Upon my return to Phoenix the good times were definitely over for a while: I had a two-day hellish van trip without music or air conditioning back to Lincoln staring me in the face. My plane got in at midnight, and I had already moved out of my summer hotel, so I just took the van out to an empty field in Mesa & laid out my sleeping bag on top and slept in the wild. The sunrise woke me up so I only got 5 hours for the second night in a row--a problem later that day when, after hours of boring driving, I had to stop and take naps at truck stops or fall asleep at the wheel. Before I left I had to gas up, which sucked because the gas was $2.50 a gallon due to the valley-wide gas shortage brought on by several major gas line ruptures.
Anyway the part of the trip I was looking forward to the least was the drive through Kansas at night. The Kansas night turned out to be the tenderest & kindest however, I could see all the stars even from the interstate, and all my music (on the 2nd day I figured out how to get my mp3 cd player to work) suddenly started making sense. Jack Johnson floored me; I realized the songs came in pairs that were related thematically. I also realized that Blonde Redhead must be really into Ayn Rand. And other similar sudden truths came to me. Maybe by this point in the trip I was starting to lose it a little. Probably I was--when I stopped for gas in small town Kansas I took out my pen and gave the "don't steal gas" police officer picture a little mustache, and added, "Yeah, we bombed people so you could waste this stuff!" underneath him.
Eventually I arrived safe (if not sound) at the doorstep of my new apt. with Drew in the western night.
Posted by Alan at August 22, 2003 01:04 PM