Yeah. Back on the road again.

My father was a 45-year-old Jewish lawyer. He was six and a quarter feet tall, but he didn't seem too tall to me. He wore spectacles above his nose, which floated atop a medium-sized, salt-and-pepper beard. He was obsessed with steak and the family dog, Kessie, a Miniature Australian Shepherd. My mother was several years older than my father, a rather stocky woman with hair that was graying at an alarming rate. She loved knitting and had an annoying dislike for AC|DC. I was a thirteen-year-old teenager who enjoyed noise, complaining and Japanese cuisine.

We had come out to Massachusetts to deal with my grandparents, a nightmarish couple who needed serious help. My grandmother had a memory problem, and they both needed our company. My education was fulfilled at a highly socialist homeschooling co-op called Voyagers, where I made a few close friends but not the posse I had been desperate for. My father couldn't find a job, and my mother hated the weather.

After nine months of agoraphobically locking ourselves out from the humidity, we decided we would be far better off back in San Francisco. We made our good-byes, good-riddances and impressions as we sped off down Route 9.

It was the best for all of us.

By the time we left our temporary residence in Framingham, the lady was bawling like mad, and it took a brief scratch to cheer her up. At about one, we stopped for gasoline at a station on Route 9. The convenience-store inventory consisted of only three kinds of candy--M&Ms, peanut M&Ms, Milky Ways and Twix. And to think I was in the mood for something with white chocolate! We bid the surly-looking cashier a silent farewell. Air was seventy-five cents. "It's a form of [scandal]," my father said as he grudgingly pumped up the tires.

I noticed there were many sushi bars on the side of the route. Wasabi Japanese Restaurant, Samba Steak+Sushi, Yuko Sushi Boat... What else have I missed?

Hopkinton, Westborough, Auburn and many other little Massachusetts towns float by like great topographic moths. When are we going to get to Connecticut? I keep on repeating to myself.

And finally, Connecticut. I hold my breath as we pass the sign. Welcome to Connecticut, the this-and-that state, Governor Jody Somebody-or-other, bla bla bla.

And there's Hartford, challenging the vegetation and vibrant colors with its cold gray pinnacles. As I had been a suburban kid for the past year, I had not seen a city in so long, I thought it was some kind of giant hedgehog, and I half expected it to turn around and shout "Dinsdale!" at me.

This changed when we drove into the town itself. There were many tunnels, webbing the city like some stange rabbit warren. The architecture is much smoother and more modern than the ugly, squat brick of Boston. With the myriad black panels reflecting the other mirrored windows adjacent, creating an ethereal canyon, it closer resembled San Francisco's Embarcadero. And more billboards! I saved on Geico... Verizon Wireless... The honking of horns was like music to me.

And as suddenly as we entered the web of ramps and roads, we left it. Back on the road again, switching seats every now and then, listening to the cat meow like an Eric Clapton solo. I was next to the cat, and when I stuck my finger through the grates to give her a little pet, she jerked away from me, and my finger ended up somewhere weird, like her ear or her nose instead of her forehead.

The trek was long. We were going through some mountains near the Pennsylvania border when my mother complained of a full bladder. We decided to stop at a Dairy Queen at a tiny little town called Fort Jervis, which boasted to be the home of two wrestlers, Ed and Joe Balucch or some other name that sounded like a puma coughing up a hairball. I ate my ice cream for a few minutes before I complained my hands were starting to smell like grease. I thought it was from some litter I had picked up earlier, so I went to the dingy little bathroom to wash my hands. I waited in taht dingy bathroom for my hands to dry under the blow-dryer, a subsitute for the urine-stained paper towels lying in the middle of the filthy floor. When I came back, I realized that was not the litter smell.

Oh, it was the ice cream, all right. It tasted awful and smelled like all Karzahni. So I chucked it in the dustbin along with the cup and spoon. Cookies and cream! Ha ha! Don't make me laugh! Processed garbage and cream!

After even more tedious time spent on the road, we stopped for the night in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. The hotel had high-speed internet and allowed animals, but had no pool. And from there I am writing.