That's the best game since Yahtzee, commander! Thanks for sharing.
Did I ever tell you about the time I thought I was going to die? I think I did, but the guy holding the joystick at the Internet zapped that post away.
Anyway, it was in eastern Colorado, the night when I was supposed to complete my twentieth year on the planet Earth. I was sleeping on the ground, in my sleeping bag. Here's a tip: when you're out West, if you put fresh sage from the side of the road into the bottom of your sleeping bag, it's almost like you don't even need a shower or deodorant when you wake up. You smell like a million dollars.
It was the last night I was to spend at the end of a two week journey from Lubbock, Texas to Cape Blanco, Oregon, and back again. I was convinced I wouldn't live to be twenty. No particular reason- I didn't have a terminal illness or anything, and I wasn't suicidal, and I don't think anybody hated me that much, yet. My feeble post-adolescent imagination just couldn't cope with the idea of being an age that doesn't rhyme with "you know what I mean." I'd always been able to see myself, when I was younger, as eighteen, nineteen, no problem. But twenty years old was, as they say, a horse of a different feather. Who did say that, by the way? Comedic genius.
So this whole trip had been just an elaborate(well, not so elaborate: pack, go, point thumb at the sky...) scheme to die far away from anyone who might mourn me, alone and conquered by the world, by whatever it was that I was sure had come to conquer. There was near dehydration in Grand Canyon National Monument, trying to find the actual monument. It shouldn't have been as hard as I made it- it's a big crack in the ground that stretches beyond the horizon. But then, I was expecting death at any minute. Remember that Mr. Belvedere episode where old Belvy has told everyone not to make a big fuss over his birthday, but then spends the entirity of the episode swinging around corners and putting on his "fake surprised" face? Death was my surprise birthday party.
Leaving the Grand Canyon, I was told that no hitchhiking was allowed in national parks, and so a park ranger drove me out in her jeep, and left me by the side of the road in the desert. I survived. I got well past San Francisco thanks to the kindness of strangers, and got trapped at the edge of Cape Blanco, the westernmost point in the continental United States, when the tide came in. I had to climb cliffs to get out, I swear. Looked down once, practiced my "fake surprised" face.
There was a crazy old hunter who swerved to hit prairie dogs and pulled over to the side of the road at the Utah/Colorado stateline to look for the carcass of an elk he heard someone had hit earlier that day. He wanted to pull its front teeth out with a swiss army knife and carve them into rings. Okay, I didn't think I'd die then, but I wanted to. He didn't find it. The elk.
There was the guy that claimed to transport capital criminals from a temporary prison to death row. He "proved" it by showing me the orange restraints and leather muzzle, all Hannibal-the-Cannibal style, in back of the seats in his pickup truck cab. I'm almost sure they don't transport inmates like that anymore- please tell me I'm wrong... He bought me a salad at Burger King.
So there I was, in eastern Colorado, where it begins to look alot like Kansas, and I'm about to be twenty whole years old. Dark. Middle-o-the-night. I wake up. A bright light getting closer. No joke. Train whistle. I sit up in my sleeping bag, smelling like sage. An old hippy in a beatup Volkswagon who rescued me from the desert taught me that trick. Closer now. Louder now. Brighter now. My wager is, based on your theory, James, that that was it. I was absorbed into the light, the sound. And I'm sharing your purgatory. Good company. Thanks for everything.
Did I ever tell you about the time I thought I was going to die? I think I did, but the guy holding the joystick at the Internet zapped that post away.
Anyway, it was in eastern Colorado, the night when I was supposed to complete my twentieth year on the planet Earth. I was sleeping on the ground, in my sleeping bag. Here's a tip: when you're out West, if you put fresh sage from the side of the road into the bottom of your sleeping bag, it's almost like you don't even need a shower or deodorant when you wake up. You smell like a million dollars.
It was the last night I was to spend at the end of a two week journey from Lubbock, Texas to Cape Blanco, Oregon, and back again. I was convinced I wouldn't live to be twenty. No particular reason- I didn't have a terminal illness or anything, and I wasn't suicidal, and I don't think anybody hated me that much, yet. My feeble post-adolescent imagination just couldn't cope with the idea of being an age that doesn't rhyme with "you know what I mean." I'd always been able to see myself, when I was younger, as eighteen, nineteen, no problem. But twenty years old was, as they say, a horse of a different feather. Who did say that, by the way? Comedic genius.
So this whole trip had been just an elaborate(well, not so elaborate: pack, go, point thumb at the sky...) scheme to die far away from anyone who might mourn me, alone and conquered by the world, by whatever it was that I was sure had come to conquer. There was near dehydration in Grand Canyon National Monument, trying to find the actual monument. It shouldn't have been as hard as I made it- it's a big crack in the ground that stretches beyond the horizon. But then, I was expecting death at any minute. Remember that Mr. Belvedere episode where old Belvy has told everyone not to make a big fuss over his birthday, but then spends the entirity of the episode swinging around corners and putting on his "fake surprised" face? Death was my surprise birthday party.
Leaving the Grand Canyon, I was told that no hitchhiking was allowed in national parks, and so a park ranger drove me out in her jeep, and left me by the side of the road in the desert. I survived. I got well past San Francisco thanks to the kindness of strangers, and got trapped at the edge of Cape Blanco, the westernmost point in the continental United States, when the tide came in. I had to climb cliffs to get out, I swear. Looked down once, practiced my "fake surprised" face.
There was a crazy old hunter who swerved to hit prairie dogs and pulled over to the side of the road at the Utah/Colorado stateline to look for the carcass of an elk he heard someone had hit earlier that day. He wanted to pull its front teeth out with a swiss army knife and carve them into rings. Okay, I didn't think I'd die then, but I wanted to. He didn't find it. The elk.
There was the guy that claimed to transport capital criminals from a temporary prison to death row. He "proved" it by showing me the orange restraints and leather muzzle, all Hannibal-the-Cannibal style, in back of the seats in his pickup truck cab. I'm almost sure they don't transport inmates like that anymore- please tell me I'm wrong... He bought me a salad at Burger King.
So there I was, in eastern Colorado, where it begins to look alot like Kansas, and I'm about to be twenty whole years old. Dark. Middle-o-the-night. I wake up. A bright light getting closer. No joke. Train whistle. I sit up in my sleeping bag, smelling like sage. An old hippy in a beatup Volkswagon who rescued me from the desert taught me that trick. Closer now. Louder now. Brighter now. My wager is, based on your theory, James, that that was it. I was absorbed into the light, the sound. And I'm sharing your purgatory. Good company. Thanks for everything.
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