I can’t sleep. The nerves in my stomach are aching with a low-lying resonance akin to the nervous excitement I experienced on the day I first moved from North Canton to Pittsburgh for college in 2006. This is it. Today is the day.
Upon departing today, which I hope to have done by 1 p.m., I’ll be on my way for at least 500 miles for Leg 1. My hope is to land somewhere past the Iowa border. It sounds a little modest, but it’ll be a good start. We’ll see if I make it much farther on the day.
From there, I’ll stop at Fort Collins, Colorado, and I’ll take I-80 down through Nevada and into Las Vegas and, finally, Los Angeles. I’m planning out five days for the whole roadtrip, and I’m taking the northerly route if only just because I am driving an old jalopy with a leaky valve cover gasket and no air conditioning. And Texas and Oklahoma are hovering right around 100 degrees at the moment.
Thus begins the trip — concluding the last time I’ll be back here until probably the holidays. Sure, noble quests and riding off into the sunset are about as trite as the game-winning shot/run/catch/touchdown that has permeated our culture since The Hoosiers movie, and probably earlier, but there’s something truly romantic about it — a sense of closure and a sense of something new and unexpected. The band Semisonic put it this way: “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”
That’s why such a trope will never cease. That’s why the 2011 conclusion to the fourth season of Showtime’s Californication ended with, you guessed it, the protagonist Hank Moody driving off into the sunset. As the show’s executive director explained in an interview shortly after the episode premiered, the fifth season is going to be a vast departure from the ones that came before it. Such things are like hard returns after a paragraph of thoughts.
I’m not expecting to get out of Ohio until the early afternoon, but expect this to be my last post for a while on this until I get to enough stable ground to continue. And while I can imagine my posts seem melodramatic in some respects, this is a huge departure for me and for anything I’ve ever done. I can promise that once I get on the road, once pictures are taken and journals are logged, this will more become a set of secondary eyes for all y’all to follow along on the trip. It’ll become a bit less Field of Dreams and a bit more Almost Famous — minus the drugs and concert aspect. I can’t play the guitar, but I used to play a mean cello in middle school. Or so I thought.
I’d love to hurry on by and get to my new apartment in Los Angeles today, tomorrow, or the day after, but this is going to be a slow burn, seeing the sights and meeting the people along the way. People keep telling me this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, so I might as well soak it all in during this one smidgen of my lifetime.
California holds so much promise for me — promise of a career doing what I love, warm weather, the ocean, and maybe even a chance to take off some of the weight I’ve put on since high school. It’s a clean sheet. And it’s going to be awesome.
Things That Rhyme with 'Cars' 