Summer Vacation 12- where i feel most at home: nowhere.

September 13,2020

    The best place I visited on this trip was the expanse found at the border of Utah and Nevada. There’s nothing there. I wish I could be there forever. Especially with what the world is becoming. I stopped more than once to take pictures. It was so natural, like stretching out in my living room. I’m not sure how else to convey that feeling of familiarity and the decompression of my psyche. It soothed out my nerves in a way I hadn’t experienced up to that point of this trip, despite the fact this was perhaps the most hostile place I would be passing through.

    I stopped to smoke a joint and snap a few pics. A few hundred feet ahead I spied a dead and decayed cow! I pulled over and picked up the skull. This little bastard moseyed too far from the herd. Lost and thirsty she fell just 6 feet from the road. How I stumbled upon his body is still a mystery. And how no one else was able to see her to try and steal her skull was even more mysterious. But it really shouldn’t have been so ponderous. Out here in the middle of nowhere. Why the fuck would you stop here unless you were smoking a joint with a fancy camera just wasting time in the pursuit of solitude?

    I unclasped my backpack and made like I was gonna strap the skull to the back seat. I tried a few configurations and realized it was just too much trouble to haul this piece of shit. And for what? An ornament of consumption? I placed the skull on the ground and got some great pics with my bike. After lingering on the idea for a minute I gave up. Problem is I didn’t re-strap the damned backpack properly so at my next stop in Nevada I came to realize the backpack had fallen on the road. Gone for good, there was no way I was gonna backtrack 50 miles to try and retrieve that shit. I went through my mind, was there anything I desperately needed in there? Did I need to go back and try to retrieve the shit? Sure, I could use everything in there but there was nothing that couldn’t be replaced. I inventoried what was now lost. All my clothes, my toiletry bag, my tooth brush, my second diary, the mushrooms I planned to take. Bullshit. But not the end of the world.