cross-country: NJ

S_, i know you did this drive a long time back, during the week of ash and smoldering metal, not looking back. but how the fuck did you make it through new jersey? growing up in the West gives one a certain set of expectations: that a west-bound highway will take you to the west, a south to the south; that you can point yourself in a certain direction and make progress towards your destination; and that one place will look different from another. New Jersey taught me how little i understood. i would rather crawl through barb-wire in a freezing rain with a sprained ankle than drive through New Jersey again. it's as if the neat, orderly parallel lines of the interstate highway system had been crumpled into a sorry mess by someone trying to jam it into an improbably small space. (manhattan, perhaps). camels through the eyes of needles. hundreds of thousands of camels. angry ones.
it was about 90 degrees and my cat, who had never traveled farther than a car-service to the vet before, was looking at me like i'd just betrayed everything we'd ever believed in.
i stopped at a gas station and bought a map and took out money to pay tolls but the map was at such a scale as to show NJ as three or four thick red lines without labels of any sort.