
I had some time off so I decided to go on a long road trip- I had to be in Sacramento at some point for a couple days, and my friend Mike was going to fly into San Francisco to join up with me, but that was pretty much all I had for plans. I brought a bunch of camera gear, some groceries and a ton of podcasts.
Just as I was entering into Missouri I happened to catch a “This American Life” about family members being murdered. It creeped me out and set the tone for Missouri for me. I came across a high school football game- it was the last game of a losing season and they were beat by a ton so everyone was bummed. After the game I drove on through, trying to make as much headway on the first night as I could. At some point I passed out at a small motel, had breakfast at a Waffle House and high-tailed it to Amarillo. On the way I stopped at a gas station in a part of Oklahoma that had guys in boots and huge cowboy hats and there was a needle deposit in the bathroom- the cashier said that too many people are shooting speed and he was sick of worrying about getting stuck while taking out the trash. I’ve read Larry Clark’s books and it wasn’t really any surprise that there’s speed in Oklahoma- I just didn’t know ranchers and cowboys were into it. Maybe it’s their long hours.
Every hotel room I stayed in had so much Febreeze in it that my eyes were watering and it was choking at times. I suppose after about 30 of those news specials where the journalist goes in with a blacklight and some cotton swabs and proves that hotel rooms are a sanitary horrorshow, the hotel industry has given up on trying to actually clean the room and instead just gas it with a chemical approximation of mountain freshness. Between that and the free cable I woke up with a lot of headaches but they would clear out after the second or third hour of a driving and where I was looked totally different than where I started out that day.
In Amarillo, at the motel I stopped at, the desk clerk and I talked about her son and his motorcycle accident for about a half an hour. He’s got blood clots in his leg because of all of the pins in the bones and she’s worried about him standing up too fast from the couch and a blood clot going straight to his brain and killing him. So she calls him every hour or so to make sure he doesn’t need to get up and get anything. She’s been doing it for months. She was a sweetheart.
The next day I would head to New Mexico.








