1:20 p.m. - 2002-09-09
Oh well....
I just got back from a weekend in Vegas, where I spent about $100 on Jack Daniels and lost about another $150 on the roulette tables.
I should've just spent $250 on whiskey and forgot about the roulette tables.
The drive back to California from Vegas is famously boring and lonely, especially when you're driving by yourself at 3 a.m.
I don't know how many of you have made the drive, but it's similar to driving through Hell. It is a barren wasteland, and at 3 a.m., darkness surrounds you on all sides. At times, it's like you're alone in the world, and not a single other car is visible anywhere.
If your car breaks down out there, you are shit out of luck.
At one point, I saw a coyote on the side of the road. It was the only form of life I saw for about three hours.
I had stocked up on potato chips and Pepsi Blue, and I was drinking the Pepsi Blues like they were candy.
To me, it's a depressing drive, mainly because it's a drive I've taken many times before with family and friends. Road trips, vacations, etc. So, now, taking the drive alone, I think back to all the road trips with friends I've had. Some friends who I no longer ever see. The drive takes me past Corona, California, where I went to kindergarten, and then I think about my childhood as I pass there. On the highway radio stations, I hear old songs from long ago, that remind me of my mom, or my childhood, or old friends I knew....and the radio reception fades in and out while you're in the desert, so the songs are speckled with static and mixed signals of distant voices.
Maybe I'm the only person who gets depressed and sentimental while taking the desert drive from Nevada to California.
Maybe I shouldn't tell you.
Holden Caulfield said it best in the last lines of The Catcher in the Rye:
"Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."
On a happier note, it's been twelve hours since I got home, and my tongue, I noticed, is bright blue from the Pepsi Blues I was drinking.
It looks like I sucked a Smurf's dick.
Hmmm.....Actually, I don't know if that's a happier note or not.
Well, I guess for the Smurf it is...
