Today’s soundtrack: Never you goddamn mind, and no those aren’t lyrics.
Today at 8:02pm: Traveling an unknown highway.


You know what a transcription machine is? It’s a tape recorder with foot pedals. You pop in a microcassette and use the pedals so you can type with your hands.

Anyways I packed one of those in my luggage ‘cause I figured, since the lectures end in the afternoon each day, I could spend the evenings transcribing the lectures I’d recorded.

But at 4:30pm on Day Three, I realize I have access to two different machines: The transcription machine in my suitcase, and a six-cylinder whip with a full tank of gas buried somewhere in the parking lot.

I pull the Avis rental agreement out of my bag and remove the map it came with. It’s a small map, hopelessly local. I decide I want to go off the map.

By 4:45 I’m sitting in the idling Pontiac, searching in vain for a good desert-highway-music radio station. Come on man, give me some Stones, some Crowes, some Zeppelin. Steppenwolf and all that. I wanna hear Jimi Hendrix offer to stand next to her fire.

Instead I find some chatty DJs. Radio DJs are fucking annoying. They say things so stupid you yearn to slap them. If I were a dictator I would rule a kingdom based on the brutal oppression of radio DJs. I would let them rise up just so I could crush them.

Finding nothing, I eventually have to settle for Merle fucking Haggard. I set the volume only halfway because while I might be looking for music, I’m not a fucking maniac.

Pulling out of the lot, I see mountains in the distance. I point the car that way and begin burning fossil fuels as the sun slides westwards.

Thirty minutes later I’m off the map alright, and sixty minutes later I’m off the cellular grid. Off to either side of me is desert growth, lots of weird cacti, some of them quite tall. I take a turn or two just to mix it up but I’m still sure of the way back.

I drive and drive. Something about the perspective out here is misleading in terms of making progress. The mountains are getting bigger but you can’t ever seem to reach them, like insecurities.

When the sun turns orange I call it quits, bringing the car to a halt in front of a tony housing development out in the middle of nowhere. The houses are fucking nice and I see some of the streets have gates on ‘em, like in LA. We don’t got these gates in New York, this is some sun-culture class-war type of shit.

As penance for polluting the environment with my V6 fumes, I light my own portable poison with a zippo and inhale deeply. I have got to quit these fucking things, and now I’ve got a reason. She’s been urging me to put them down for good without nagging, not an easy balance to strike, and she reminds me of all the right appeals. Like the kind that will have the same last name as you and half your genes. When a girl can make the future matter you know you’re in trouble.

Before I know what’s happened the sun sets, precluding any possibility of me riding off into it.

Well, fuck a cliché. I’ll go back to the hotel when I’m damn good and ready.