Happy trails

On my way through Lakeland a few weeks ago, I got behind the rental car I rode to Chicago in back in very late December. It really threw me to just randomly be riding in traffic behind the very same car that had been my road home for a few days. I mean, how many rental cars are on the road in Memphis at any given second? But I know that was the right car. Well, truck. It was an Explorer. I remembered the painted-on number and the Georgia Bulldogs sticker on the back window. I watched it turn off Highway 64, headed to wherever it was meant to go that day. I wondered if the CDs I had made for the trip that my trip companion didn’t really care for had gotten stuck somewhere obscure, maybe between the seats, and if anyone would ever find the discs and pop them in and actually like them, months after they had been made.

It got my captive brain thinking about how, from certain angles in the stratosphere, we must all seem like ants, following the same pheromone trails, looping here and back and here and back, stop go stop, rarely straying from the same paths every day. How often do you go somewhere you’ve never been before?

Today I started thinking my way out of going to Bonnaroo. Amber’s not going to be able to make it, so I’m looking at a solo trip. Which is fine — permit me this mopey moment where I say, in an Eeyore voice, “I’m used to doing things alone” — but it’s hard for me to imagine having a really good time alone. It’s mostly the camping bit that I dread, because I think I’ll be able to find friends during the day (if cell reception holds; it was kinda iffy last year). I can put my work face on for everything during the day. But I don’t think I am the kind of person who should be allowed to camp alone. Last year, deep in the heat of our tent-raising fiasco, I repeatedly just suggested that we give up and sleep in the car. Granted, that is because we were trying to erect a tent that was eleventy billion feet tall (which, in the end, turned out to be an AWESOME home) and we were … inebriated … and it was midnight and there was a storm brewing and everyone else around us put up their tents in ten seconds flat.

In my deep driving-to-Cordova-and-back thoughts (the deepest thoughts known to man), I reasoned that I could just spend my days off at home, working in the yard, or traveling to see friends. And then I put in an Avett Brothers CD and thought about being in the photo pit for their show and how I would kick myself if I chickened out of that opportunity. Look at this lineup. Look at this fucking lineup. There are several artists on that list that I have worshipped for a long time. And I have the opportunity to not only go and hear their music in the midst of the biggest party in the state, but to get ridiculously close to some of them and point my camera at them and steal some moments from them for eternity? It’s too bad you weren’t there to slap me out of my mopey bullshit. I know that’s what you’re thinking.

So Bonnaroo. I’m fucking going and it is going to be fucking great and if it’s not, so what? I will get a story out of it regardless. The stories are my life.

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I got hopped up on coffee today and got extra pissed at myself for having not visited Nick at his new place in Chattanooga or Cox since he moved to Oregon YEARS ago. And then I decided that this summer was going to be the summer I rectified both those problems. I requested time off, cleared my schedule, and booked plane tickets. So it’ll be a Chattanooga-y July and a Salem/Portland-y August and I could not be more excited to forge a new pheromone trail or two in my life.