Firing on All Cylinders.

I had a job once, temp job, not pleasant but not particularly hard. Just boring. Eventually you get into a rut of when you eat lunch and what you have for lunch and how many cigarettes you can smoke on a break. The idea was to make money and....? Go, I guess. Cos that's all I wanted back then, to get in the car and go.

I sat outside, one summer day, eating my sandwich, drinking my can of coke. Staring across the grass patch and the grill of my car. "We gotta get out of here," I thought.

I always felt like I was born maybe 10-20 years too late. Like I had missed out on the ground floor, which was then covered in sand, buried in gravel, and replaced with the next floor. I think I would have fit in on that old ground floor.

When I was Going places it was a romantic notion of a bygone era already. All those road monkeys of old never described the crippling loneliness well enough to dissuade me. Or the hours sitting in a hot car, wondering where the hell you fit in with the world.

Ah, it's a rich man's game now, the cross country road trip. Gas is expensive. Time is expensive. Should you really be doing THAT to the environment?

One day you realize that there is no loneliest place on earth. One day you realize it's good to just be alive. That's a hard mindset to get rid of, try as you might.