Travel Never Goes the Way You Want

Kickin' It on 66 has been a goal of mine since, you know, I like...heard the song, however long ago. Travel was always completely romanticized for me, as I'm sure it was for, like, basically everyone else in the world. You, and you, and you...and you.

It started with survival stories, Jack London and Never Cry Wolf. Eventually, and predictably, in high school I read Kerouac and Burroughs and Henry Miller and understood about 15% of it, and I knew that I wanted to travel, and live. Of course in my head I was discovering unfound authors, and those books were "so hard to find," and "I had to go to this small, cryptic, used book store that's like, in the basement of some random building on some shady street in a nameless town" to find fucking On The Road, like it was this rare gem. Pretentious fuck, right here. At sixteen. And I still suck.

Sigh. Penguin Classics are sooooo esoteric. Shut up, Ross.

Of course, mine was a unique wanderlust, and no one could ever understand my nomadic desires.

Right. Douchebag.

And finding people such as my Self was an automatic Sergio Leone conundrum:

1. Good thoughts abound because, you know, someone shares my vision...finally, I've found a person who understands, and my dreams aren't so lonely.

2. Bad thoughts abound because, you know, someone shares my vision...I'm not as special as I thought I was.

3. Ugly thoughts abound, because, you know, someone shares my vision...and fuck you, I was fucking here first, oh, it's time to play the One Up game, dick. I'm gonna shove your uniqueness right up your goddamn wishful ass until I'm the uniquest mammajamma east of the Mississippi. Bitch.

You did it too, at sixteen. Maybe.

Prolly not.

But travel never goes the way you want it to, even when you have the time. Bumming around Europe started out as this fast-paced sightseeing whirlwind for the first month, and in the second month I ran out of money and cigarettes replaced food, and then I was robbed by goddamn gypsies and got lost in the middle of buttfuck Beauvais and stayed with some random French girl and her cocker spaniel until I found a flight to Ireland.

That makes it sound way more exciting than it actually was. In reality, it was a lot of stomping, and insulting the French, and a lot of laying around reading Harry Potter 5.

So, yeah.

That's one of my standard stories, I think. I tell it constantly. It's up there with the story about the time our neighbors thought we stole their snowman, and the one time I got hammered and helped Muffy cut off her dredlocks for a job interview and basically destroyed her entire head. Or the time that we went camping, and took down every single tent on the campgrounds while people were sleeping in them, and lined up our chairs, looking out at the wasteland of shriveled tents, drinking until the sun came up, watching people wake up pissed and confused because they were drowning in nylon, and how the fuck did that happen?

I was all, haha. Sor.

I tell those stories all the time. They're these signature narratives of mine that I whip out at parties and social situations, like Jude Law in I Heart Huckabees.

Pretty sure I have problems.

On a side note, I've decided that the shiny blog is back in business, because I'm not as embarassed about it as I was two weeks ago. I wrote it, fuck it, and it's something that I've thought for years and never voiced. Because I am crazy.

Eventually I will write about Route 66, and I'll talk about how Illinois was by far the best state, and how New Mexico is the seventh circle of hell. Don't even know if anyone cares, but I'll do it, and out of spite if nothing else.

This blog did not turn out how I thought it would. But at least I have a title.

...