the sickened traveliers

for anyone looking for info on ordering a copy of "failgivers, volume one", please go to the november 7th, 2007 entry

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4/02/07

Four thousand miles and about twenty pictures.
Not even of anything that exciting.
A couple shots of a store called "crazy woman liquors" and some random glimpses of a boy walking a dinosaur, a devil's head peaking out of a vast field of nothing, and some mountains.
That's it.

I guess that's all you really need when the most important moment was the very point you headed onto I-90 in Mass. and got the fuck out of there.

We spent the first twenty four hours exchanging spots behind the wheel with occassional moments of nap-time, distortion on eleven and about fifty bags of chips.
I'm not sure whether or not a bitter mother nature had anything to do with it, but every time I drove there somehow needed to be a snowstorm. It was almost comical by the third time it happened if it wasn't so goddamn annoying.
Seriously.....that's it.
That's the trip.

I could go on in detail about the nothingness of driving through the midwest, or the fact that once you leave new england and you are hungry past ten o'clock, vegan-wise you're fucked.
I could go on about my bewilderment of tractor trailers flying past us at 70 mph on a steep incline while we were nestled deep in the heart of the cascade mountains. I could go on about being on those mountains and the snow falling so hard i couldn't see two feet ahead of me. I could go on about how hard I panicked at one particular piece of time while said tractor trailers were both blinding me and taking away any sort of notion I had of myself as being a strong individual, causing me to envision us tumbling down the side of the mountains in an avalanche where we'd be buried under mounds of snow and no one would find us for two weeks. I could go on about how all I wanted to do at that point was find a hotel so that I could not miss an episode of LOST.

But, I won't.

Instead, I'll go on about the moment we came up over the mounds and caught the first glimpse of our new home on the total opposite side of the country. Within the first fifteen minutes of parking our car, I must have said "I live here...." to myself a good hundred times. This may not be what could be considered a big deal to some people, but when you have lived in the same state for the first thirty years of your life, this is the biggest fucking deal that could possibly happen.

Fuck the lotto. Fuck a raise.

You put things off for the sake of nothing in hoping for everything that ends up being that nothing.

After the first few days in a new world (which this very much was.....from the roads and trees of new hapshire to the streets and breathing life of seattle is about as new a world as you can get...) you find your routine. It's a new routine and it feels much better than you could have ever hoped for.

And then you taste a vegan donut that brings tears to your eyes as if you've found the holy grail.
You go to a show in a venue you've never been to and drink coffee at a new spot.

These things matter.

Everyone wants to "start over", or have some sort of "new beginning", and it makes no sense. Why bother? There's no such thing....no fucking rebirths are ever going to take place, son.
What you can actually work for is to do what you want to do. That doesn't involve erasing all impact ever made or not made.
It means, "let's do something....."

Figuring out what you want out of anything takes a damn near infinite amount of time for most of us lost-at-first-chancers. The worst part is that the odds are against you that when you finally figure shit out, you won't have the means to make good on your new discovery and/or revelation.

I'm okay with this.
I'm okay with trainwrecks.....as long as that wreck is where I want it to be.

I'm good.
You're good.
We're good.

Fuck it.
Let's get damaged