In numbers:
Miles traveled: 647
Rest stops taken: 2
States: 3- Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska
Volume of Coke consumed: 24 fluid ounces
Ham sandwiches eaten: 1
Gigantic lemons on trailers: 2
Gigantic Jesus statues in western Nebraska: 1
Albums listened to: 11
Avantasia- The Metal Opera Part Two; Equilibrium- Turis Fratyr and Sagas; Queensrÿche- Operation: Mindcrime; Radiohead- Amnesiac; Sonata Arctica- Reckoning Night; Blink 182- Enema of the State; Ensiferum- Iron; Daft Punk- Human After All; Blind Guardian- Nightfall in Middle Earth; Edguy- Burning Down the Opera.
Times I almost crashed into things/drove off the road: 3
Lessons learned:
Taking pictures while driving is very difficult and often stupid.
Reading texts while driving is also very stupid.
One should not try to both line up a shot and drive while looking through a camera's LCD screen- the time delay on the screen, while small, is significant enough for near-catastrophic, 80 MPH collisions with traffic cones to occur.
Don't accelerate to 88 MPH just so you can take a picture of the speedometer. There are cops lurking around, and you aren't driving the Delorean anyway.
Nebraska is, in fact, windier than Wyoming.
(Full write-up and lots of photos forthcoming)
Monday, July 28, 2008
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Sleep talking
(We were up at my grandparents' cabin, staining the exterior)
Me, in my sleep: "Kit, are we going to stain the deck now?"
My brother Kit: "Well, seeing as it's three in the morning, probably not."
Some time passes, I fart.
Kit: "Aww, cute!"
Me: "You think so?"
Me, in my sleep: "Kit, are we going to stain the deck now?"
My brother Kit: "Well, seeing as it's three in the morning, probably not."
Some time passes, I fart.
Kit: "Aww, cute!"
Me: "You think so?"
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Ghost
It was one of those nights. One of those nights at the end of one of those days. One of those days when you're just tired all of the time, alternating between hope and sorrow, questioning all those things you once took for granted. When keeping your eyelids open is almost impossible; when you pause halfway up a flight of stairs because continuing up seems pointless and you can't remember why you were walking upstairs in the first place.
Yes, it was one of those days. Forlorn sighs, watery eyes- despair.
I watched the sun --a blood red orb in an orange sky-- sink beneath the far off mountains. I cleaned and straightened everything out in the house. I even played my guitar: something I haven't done in months. After sitting on the deck in solitude, glass of water in hand, watching the iridescent shimmer of the yellow and orange lights of the city below, I decided it was time for a night drive.
Driving at night clears the mind. There's something about headlights and darkness, the barren emptiness of wide swathes of asphault, the single-minded focus of the driving, that's cleansing. I chose a nearby canyon and turned in.
The road was narrow, and near the bottom there were a lot of cars, but as I continued to climb the cars thinned out, and eventually I was the only one on the road- a lonely pair of headlights and a gurgling engine stabbing straight up at the full moon. Campfires and trailheads floated by in the blackened periphery of the road as I continued to ascend. I finally reached the top, and it was there that I saw it.
The ghost.
It was a disembodied light floating in the forest. It moved with an ethereal grace, drifting through the trees with an otherworldly motion. I quickly turned the wheel and hurried back down the road, not wanting to disturb it. It gave me a sense of foreboding, a deep spasm of that unnameable, primal fear of the unknown. I hurried down to a spot further down the road and parked the car.
I stepped out and glanced up. Far off, obscured by the trees, was the moon, and over my head the inky blackness of the night was punctuated with a swarm of stars. I never really see them anymore. I might catch a handful with an occasional glance into the night, but nothing like this. As I leaned against the car and craned my neck further the ghost reappeared.
This time the floating light was a little less threatening, and I restrained the urge to hide from its glance. As it wandered down the road it gazed from side to side, eventually turning its attention to me. It regarded me with passive curiosity, a sort of detached interest only ascribable to the truly foreign. It knew so much, this ghost, and it seemed tired, disinterested. I thought of waving to it, but kept my hands by my sides. It gazed at me for a while longer and then turned away, wandering further down the road until its light was swallowed by the darkness.
---
Postscript: I've been in a really awful mood for the past couple of weeks. This is the product of all that frustration, I think. Occasionally the Passion seizes me so incredibly hard that I just have to let it explode out of my hands before it burns itself up and disappears. I literally stopped on the side of the road in the middle of the night and wrote this out on my iPod Touch. I was crying by the time I got to the end.
I really want to add more to it (one particularly delicious phrase I thought of was, "One of those days when your mood swings back and forth like a corpse strung up at the gallows."), but I think that would dilute the aesthetic of it. I've made the barest possible changes, just changing a few words and fixing typos.
It's meant to be read slowly.
Yes, it was one of those days. Forlorn sighs, watery eyes- despair.
I watched the sun --a blood red orb in an orange sky-- sink beneath the far off mountains. I cleaned and straightened everything out in the house. I even played my guitar: something I haven't done in months. After sitting on the deck in solitude, glass of water in hand, watching the iridescent shimmer of the yellow and orange lights of the city below, I decided it was time for a night drive.
Driving at night clears the mind. There's something about headlights and darkness, the barren emptiness of wide swathes of asphault, the single-minded focus of the driving, that's cleansing. I chose a nearby canyon and turned in.
The road was narrow, and near the bottom there were a lot of cars, but as I continued to climb the cars thinned out, and eventually I was the only one on the road- a lonely pair of headlights and a gurgling engine stabbing straight up at the full moon. Campfires and trailheads floated by in the blackened periphery of the road as I continued to ascend. I finally reached the top, and it was there that I saw it.
The ghost.
It was a disembodied light floating in the forest. It moved with an ethereal grace, drifting through the trees with an otherworldly motion. I quickly turned the wheel and hurried back down the road, not wanting to disturb it. It gave me a sense of foreboding, a deep spasm of that unnameable, primal fear of the unknown. I hurried down to a spot further down the road and parked the car.
I stepped out and glanced up. Far off, obscured by the trees, was the moon, and over my head the inky blackness of the night was punctuated with a swarm of stars. I never really see them anymore. I might catch a handful with an occasional glance into the night, but nothing like this. As I leaned against the car and craned my neck further the ghost reappeared.
This time the floating light was a little less threatening, and I restrained the urge to hide from its glance. As it wandered down the road it gazed from side to side, eventually turning its attention to me. It regarded me with passive curiosity, a sort of detached interest only ascribable to the truly foreign. It knew so much, this ghost, and it seemed tired, disinterested. I thought of waving to it, but kept my hands by my sides. It gazed at me for a while longer and then turned away, wandering further down the road until its light was swallowed by the darkness.
---
Postscript: I've been in a really awful mood for the past couple of weeks. This is the product of all that frustration, I think. Occasionally the Passion seizes me so incredibly hard that I just have to let it explode out of my hands before it burns itself up and disappears. I literally stopped on the side of the road in the middle of the night and wrote this out on my iPod Touch. I was crying by the time I got to the end.
I really want to add more to it (one particularly delicious phrase I thought of was, "One of those days when your mood swings back and forth like a corpse strung up at the gallows."), but I think that would dilute the aesthetic of it. I've made the barest possible changes, just changing a few words and fixing typos.
It's meant to be read slowly.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Overheard in the waiting room
"Gonna take me a mutha fuckin NAP!"
I glanced up from the Esquire I was reading, trying to restrain my face from shooting the baseball-capped stranger a look of incredulous disgust. The guy was in his 20's: jet black hair, goatee, light blue jeans hanging down below his ass. He fit the perfect description of the type of person you'd expect to see in a car audio store. He half sat, half threw his body onto the other half of the couch I was sitting on. I payed his companion no heed, and went back to reading about Jack Johnson. Hopefully they'd be finished working on my car before too long. He adjusted his cap as he spoke to the guy he had walked in with:
"Man- once I get my papers from my P.O. I'm gonna roll myself a gigantic fattie."
I had to choke back my giggle. To my left was a rotund lady in her 40's, drenched with sweat; across from her in the small waiting room --adorned with posters of Lambourghinis and Ferraris-- was a high school girl. To admit that I am going to smoke weed, even to admit I have a parole officer, is something that I would have trouble confiding to my closest friends in complete privacy. This guy was surrounded by complete strangers. His friend, a gangly-looking fourteen year-old, spoke up:
"What was that?"
"I said I'm going to roll myself a fattie," he said, louder, "a marijuana cigarette."
My shoulders shook with silent laughter. A huge smile spread across my face as my eyes watered. His intonation was cool, impassioned. It had the self-assured confidence of a complete idiot who doesn't know he's stupid.
"Jesus, it's been forever since I got high man." He continued.
"How long?"
"...Three years. And I could probably get ahold of some reaaaally sweet, smelly ganja too."
The teenager, likely his brother, laughed obediently, his braces glinting in the dim overhead light, his knees coming up towards his chest with every bout of laughter.
---
And that's all I wrote. I have problems with projects that I can't complete in one sitting. This is about all there is to it, though.
I glanced up from the Esquire I was reading, trying to restrain my face from shooting the baseball-capped stranger a look of incredulous disgust. The guy was in his 20's: jet black hair, goatee, light blue jeans hanging down below his ass. He fit the perfect description of the type of person you'd expect to see in a car audio store. He half sat, half threw his body onto the other half of the couch I was sitting on. I payed his companion no heed, and went back to reading about Jack Johnson. Hopefully they'd be finished working on my car before too long. He adjusted his cap as he spoke to the guy he had walked in with:
"Man- once I get my papers from my P.O. I'm gonna roll myself a gigantic fattie."
I had to choke back my giggle. To my left was a rotund lady in her 40's, drenched with sweat; across from her in the small waiting room --adorned with posters of Lambourghinis and Ferraris-- was a high school girl. To admit that I am going to smoke weed, even to admit I have a parole officer, is something that I would have trouble confiding to my closest friends in complete privacy. This guy was surrounded by complete strangers. His friend, a gangly-looking fourteen year-old, spoke up:
"What was that?"
"I said I'm going to roll myself a fattie," he said, louder, "a marijuana cigarette."
My shoulders shook with silent laughter. A huge smile spread across my face as my eyes watered. His intonation was cool, impassioned. It had the self-assured confidence of a complete idiot who doesn't know he's stupid.
"Jesus, it's been forever since I got high man." He continued.
"How long?"
"...Three years. And I could probably get ahold of some reaaaally sweet, smelly ganja too."
The teenager, likely his brother, laughed obediently, his braces glinting in the dim overhead light, his knees coming up towards his chest with every bout of laughter.
---
And that's all I wrote. I have problems with projects that I can't complete in one sitting. This is about all there is to it, though.
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