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atkins and me

We are not stupid.

Chuck and I kept telling ourselves this. Surely the readers with the slightest cosmic bent would see the beauty of our quest.

So we drove out there. More precisely, he drove out there - I rode shotgun. I could've shared the driving duty but, given my lack of experience with top-heavy 4WD manual transmission mantrucks, I also could've rolled us into a ditch, and it's just wrong to kill a man's horse on the day you first meet him.

I'm still hoarse from all the talking we did. Okay, I'll admit it, I did most of the talking. Stick a guy in a house with a 7-year-old for a long time and stuff is gonna build up. So instead of focusing on my duties as the Music Selection Officer, I blabbed and kvetched from Burbank to Barstow to Baker and back. I spilled my guts to the guy, splashing opinions all over the insides of his Land Cruiser. He knows how I feel about way too much.

I'd tell you more right now, but I'm going into the darkroom instead. There's a couple of rolls of film that I know will help me to recall the finer points of our trek, clear evidence that we, in fact, did this. I still have those moments after first waking where I have trouble remembering whether or not it was a dream.

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today's music:

"Route 66" -- The Manhattan Transfer -- BOP DOO-WOPP

today's wisdom:

"Most people have a furious itch to talk about themselves and are restrained only by the disinclination of others to listen. Reserve is an artificial quality that is developed in most of us but as the result of innumerable rebuffs."

- W. Somerset Maugham