Award Tour Vol. 5: Quiet and Merciful End

Amarillo to Albuquerque:

I witnessed two things out in New Mexico that I had never experienced before on the East coast. The first thing: Vast mesas. You know - the big stone structures that Wile E. Coyote would inevitably:

a) plummet off of?

b) Be squashed flat by?

c) Go careening into at a high speed?

d) All of the above while trying to catch Road Runner?

Yeah, those things. Having seen them repeatedly in cartoons, but never in real life (not in video, pictures, or even postcards), I was close to believing they were merely an artist's rendition of what life might look like on Mars during the Bronze age. Why my mind chose the Bronze Age and Mars is a conversation for another time (one commonly referred to as “never”). Let us move on.

The second thing I had never seen before was - vast spaciousness. New Mexico was more empty than a politician’s promise. On the east coast you can't drive an hour without running into a city (or at least a small town) - in New Mexico if you're heading towards anything but Albuquerque, you could easily drive an hour without seeing "signs of life". I don't just mean townships, villages, or settlements - I mean foot prints, abandoned campfires, or hell signs of struggle.

I don’t even think there are microbes out there - if you died out there, your body wouldn’t even decay. You would just sit in a naturally occurring state of suspended animation (I do not advise that you test this theory by the way). I once made a joke about the East-West Connector area in Atlanta being desolate (I think I described it as the Outer Space with trees) - but New Mexico has raised the bar (or lowered it depending on how you look at it) on empty space. You know you’re in desolation when:

-It's the 21st century and still, we overhead radar and Rand McNally is still making guesses as to where your roads and streets are. (I mean come on ya’ll... this is Rand we're talking about. This isn’t the standard “Wild Goose Chase” that MapQuest sends you on once you’re within 2 miles of your destination telling you to turn on streets that don’t exist… we’re talking about faking out Rand and them. Do you have any idea how long them dudes been making maps? No you don’t so I’ll tell you... 100+ years. A 100+ years of mapping and they still don't know how to handle New Mexico, N.M. still has them guessing.)

-When you travel 20 miles on the interstate in a straight line because when they were building the highway there was nothing to avoid. (It kinda makes the whole Interstate feel like a slow motion “jail break” than a public works doesn’t it?)

-When you could shoot a post-apocalyptic film without altering the landscape (that should be self explanatory – moving on)

Albuquerque to Flagstaff:

In case you forgot, our plan was to drive from Nashville to Los Angeles continuously. In case you also forgot, I am me... and so a bad idea (such as driving from Nashville to Los Angeles continuously) can only be magnified, and the subsequent disastrous outcome can only be hastened, not avoided. And after driving non-stop for almost 25 hours by now we have reached a point where our conscious has become a bad acid trip. We are both starting to see things, pink elephants dancing on the horizon, stone formations coming to life and running relays across the road, whatever you might see during a poorly done abstract film while on high on percoset, that’s what we’re seeing (except we know we’re not high – which actually makes it terrifying). Delirium is funny like that... not funny "ha ha", but funny "what the hell"... have you seeing things that not only don't exist, but wouldn't make sense if they did exist. We pushed the boundaries of human endurance... and as it turns out they were pretty firmly cemented where they were. Seems like you actually do require more than token sleep in a 24 hour period. Who knew?

Of course there was some good in all this (hard to imagine I know). We had now traveled nearly 3/4 of the way to Los Angeles. That sort of hard charging towards the finish line has given us some slack in our schedule. We can stop and visit places like Vegas now. And also, let's not forget, were it not for the mind numbing insanity of this non-stop truck driving marathon, I would’ve heard and perhaps answered (in a more timely fashion) the cry for help from my lower back which really cannot take another 5 minutes of this seated position.

When we finally reached Flagstaff, our neurons were barely firing in a way that could be construed as "thought". As evidence of this, we formed (what might loosely be interpreted as) a plan which entailed finding the nearest rest stop, laying out on the truck-bed of the U-Haul and taking a nap. Let me say that again (because you obviously didn't hear me) I said: our PLAN was to find the nearest rest stop, lay out on the truck-bed of the U-Haul and take a nap - not to go to sleep, not to stop at a hotel - but to nap in the truck - ON PURPOSE. Pause and reflect.

(You see what sleep deprivation will do to your judgment)? Granted, it seems like a bad idea to you now because you've had a good night's rest - you're in your right mind. Even still, when you consider the ridiculous nature of the original plan, a camp out in the back of the truck actually seems like an appropriate finale. How else could you end a 25 hour festival of funk filled U-Haul road tripping? Not in a swank hotel... not if you want to comply with the theme: "Insanity: Making Bad Decisions Work for You!!!".

I want to say cooler heads prevailed, but it was our heads that came up with the original plan, and so it's kind of counterintuitive. Let’s just say that these brains somehow managed to come up with a better plan (despite themselves). I honestly can't even remember what convinced us to reconsider our "approach vector", all I know is that instead of sleeping in the U-Haul we stopped at a Hampton Inn and actually slept on a bed. Our Tom-Foolery has come to a quiet and merciful end without us understanding why, when, or what. And you know what? When you’re seeing rock formation relays, why, when, and what don’t even matter.