Retrospective
Hey, Jason checking in. OK, so it’s been a pretty long time since I wrote anything on here (I’ve been home for almost three months…) and I guess this will be the end cap post. At this point I’ve forgotten about half the stuff we did, but after having looked over pictures and materials I saved I think I remember enough to write about it. So, I suppose the best way to start would be with the end of the trip…
When I last wrote, we had just left New Orleans in the pre-Gustav fright-fest. Luckily, that turned out to be mostly media hype and I can happily say that everything and everyone I saw are still there and that things are as ok as things can get in a place like New Orleans. When Elliot and I hit the road that day, we ran into a little evacuation traffic but after that things went smoothly all the way to St. Louis. We ended up getting in fairly late, and searching for a place to stay that night turned into a hectic chore. After consulting the Lonely Planet guide we stopped at a place they recommended and tried to get a room. This was at about 3am. We didn’t end up staying there. Maybe it was because I was tired and didn’t feel like standing around to book a room. Maybe it was the intimidating guy in front of me in line who was sniffling and touching his nose a little too much. Or maybe I didn’t feel like waiting in the reception office to take my turn speaking through the perforated holes in the 4 inch thick bullet proof glass. Either way, something told me that we should move on. We ended up leaving and after finding absolutely no other helpful information in the book, we drove around for about an hour looking for anything open before settling on a really nice (and expensive) hotel. This was by far the nicest (and most expensive) place we had stayed in on the entire trip. And, throwing all logic out the window, we ended up being there for about 5 hours total. I watched a crappy movie on the free HBO. We slept and left. That was that. Waste.
That day we took an uneventful tour of the Annheiser Busch Brewery which basically convinced me to never buy any of their beers ever again. It’s not necessarily the beer itself (though, yeah, that does factor in) but the incredibly irritating infomercial video they made us watch turned my stomach more than warm Natty Ice. It was one of those things in which jackasses with too huge smiles tell you the exciting reasons why their product is superior to all others. People who get excited about things that shouldn’t excite anyone (and I quote, as best I can remember, “Here at the brewery we produce nearly ten thousand cans of Bud light a minute! Wowee! It’s this exciting pace that lets us provide America with 50% of its beer consumption. Because we’re working hard so you can take it easy with a nice, cold Bud!” (insert idiotic laughter here)). You get the idea, trying to be up beat about something that’s best left to be said blandly by charts in a board meeting. Anyway, after getting our two free (gross) beers we left and drove around for a while and saw the St. Louis arch before getting to Washington University for the Ratatat concert. There was a small fiasco with the tickets but everything worked out well enough and we got in. The opening bands were terrible in ways I don’t care to describe, though Ratatat was really great and the concert had to be stopped twice for fear of too much raucousness in the crowd. It was really loud inside and Elliot lost his hearing for a day, which I avoided by chewing up my brewery tour ticket and jamming the pieces into my ears to act as make-shift earplugs. We left St. Louis and hit a Carl’s Jr. on the way out…
The trip ended as almost all things do, uneventfully and with little fanfare. After St. Louis was Nashville where we visited my brother and then Atlanta where we saw some friends of mine. We, or rather I because Elliot had left by this point, ran into the Octopus Project again who were great as always. Atlanta was sort of a separate era on the trip. I feel like the trip ended the second I got to Atlanta since it was my home for four years. As soon as I was ITP (non-Atlantans, may want to google that) I was back in my comfort zone, and I did comfortable things. I hung out and enjoyed myself and drank too much the way I normally do. Days rolled on. Time passed. I drove back to New York a few weeks later. Uneventful. I feel like I wanted this story to have an engaging and interesting ending. The kind of ending that watching too many movies has made me expect in real life. All the loose ends tied up tight, maybe you don’t get exactly what you want but you end up better for having had the experience, with important life lessons now at hand. I wished that would happen for this whole cross country adventure. But things never work out like that, do they? Most events in life are just open ended segues into other events. Things happen. They end. New things replace them. Other things happen and replace those new things. On and on…
A while back I wrote that seeing the sunrise in my rearview mirror really pleased me but I didn’t know why. I think I put my finger on it now. When you’re driving long distances at night, there’s nothing around you. Especially in the emptier parts of this country, its just highway and headlights all through the night. Driving especially sucks because the person you’re with will be asleep most of the time, so essentially you’re alone. Then the dawn comes. It shows you that all along you were surrounded by beautiful things, by people, by homes. It’s just that they were invisible black on black shadows in the night until now. Dawn is your reward for making it through the night. Having been awake since the day before, it puts a neat close on one day’s adventure. But it still promises that new adventures are ahead, in a new day. It’s a simple but beautiful cap on one set of adventures. That’s why I liked it so much.
It’s now three months since I’ve been home. To say that my life has changed significantly since the trip would be a lie. I’ve gone back to pre-trip situations and pre-trip attitudes. I’m jobless and purposeless. I feel scared and I don’t know why. My nerves are ruining me. I panic when there’s nothing to panic over. To say the least, I miss my life on the road. I miss the excitement and I miss the freedom. I miss the complex simplicity of new things everyday and I miss the distraction that it provided. I miss the sense of purpose and knowing that even if I never accomplish my goal I’ll be happy. All that bullshit about the trip being in the journey and not the destination can hold a little truth sometimes. Held at the right angle, even a bucket with a bottom full of holes can hold a little water.
But I cant entirely say that I came away from the trip with nothing. It feels good to wander, to have no expectations. It seems that all my disappointments with the trip were mostly in things that I thought would happen and didn’t. It didn’t change my life. Things didn’t end nicely. But I had a great time (I think about all the stuff I did… I interviewed some of my favorite bands, I got free booze on other people’s dime, I saw devils tower, I was 5 feet away from bison, I thought I was going to be killed by bears, I romped through san francisco, I saw frida kahlo paintings live and in person, I had great drives, saw beautiful scenery, saw the best and absolute worst of monument valley, I saw the freetail bats leaving a cave in new mexico and a bridge in austin, I saw deeley plaza, gambled fought and drank in new orleans, saw ratatat in a tiny basement and spwnt time with people I care a great deal about). That’s what I took away from it and that’s all one can really ask for, in the end. I learned the joy of wandering with a purpose (that’s life, aint it? corny). So take things as they come, lose your expectations, know that things won’t wrap up nicely. I guess what I mean, to sum it all up, is
