A Dramatization of Actual Events

It was sometime between pulling off to get a drink and merging back onto the highway that the sun began to rise. The small sliver of moonlight was just as bright high up at its apex, but directly in front of me the sky had developed a faint blue tinge. A band of something you couldn't quite call pink spread like a rash across the very bottom. A precursor to pink, a chromatic representation of the impossibly high-pitched hum that lets you know you've left the TV on before you actually see it.



In spite of all the mental energy I could summon the sun crept up, with the typical blend of reds and yellows and majestic metaphors, and I witnissed the fact that this was another day that I wouldn't die, unsure with my sleep-deprivation/cigarette-induced headache how I felt about it. The cigarettes really were getting to be a problem.



The biggest problem with traveling for a living is not the sense of unreality caused by the difficult schedule or the lack of permanance or the terrible things consistently spewed out in place of music on the radio wherever you go, (at least two of these things are definitely perks). The worst thing by far is getting the crack farmer shift and watching the sun rise from behind gummy eyelids. There's something dehumanizing about it that makes all the genuinely dehumanizing aspects of one's life pale in comparison.



I passed a couple of hitchhikers during all this and didn't feel like a dick for not even thinking about picking them up. Something about driving into a sunrise make me totally inconsolable. Someone once said that humans have an ineffable longing to be near the borders where two elements meet, explaining the nature of humanity's fascination with beach houses and sunsets and mountains. Fuck that guy.



In the afternoon I woke up and didn't know where I was. This happens every day. I was on a bench seat with a familiar sharp ache in my knees, unhappy with the bent position they were expected to hold during their four-to-six hour stint of rest.



I struggled to get them unclenched by hobbling into the gas station we had stopped at. The smokey reflection in the tinted glass of the door showed someone I didn't recognize--a problem which I understand is common to many people who unexpectedly catch sight of themselves in the morning--with a plumage of greasy hair at my crown and wild eyes, shuffling along like a senior citizen from a Hover Round commercial. I relieve myself inside, smooth down the hair, buy a pack of Camel Lights and a blue Powerade. When I walk outside I remember why it is preferable to drive through the American heartland at night.


* * *



This particular night we arrive in Springfield, MO at about 6:30 local time, a healthy three-and-a-half hours late. Jon is driving and I'm in the passenger seat. Springfield is very much like an arts-centric small northern California town, with the exception that it's in central southern Missouri, so really all that's left is unpretentious architecture and a couple of roundabouts, with no progressive, psuedo-intellectual mind frame to support it.



There was however a very northern-California-looking street hippy camped out in front of a nearby building, fresh off Psychedelic Breakfast or Disco Biscuits tour or something, harassing uncooperative clients passing his work space. This--as anything is likely to do--enraged the freshly awakened Rusty, informed once again that he'll have to shake off sleep by moving two-and-a-half tons of gear out of the trailer and into the bar. Without any sort of high-proof alcohol to restrain him he nearly got into a scuffle with the guy, who said he was an internationally traveling musician. Chris ordered him to go stink up someone else's corner.



This all amounted to nothing of course. The bum left after yelling obscenities into the bar after us for a few minutes and thoroughly frightening an old woman sitting next to us who was urging us to stop yelling back.



It turned out to be a pretty decent night, though. No one hit anyone else, the bar owners danced, and we had more of a crowd than you could rightly expect from Spingfield on a Wednesday night. We drank and smoked with the bar owners and their friends, loaded out, and headed back to Edmond for a few nights of relaxing, knee-recuperative sleep. We had to stop in Tulsa for several hours between sunrise and late morning because we were too exhausted to drive, but at least no one got the crack farmer shift.