Josh is going to move on without me. The RV wasn’t ready. Nothing has gone as planned. I felt terrible about bailing, but there’s too many things keeping me in ABQ and not enough reasons to wait around for the RV any longer.
He’s going to rig his truck so there’s two levels with camper shell, the top part a bed to sleep.
He’s off to Denver tomorrow. And I’m going to try to find a way to get bills paid.
Square.
My mom was really confused when she found me at home this morning.
Coming back so soon was slightly embarrassing. It’s been a week since we started the RV Journey, and so far there’s been no RV and hardly a journey.
Eventually both of my parents heard about how I cut my hand, and freaked out about the lack of sanitary procedures, and use of crazy glue. So Dad made an appointment for me and had me go to urgent care to get stitched and cleaned properly.
The doctor was actually thoroughly impressed with the tape/glue job we did on my wound. He thought it was a bad idea to reopen my wound to clean it, so he brought in a second doctor to look at it. She was super impressed, too, as they also use Krazy Glue™ to mend deep gashes in the flesh.
I didn’t tell Julia I was back in town and decided to show up to her house during a conversation on the phone while having her believe I was 500 miles away. Then we had Bloody Mary’s with her and her friends and explored various yoga postures.
Josh and I decided to go to Sedona today. We biked some trails where supposedly an Earth-energy-vortex is located. It is said that there is a mountain (pictured) where the temperature fluctuates and compass needles spin in confusion for whatever unknown reason.
We strapped on the Canon 7D to a helmet and got some cool shots. Unfortunately I have nothing to show for it.
After that we drove to Flagstaff to get some documentary footage of our trip with Josh’s new boom mic, which captured the attention of an elderly New York couple and three older women, also on a road trip, who expressed inuendos of loneliness and desires for its quenching.
We drove to Flagstaff, racing the sun to find some place to make some food and camp for the night.
Minutes after taking this picture, I cut my hand while trying to break apart some branches while holding a knife.
We finished our food and drove back into town, and used the bathroom in Target to fix everything. Josh got a hold of butterfly tape, peroxide, and crazy glue to close the wound. That was the first time I saw tendons moving around inside of my body.
This wound was eerily similar to Tommy’s Wrist Slash earlier in the year.
While back in town, Josh got a hold of his Dad and found out the RV was probably not going to be ready for a while because the mechanic has gone missing.
…so, we drove back to Albuquerque.
Something I remember only when traveling or being on tour is the enjoyment of finding new music along the way. Music has a way of finding you when you are on a journey, and it can hit you in a way that it could not do had you been at home.
Tucson – Andrew Bird – Tenuousness
Phoenix – Menomena – Queen Black Acid
Around noon, Josh told me that the RV-part was to be in on time to have the RV’s engine put back together properly. That was the good news. The bad news? The mechanic’s brother had been murdered… yes, murdered… in Mexico and had to suddenly skip town.
As tragic as that is itself, we may be a little more set back in getting the RV out to Arizona. Last we checked, the engine parts and tools were lying all over the place… so we hope the new mechanic can find what is needed to put it back together.
The night ended with meeting up with Jonce and new-to-me-guy named Tim who’s a teacher of many subjects at a local prestigo-school here in Phoenix. The intelligence of humor was quite escalated at this gathering, and political-speak had never been so well-integrated with poop jokes.
Josh and I didn’t leave on this trip in the best financial standing, so every little job we find helps.
We spent the day fixing John and Paige’s house.
While picking up some supplies, we encountered a “homeless” woman in a Home Depot parking lot. I didn’t want to give her a chance to approach us, as most beggar introductions are quite textbook and cliché, but Josh wanted to hear her story. Her story had illustrated that she had proverbial kids who were proverbially sick and were proverbially somewhere close-by but conveniently out of sight. Of course, she needed money to feed them (as they were very hungry from attending her “mother’s funeral” earlier that day), so we drove off to buy her and her kids some food and fill up a gas can for her. Much to…our…dismay…, she was nowhere to be found when we came back.
Josh and I were then paired with a couple of bags of junior bacon cheeseburgers from Wendy’s, and also five gallons of gas that we hope will end up in the RV’s gas tank sooner than the Truck’s.
Still no word on if we’ll be seeing the RV soon…
Last night we stayed at Justin and Melissa Nail’s house, 2 more old friends from my 4-month stay in Las Cruces 2005. They live in Tucson now.
Justin made a Journey to Alaska before. He told us all about it, as Josh intends to go all the way up there with dreams of taking bites out of freshly caught salmon, man vs. wild style.
We’re discovering that the roads to Alaska aren’t exactly friendly to any cars, much less RVs. So a ferry ride may be in the works if we desire to go as far north as Alaska.
We drove to Phoenix today. Josh bought a new boom mic for his camera, and decided to create a boom pole out of painting supplies from the hardware store.
Later, we met up at Josh’s brother’s house to see the whole family.
Today I woke up late. Of course I had no idea where I was, as that happens on road trips and/or tour. We stayed at Dan’s house for the night. I slept on a familiar couch that used to be one of my beds from when I lived in Las Cruces, clearly grandfathered into Dan’s ownership from 5 years ago.
We went to Andale’s, a Las Cruces Mexican restaurant with delicious Mexican food that doesn’t make me want to die after I eat it.
Josh finally got to show me who he believes to be my look-alike doppelganger. Josh had wanted to show me this guy for years, and he happened to be our server for the day. I insisted he looked nothing like me, but everyone at the table, including those I just met, insisted the guy was my counterpart.
We made our way to Tucson and stopped halfway to take photos of a spot containing a tree (of life) next to a small lake paired with an old windmill.
Strange things happened here. First, there was an infestation of other-worldly grasshoppers, hopping all over the place, 50% of which were in the process of procreating to perpetuate the plague-like presence of their species.
As we neared the photographic oasis of lake, tree, and windmill, Josh came inches from stepping into the striking zone of a rattle snake hidden deeply in the brush. Of course, we took some time and effort to poke him with a long stick to test his anger threshold. Surprisingly, after a good 5 minutes or so of moving him around with a stick, we realized that he was a little too full to put up a fight, as a bulge in his body signified that he may have just swallowed a small animall.
After we finished taking some photos, a strange thing happened…
We headed back towards our truck, illegally parked on the side of the freeway (I-10). I took a moment to get some video of the train that passed near our truck. While I did that, Josh disappeard to a bushy area, and began to yell after me…
“Jimmy, come check out this snake!”
I took the camera with me and found Josh pointing at a 6 foot snake that was standing up almost like a cobra looking straight at both of us. I quickly approached him with the camera, first noticing that this wasn’t a poisonous snake, and I knelt in front of the snake to get a good shot. He slithered away super fast into the bushes.
I didn’t have time to get any shots of him. We were left alone to observe the surroundings.
A dead crow.
A dead cow carcass.
Another dead crow.
Then, a third snake.
Josh approached the snake, also different than the other two. It was small, like a baby rattler, only no rattle on its tail.
It slithered away in the most creepy way possible, rhythmic, pulsing, strange. It wasn’t fight-or-flight. It was slithering in a mocking way. Like… you guys shouldn’t F@#%^ing be in here.
I looked at the dead cow. I took photos of it. Something felt strange about taking photos of the dead animals. Then I took note of how dry the ground was, cracked desert platelets of dirt, and then noticed how grass seemed to refuse to grow around the small trees within the boundaries of the place. The place wreaked of some unique stench, as if the rotting cow had been sugar-coated with some kind of fragrance.
Josh expressed how uncomfortable he felt to be in there. With a chill, he left ASAP-style. I followed.
We talked about how strange the event was. It was quite close to experiencing a dream that suddenly takes a turn for the worse, a nightmarish trap.
3 snakes. 3 dead animals. An oasis versus a dead zone. It was too weird. We talked about animal archetypes, numbers, and what it meant for the future of our journey.
The windmill was on the left point, the tree and lake on the right, the dead-zone was on the top point, like an isosceles triangle.
Elephant Butte was finished with a boat ride out to the middle of the Lake. Josh swan-dived into the water without hesitation. I was on a boat mostly full of strangers, plus old friends from my 4-month life in Las Cruces in 2005, Judd and Raul.
I didn’t jump in. I probably should have. Instead I filmed and took photos.
Ever since I can remember, I’ve wondered how the fun of owning a boat and driving jet skis outweighs the other shtuff… the amount of time it takes to back them into water, drive them onto a trailer, and park them in a high-security storage space… plus all of the maintenance, payments, hangovers that it requires.
But, other people’s boats? Fun enough.
Nevertheless, we downed some meaty tacos and bailed to las cruces. Raul made us some tortilla soup. The name doesn’t make sense really, as there aren’t any tortillas in the soup, but plenty of chili and chicken to burn a hole in your bowels. But, man oh man, it was worth the pain.
Then we went to a hill and took photos of Dan for his website, and later got carried away doing a series of jumping photos by which we created this one, no photoshop required:
We started in Elephant Butte (pronounced B’YOOT). There was nothing going on there but beer-drinking next to a lake. I had a bizarre experience there. Everybody began to drink beer right away, including me. The beer selection entailed only bud light and pabst, so I was only able to finish 3 beers (barely) for the entire night. Something about bad beer makes me want to drink my own urine to wash the taste out of my mouth. I guess that’s what I get for starting my beer drinking career with beers like New Castle and Guinness.
While Josh and friends Judd and Raul proceeded to get a little inebriated off of terrible domestics, I was distracted with observing the human behavior and dynamic of Labor Day at the lake with drunk strangers and six-figure trailer configurations. No real epiphanies hit me that night until it was time to go to sleep, where I was cloistered in the corner of a boat on a padded bench in a winter sleeping bag that leaks down-feathers.
This was the darkest night I had seen in a while. No moon. No city lights. All stars, planets, and the Milky Way belt. I lied there in my sleeping bag, watching falling stars, all of different types; some falling at light speed, some threatening to fall forever and penetrate the hull of the boat I slept on. The sky never seemed so vast, yet never seemed so in-my-face. The cosmos seemed to stare me down that night. Then I remembered how delayed I am in the development of my perceptions, along with the idea of how we, humans, another form of ants, go about our days busy as can be, forgetting about the stillness, the stoic magnitude and ordered chaos of the space above our heads that shall remain fixed and eternal in the scope of our existence, a comedic blink of God’s eye.
I feel like I’ve sinned against the gods of Mount Olympus for not updating this for so long. But now, I have an decent excuse to do it.
Over the last few months, I’ve been bar-backing. I turned 28 in July. I’ve been playing with Coma. I’ve been hanging out with Julia quite-a-bit.
Weeks are going by, and instead of landing an extra job-or-two like I “should,” I have only ended up doing things I really like.
It turns out Josh’s dad got himself a 1975 Ford RV and didn’t really have any place to put it or have any immediate use for it. So he’s going to let Josh drive it all over North America for as long as he wants to.
I was pretty sure that I wasn’t going to go along, but Josh has very effective ways of convincing people of doing above-average things. Sort of like how he made a teaser/trailer for the trip, probably to get me to stop being fickle about leaving on a whim.
We’re taking his Canon 7D along to document everything in photo/video form, along with accompanying homemade dolly and jib.
I really don’t have any idea how far we’re going to get, for 3 reasons:
1. Money
2. The RV is from 1975
3. We’ve already started the roadtrip, sans RV because the engine is currently in pieces.
We’re hoping to meet the mechanic and the RV in Phoenix, AZ this coming week. If all goes as planned, we’re heading to Pacific Coast Highway to make our way up to Canada, maybe Alaska. The true length of the trip is still unclear to both of us, but the efficient RV average of 7-miles-per-gallon will require some creative thinking and oddjobs to successfully travel the 3,000+ miles required to make it to Alaska or wherever else.
It makes no sense for me to be doing something of this magnitude right now. But it also makes all the sense in the world.
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