In Need of A Road Trip

$4.50 a gallon. Did we ever not care about that. I think I thought I remembered not worrying about the cost of my fuel. Maybe when I was 16 and my mom gave me the keys to the Dodge Shadow for the weekend and let me drive north to meet up with summer camp friends in Bremerton, Washington. Pure freedom. Stop and start on my own initiative. Just unharnessed youth on an open road, that feeling is unmatchable.

I haven't set out on the road in a while, I was just checking my log books. My ship has been in port for quite sometime. No more desert adventures of late, though an Easter pilgrimage to the Palm Springs world is shaping up. Speaking of books, my books on tape account online shows I have several credits stored up. Waiting for that long juicy unabridged fiction story, preferably read by a British guy.

I know the road is calling because I have a paper due on Monday. I keep telling people different numbers, because I guess its a little like calling your shot on how far you plan to hit a baseball. "Oh, my thesis? Yeah I'm thinking like fifty pages... what my thesis, yeah they are asking for 25, which seems too few I mean I write more than twenty-five while giving directions to strangers on how to find the local In-n-Out Burger." For the record I have around 12,000 words on the subject, but only half of them go together, the rest are orphans looking for paragraphs.

Nervous? Not really, I like writing, the words, when made permanent outside of my head allow me to settle down my thoughts on a subject or object. But I never seem to be very happy with easy, so of course I had to pick a project with some risk. I know it will get made, the project that is, I'm just not sure what its going to cost me yet. I hope it costs me everything. Because the road trip never gets better than when you've spent down your entire road stake and you have to make a whole new plan. Busted and flat broke, bumming change for a pinball machine in the bowling alley, a long way from home, hoping like hell, that that collect call you placed to your people will get the right kind of rescue party mounted. Which is to say, even when the road trip is almost over and your ride home is coming to pick you up anytime, you should still be playing for High Score!

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