Date: 11.4.11
No photos. No video. I let you down. I spent the day mostly in the hotel room. I'm tired. Something made me tired.
I slept late. I turned on the TV for the first time in 65 days. I cracked a beer at 3PM and watched football and monitored my last place in my fantasy league. I also ate fast food for the first time on this trip. I challenge any of you to spend that many days traveling in this country and say that you lasted that long.
My meal was so full of sugar and fat and nothing that it wasn't 30 minutes later that I was napping and lucid dreaming. You may not know, but since I can remember I've always had the ability to go in and out of dreams at will. I can control them, but sometimes, like today, I have many levels, like in the movie "Inception", and I had trouble telling where I was. It's not the opposite of disturbing.
I have two pages of that dream sequence in the personal journal, but I will tell you that my buddies kid was a chimpanzee in a pizza hut uniform and that it is possible to meld the personalities of three ex-girlfriends into the body of a wild pig who is capable of speech.
I spent lots of time between the weather channel and google maps and every travel site in the world trying to figure out where-to-next. Truth is, I'm a bit ragged out and I need a bike ride.
You know I hate to poo on places, because you can't just look at a river and say it doesn't have any gold running through it, but I drove around this town five times before I found a restaurant that wasn't a Sonic, or similar. And that place that I found, the place where all the cars were, that place had food that tasted like carpet.
Give me credit for eating the entire plate while swatting flies from the table and wondering why someone, anyone, just hadn't yet reached up and taken down that surveillance camera that was dangling from its electrical cord and pointed straight at the ground.
When I tell my waitress that I don't think the surveillance camera is picking up much action, she just waves her hand and I don't even get a smirk. Yeah, "put on a happy face" is a great song, but when the place is an energy suck, it's not so simple.
And when I ask the lady at the gas station, where I go to get supplies for the night, I ask her if there is a place I can go and watch the game, have a beer, you know, be around other folks.
She tells me she doesn't go to bars. That's all she says. I ask her if she knows anyone who might and if so, where might she find them if she were looking for them? And she says, maybe the Dairy Queen?
I can do this. This is a no-dance town and I'm feeling foot-loose, that's all.
Off to El Paso tomorrow. I need some mountains to stretch my legs and my brain. I'll be back. Not to Pecos, but to you.
