28 July 2007 15:52 -06:00 GMT

I'm glad to say that I'm finished with USMLE II exam. I took it on Thursday in Montgomery, Alabama. It was better than USMLE I, which I took in Atlanta. It was better because I felt like I performed a bit better. For USMLE I, after the first hundred questions or so I was concerned that I might not pass it. But for this one I was better informed. The first hundred questions had me feeling good.

I might not only pass but do pretty well on this thing, I thought.

Corey Campbell and Michael McCloud, classmates of mine, were also there for the exam. It's a long exam. I checked in at 8 and didn't leave until about 4:30. Long ass exam. You know what though? I didn't look at the clock once until about 1:30. That's amazing to me. It's like I lost five hours to some sort of time warp.

Anyway, the reason I wanted to write this entry was because I took a road trip after the exam. I was feeling good, and I didn't want to just get back to Birmingham. I wanted to see a bit of the Alabama countryside, so I drove east.

I took Zelda Drive eastwardly. Somewhere along the way I came onto route 80, I think. I was surprised that Montgomery had nicer suburbs than what the city proper made me expect. It was the same as any suburbs in any city of the United States. Strips and banks and movie rentals. Then it thinned out, and I was reminded of the similarity between Alabama and Zambia. Once you get out of the cities, you get rural pretty fast. There were cows and horses and farms. There was green everywhere; the recent rains made the green vivid.

I passed through places with interesting names, like Wetumpka. I passed by the Julia Tutwiler women's prison. I passed through the town of Tuskegee, made famous for the syphilis debacle of the last century. I wondered if there were still people living there who were involved with this research. I also pondered, if I had another lifetime to spend, what it would be like to interview people there, and to hear their story. I wondered what their trust for medical care would be like, and I wondered how they would express it. The road passed under my tires at fifty miles per hour.

I had the windows down, the iPod on loud, and I just drove. My mind relaxed with free form thinking, loose, under the speed limit, without a care in the world. The stress bled out of me like a cold perspiration.

I was reminded of how wet the state of Alabama is. In the five hours that I drove after my exam, I must have crossed over no less than twenty streams or rivers or lakes. We have had a drought this Summer, but this is still a watery state.

Another thing that struck me was the mixture of names of places...there were Native American names and plain old American names, back to back. I wish I could recall some of the names, but I can't. Chattahoochee river is one. I saw all kinds of permutations. It made me wonder what the Native American history was of the places I passed through.

I stopped for gas at a little town right around dusk. The clerk had tattoos on her wrists and forearms, and I wondered if she had a drug addiction problem. I purchased forty dollars of gas, but the tank only took thirty-five. I got my five bucks back and bought a liter of water. There were some older Black men hanging out front of the store, smoking blunts, gathering. I got the impression this was a daily event. Two white girls of high school age crossed the two lane highway to get the convenience store I was leaving. A white couple in their early twenties stopped for gas. After their fill, he, the driver, pedaled the gas to make the engine roar a deep grumbling announcement.

It was a hot drive, despite it being after six in the evening. I listened to my "top rated" playlist the whole way through. A nice feature of listening to the iPod is that you can skip through the songs you don't want to hear, and you can skip through to the next song when the end of the first is boring. When the sun finally came down, it cooled. And the tunes kept me boppin'.

By that time, I was ready to be home. I had called Maggie a couple of times to explain why it was taking me so long to get home. She was understanding, and told me to take my time. She understands me better than any human being on Earth. Makes for a a nice arrangement, doesn't it?

I still had over sixty miles to get home. I drove through Sylacauga, which is famous in my mind for a 1999 beating and burning of a man "because he was gay." Steven Eric Mullins and Charles Monroe Butler were the murderers. Billy Jack Gaither was the victim. This was later billed as a hate crime, and as a gay-bashing murder, connotations that carry a more severe penalty than your run of the mill murder.

This murder took place at a time when I was fresh back from Zambia, and eager to do whatever I could to assist in the plight of those affected by HIV.  I was newly involved with AIDS activist groups here in the U.S., and so I learned about this murder through those channels. Gay or not, I would think that most would find this to be a heinous crime. On the other hand, I sensed that an undercurrent of he got what was coming to him was there, beneath the surface.

So I drove through Sylacauga, a city now stained in my mind by the actions of two, and I wondered if this was friendly territory or was I among foes. I don't know if the case has been resolved. It is interesting that the crime took place when the Hate Crimes Prevention Act was being debated in Senate.

Despite sleeping only two hours the night before the exam, I had difficulty falling asleep when I got home. I didn't fall asleep until after 3, but I slept a good 7 hours. And last night I slept longer still.