Strap in, margarita pushkin.

So there I was: a fully repaired and tuned-up car, all my shit packed up, and my heart quietly beating in my throat. It was finally time to move to Madison, and the fear/excitement factor was about 40/60.

Funny thing about last minute car packing: takes you longer than you thought. About two days longer, such that Ma and I went down one day to get some auto supplies, and the day after that found some other seemingly necessary bits. Slowly but surely, though, we packed the car--and I mean we PACKED the car, somehow getting it all in thanks to Mom's Five Dancing Cranes of Packing technique. Sun Tsu would have wet himself at her skillz. Observe!

That's the car pre-flight.

And that's Mom measuring out the trunk to fit yet more stuff in there. The picture doesn't do justice to how much she crammed in there.

Now I know the car looked ready (kinda), but somehow the battery had magically died on the evening of the 15th. Ma and Scott couldn't explain it, and I, of course, obsessively worried whether I'd get to Madison to see Dr. Crisco in time.

Finally, at noon on the 16th, I started driving out to the freeway with Mom in tow, to make sure the giant roof-rack or the bag secured to it didn't fly off and give me a heart attack. Nothing went wrong, so Ma gave me the wiggling fingers up, hopped on the Lincoln exit, and there I was: moving to Madison.

The abstract concept had sprouted roots in the earth. Holy Shit.

Soundtrack: The Pogues, "Sally Maclennane"

That was the first song I played. Quite fitting if you click the link for the lyrics.

Driving through LA wasn't bad, just snarled. Things didn't go down hill until Nevada. I'd been here before, on my Las Vegas trip not a few months past. I knew what it'd do to my car and I prayed that the sun wouldn't screw me.

Oh but screw me it nearly did. See, Nevada is a fucking hot state. Hell's second cousin, Nevada is. The car got near overheating a few times, so much so I pulled over once or twice. That shouldn't have been happening, but it looked like the car repair hadn't tackled that one big-ass problem. I'd learn later the transmission runs too damned hot--and hot state + hot transmission = suck assness.

So I got clever, I did. I remembered I could turn the 'vent' on, put it on max, and crank the heat to full. The cabin in the car wasn't too bad, actually, since I had the windows rolled down. My foot felt like a brisquette, what with the vent near it, but I was dealing. All of the sudden, though, people started stopping, and I wondered: WTF?

Apparently a car had flipped over and was smoking on the side of the highway. It was gruesome: the body bent out of shape, metal chunks distended like drool, some luggage thrown to the other side of the road. I'd been sweating my ass off and listening to the "Pirates of Penzance" to not too angry, but when I saw that I just couldn't believe it. After that, thankfully, there weren't any more delays, so the wind obligingly whipped through the car cabin and rushed out the blistering hot engine air. The sun was high, smoking bowls of clouds into the air that occasionally made me fear getting skin cancer a bit less.

Mostly Nevada was a vast expanse of multi-colored desert and bored mountains, clumps of rock with pituitary disorders drooling out the heat of the sun onto even more bored motorists. I did well enough, I suppose. If you've never been to Nevada, here's my interpretation:

After I'd stopped off at this 40 pump Chevron megaplex and gotten some water at Nevada Border Whore Town, I'd thought about going down to visit Tiff and family again in Las Vegas, but I decided that'd lead to too many delays--that and I didn't have her number handy. A little bit after that I tried to brush my teeth in my car, since I'm kinda sorta obsessive about that nowadays. Only problem was that the ACT moutwash I use is pressure-sensitive, and it'd be knocked about, so it sprayed me when I opened it. I pulled off here to wash myself like a proper animal:

Can't you just hear the earthworms playing poker over the bloated corpses of Mafia wiseguys?

And so CD's danced in and out, I juggled my arms to get them out of direct sunlight, and I thought about T, telling myself to just stop thinking about it and move on--which worked about every 3-4 hours.

The last part of the day and through the morning was mostly relaxing: the way that people really stuck to the 'shift into the right lane if someone faster is coming up' golden road rule, how pretty and satisfying it was to see that giant ass gas ball crank below the horizon, and just the satisfying mindless wandering with occasional meter checks.

It was out around the beginning of Arizona, sometime after midnight, that I was driving on a highway with no service stops. Not a one, just mile after mile of noone but me and one trucker I passed back near Mile 55 or something. That lasted for 80 miles until I was near a quarter tank. Getting a might wee desperate, I turned off the highway after seeing a 'gas off this exit' sign. Trouble was, a smaller sign at the bottom said that gas was 13 miles thataway.

And so I crept along the two lane country road, steadying my nerves by babbling to myself and putting on the Beth Orton/Aimee Mann/Ben Folds Five compilation. Then it began to rain, and I nervously chuckled. After 12 miles I hit a bum-fuck-nowhere town, not seeing anything remotely resembling a gas station. I'd seen some other drivers come both ways, so I figured it hadto be out there. So I decided to stick it out until the next town. The rain began bomb my car in sheets, an unusual number of semis barreling past me. I could barely see the road. Every semi that passed rocked my car back and forth, vomiting water at my windshield.

After a 27 mile detour, though, I found the next town, only minorly bigger but sporting my golden nugget of glory: a 24 hour gas station. Not a soul was in sight (which makes sense for 2 in the morning in Bum-Fuck, AZ). The whole place looked rather genial, actually, with some hotel cabins set up in back of the huge lot, a sea of gravel-dirt rolling out under the dark sky. I saw a cat that looked like Moonbeam, but it darted off. After checking the roof-rack straps and oil and all, I snapped a few shots of the place:

And then I went back the way I came.

Eventually at around 2am, I'd made it to Utah and I knew I had to sleep. I bedded down at a Motel 6 I'd seen from the highway, one of those two story generic motel set-ups. I could barely sleep that night. I constantly thought about having to get there on time, on the 20th, how I'd only covered under 600 miles in the first day. I think it was the stress of the near overheating and the deadline that got to me. I just couldn't relax. I think I slept for 4 hours, got woken up at 6am by some of those 'I rise with Dawn and chatter like a fucking bullhorn because I'm a selfish asshole and assume EVERYONE wakes up at 6am" people. I went back to bed, woke up at 10:30am, and made my way out to the road again.

That would be Trip Day 2, the "Flat Utah, Pretty Colorado, and a deep-dicking by Fate" day. You'll see why in the next entry.

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