Day 4: Online and on the road (at the same time)

There is, as we all know, a lot of improvising involved in the classic Road Trip. We live, we learn. One thing I have learned at this point in living this particular trip is that it is not easy to find the conditions necessary to do the kind of ongoing in-depth reportage I had in mind:

1. An appropriate expanse of time to collect my thoughts and accumulated images (i.e., when we are not entering or exiting a major city, or trying to find a place to stay, or visiting friends, or sleeping) and transform them into a blogpost;
2. Properly functioning and fully powered equipment (i.e., the "MiFi" doohickey that theoretically gives us a wifi connection en route, which tends to lose its Sprint signal or else konk out every 5 minutes or so; the cellphone that takes decent pictures & shares them with Facebook easily but that is a pain in the ass to type on; the laptop that is easier to type on than the cell phone but which loses its internet connection every time it is ignored for more than 5 minutes; etc., all of which require juice, and most of which are prone to failure, which invariably triggers a spew of obscenity from me and a desire to throw them out the window of the Leprechaun);
3. 1 & 2 both in effect at the same time.

So my dream of daily updates in chronological order will not be happening. (I honestly have no idea how Steinbeck did it. Or Baudrillard or Nabokov or Kerouac, let alone poor, carless De Tocquefuckinville. And they were all doing it in the analogue era! That must be the key.) Instead, I shall be impressionistic and nonlinear, and brief, haikulike (by my standards, that is) posts will occur when the conditions above apply. As they do at this very minute.

See you again in 5 minutes or 5 days. It's out of my hands, people.

UPDATE: Turns out "this" was NOT the "very minute" I had hoped it would be, because the MiFi doohickey has, yes, lost our signal again. As a demonstration of the problem, let me say that the above was composed on 9/30/10 at around 3:15 p.m. on Rt. 95 south of Fredericksburg, VA. It is now 4:06 p.m.

UPDATE, UPDATED: Midnight in Raleigh, and conditions 1-3 have all been met, so it's postin' time!