortis’ (or, sometimes, the ARM). In practice, the ARM restates a situation made relatively clear in the institution’s public documents- that the success of their small number of graduates is achieved at the cost of the large percentage of students that fail or drop-out. The academic targets of Prairie College are impossibly demanding and students are expected to fulfill physical farming duties in addition to coursework. The administration has leaned into this trend, creating something that shares more aspects with an obstacle course than it does with any other accredited educational program in the country. Its workload has been deemed psychologically damaging by several local psychiatrists who describe failed students as ‘irrevocably broken.’

‘Academic Rigor Mortis’ is the result of a particularly cruel policy, one that states that ‘Prairie College’ will not release documents for transfer before a student buries her completed physical coursework on campus, erecting a small headstone that displays their proposed (and unfinished) thesis to mark the lot. The ARM, then, is a field sown with failure and failure grows there, the paper and ink leaching into the earth and creating a dark chemical shadow.

‘Prairie College’s’ founding documents famously refer to its ideal graduates as ‘enlightened farmers’ and famously digress into something like a summons for a singular being: ‘The Enlightened Farmer.’ The school’s tightening filter, it’s suggested, will someday result in its final graduating class- a class of one. This student will end the ARM’s decay and, perhaps, the punishing educational cycle of the institution from which it extends.’

There was a time when I thought I may have wanted to be a farmer. I would tend the garden in the backyard and read books about the end of the world. Looking out over the ‘ARM,’ I wonder how long we’ve been preparing for disaster. Humanity is bracing itself for an apocalypse and the end-times are crowded with prophecies. The longer we draw this out, the stranger the world will become.

-traveler

‘‘The Thistle Garden’ has grown at the center of Bellstaff, Wisconsin for three decades and it has made the small town miserable for all those years. The thistle there (all North American varieties of the species as well as several prize-winning, experimental strains) is not bound by the garden walls. It runs rampant, having infiltrated the urban sprawl in the same way it seems to infest forests elsewhere in the country. It rises from split asphalt and twists itself into ivy. It lies dry and dormant under snowfall until a careless foot breaks through the frost. It grows like mold in backpacks and in the collars of old shirts. The air of Bellstaff itches with thistle and so thick does it grow that ‘The Garden’ may well be the town itself.

But, officially, it is not.

‘The Thistle Garden’ is an acre of tastefully shaped weeds and, because contemporary landscaping favors a wilder look than years previous, the thistle is allowed to grow until it leans just over the boundary of the walkway, creating an unwinnable maze. Few would think to enter ‘The Thistle Garden’ in shorts, but even jeans-sporting visitors report that the plants linger on their denim, an evolutionary long-con with no obvious purpose but to cause discomfort.

Nature’s senseless cruelty, in this regard, is mirrored in ‘The Garden’s’ keepers, who have constructed a playground in the center- the best playground in all of Bellstaff. To quickly catch one’s self at the end of the slide seems to be a natural talent held by most of the city’s minors, but this is not at all the case. Each of these children has been jettisoned into the thistle at least once- a tradition as deeply held as chicken pox and equally as important. They have learned and they encourage others to learn as well. Out-of-town cousins are rarely warned ahead of time and, though many consider this a vicious joke, you will find no one laughs while they rescue a child from ‘The Garden.’

-excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

In my absolute willingness to turn over creative guidance to the Editor, I wonder if I may have overestimated her expertise. The relationship between a writer and an editor should involve careful collaboration, I think, or a playful push and pull. It should involve a balance, not necessarily of skills, but of power.

Or so I imagine.

Somewhere along the way I seem to have given up total control to the Editor, assuming, like I do of almost every person I meet, they she knew something about this world that I did not. As I watch her struggle with the crank of an old souvenir penny-crusher, I wonder if I’ve put too much trust in her lead and I worry about the process of reclaiming that power peacefully.

“I don’t think this is the one,” I venture, and she glares at me.

“What makes you the expert?”

“If I wrote the book-” I reason, “-and you assume I did. If I wrote that it would be easy once you found the right machine, it’s not going to be hard.”

She continues to glare and I shrug.

“I never try very hard.”

‘The span known, among exonumists, as the Period for Contemporary Elongateds has already far surpassed the 20-year Period for Modern Elongateds, the distinguishing factor of which was that said elongated exonumia were mainly created and sold as trinkets in stores rather than crushed fresh on-site by the sheer manpower of the tourists themselves. The early timeline of the Elongated Exonumia Tradition is somewhat contested in the field and crushed coins existing prior to the 1960’s are simply called ‘oldies,’ a term that is just as likely to refer to actual, machined designs as it is to nickels left on train tracks.

Suffice to say that the off-centered copper stamping of a smiling gorilla that you’ve frivolously squandered your laundry money on has a long, absurd history and, no doubt, a long, absurd future.

The Period for Contemporary Elongateds is coming to a strange end with the discovery of a mysterious setting available on a series of modern penny-crushing machines in rural Iowa. The most reliable of these machines can be found at the ‘Diesel Dump,’ a small gas-station, laundromat, and dive bar that is popular both with the locals and with a certain brand of roving hipster. By pulling the crank out at its base, as though one is preparing to set the time on their watch, the machine can be operated in reverse and, fed any type of elongated copper, it will produce two quarters and an old penny.

The process has become known, in certain circles, as ‘Maxwell’s Remonetization’ and the machine, ‘Maxwell.’ ‘Maxwell’ and its mysterious process remained a strange but benign attraction until late 2017 when Alexander Horton, a longtime exonumist and recent drug-addict, arrived at the ‘Diesel Dump’ and exchanged his formidable collection of elongated coins for $350 dollars in warm quarters and pennies. The event prompted Valeria Isabella, owner of the ‘Diesel Dump,’ to admit that she hadn’t ever given the machine much thought, neither emptying nor servicing it in the several decades it has gathered dust near the door.

Experts have confirmed that ‘Maxwell’ is returning crushed pennies to their original forms, not just exchanging them for equal value, and that the quarters paid back for the trouble are identical to those used to pay for the initial elongation. The ‘experts,’ it should be said, are all members of a quasi-cult that has formed around ‘Maxwell’s Remonetization’ and believe that the machines capable of the process are acting against the slow decay of our universe. These strangers stalk tourist hubs with heavy pockets and a jangling gait, sure that, in repairing the nation’s flattened coinage, they ward off time’s arrow.

Those in opposition of the ‘Remonetizationist’ movement have criticized its followers for glorifying the past through the worship of old money. The cult leaders have denied these accusations, stating they act only against entropy and are not at all opposed to change.’

‘Maxwell,’ it turns out, has been moved near the counter so that the ‘Remonetizationists’ can be easily monitored. The crank pulls forward with a satisfying thunk and the Editor glares, again, to see that I was right.

From her wallet, the Editor pulls an old souvenir penny, dark with tarnish. She hands it to me without explanation. It says ‘CLOWN TOWN, 1991’ and features a wide, cartoon grin from which several teeth are missing.

“My sister stole my lucky quarter for this,” she says when I hand it back, “And it’s been a pretty shitty thirty years.”

The Editor bends the metal to that it fits into the machine’s input tray and slams it backward. We work the crank together and ‘Maxwell’ groans with mysterious internal effort. After a minute, or so, three coins clatter out the bottom. The Editor retrieves them and she smiles, instantly, in recognition.

“That’s the one.”

The remaining 26 cents is thrown into a pile that eventually pays for two soft-serve ice creams and a coffee on the patio of the ‘Diesel Dump.’ The sun is setting and we haven’t made plans for the night, a prospect that would normally worry me, but seems to be mitigated, in part, by the Editor’s renewed calm. She fingers the quarter incessantly, twirling it on the table and dropping it often enough that I suggest she pocket the thing before it’s lost again. She does, and her hand remains there with it as the ice cream melts to a chocolate puddle on the cheap plastic furniture.

-traveler