Less than one week now until the big mess of an anticlimax known as my birthday and I am pretty sure that I am seeing things. In the corner of my eye, I keep seeing little twitches and vibrations on my screen, sure that there has been a change that someone has sent me a message or an email or...? And I can only assume this is a product of my desire. That, indeed that corner tab is not moving, only that I so wish it to that my eye has produced a spasm just to give me that single, short moment's reprieve.

I have been itching for a road trip lately. Not sure where to go, the few places within reasonable drive distance all rather...unappealing destinations. I was on my way back from the airport in the grocery getter and felt a sense of dull happiness at being on the (sorta) open road that I hadn't felt with that awareness since college and the days of endless back and forth between Lawrence and the Ville.

Driving, for me, has always been fertile creative ground, especially when I am prone to sadness--which, luckily for me and all my rapt readers (ha!), lately I have been--and has produced a number of short pieces for writing classes, all with themes of emptiness and open space and possibility and smog.

It hasn't felt as cathartic as that brief, late night drive was. I was tempted to just keep going. I feel the need to shake off my life right now so strongly, that there is some irrational, terrifying, urgent siren call to just fuck off and not come back. Take all my money ($31), shirk all my duties, leave all my acquaintances and just blow outta here. It is a dream.

In that dream it is warm and dry and I have some futureless, somewhat personally fulfilling job like bartending or driving a school bus or working the cash register at a convenience store. Somewhere small, lots of small places. Where I eat canned beans and PB&J and sleep in my van and spend my free time--so much of it!--walking around, picking through antique stores and talking to old strangers and musing about the world on driftwood benches around a lake.

Some sort of comforting nothing. With goals and achievements one in the same, doing what I want to do, and wanting what I do. Everyone around and nobody with me but me. Low expectations and pleasant surprises every day.

I'd write a book on the customer copy receipts that no one wanted and staple it together with a psuedonym like "Almetta May Van Duesel" on it and pay my $127 dollars to have it copied three dozen times at a Kinko's onto smooth, bold colored paper and send it to my loved ones. The people I used to know.

I'd sit at the ratty booth at some creepy truck stop diner and smile all my teeth at the greasy guy at the pie bar with almost none and get back to my novel, tea in hand, one foot out the door.

Greener Grass

In an effort to distract myself from the 1200 words I have left to write for an article due NOW (but actually going to be done by tonight) until my incredible caffeine jitters subside and my vision is a little less effervescent, I have decided to write a useless blog--as it doesn't matter so much the quality, readability, heck! even the coherence of this thing. It is the perfect venue for my crack-writing.

This weekend, after a disconcerting hour spent huddled in the prairie wind by a barbed wire fence while an overzealous policeman gave my vehicle an excessive cavity search, I rendezvoused with my sister sibling in that booming Western Kansas metropolis of Hays. No--really, a nice, farm-fed fellow who bought us a drink and slow-two-stepped me around a corn-starched dance floor told me it was THE destination in the west of the Wheat State. And he would know, he lived in the big city for a year, then decided that Wichita was just not the place for him.

Anyhoo, so we took the standard turns at a local eatery and a smoke-filled dive bar at which every single patron sat with their skinny drink straws dangling from their lips and their cigarettes fading to ash in their yellow fingers, riveted by the UFC on the TVs. We played some Penthouse PhotoHunt, whooped loudly, made it painfully clear we were not from Hays and headed to the western bar to get the night actually started.

The thing that was most abundantly clear--outside of the fact that it seems that country boys (and country old men) dig girls with glasses and a city vibe--was that these folks were a different country. Everything about the way this bar worked was foreign to us. EVERYone had a second nature gift at two-stepping, swinging and line-dancing. Not only did they all know how (as if born with boots on) but they did it automatically--almost mechanically--with partner after partner, sometimes never bothering to smile or speak at all, before or after. This was just the norm, the reg, you didn't even have to like a gal to dance with her, you just had to be able to flip her around.

The very best part of the business was the old folks. Now, Hays wasn't running any sort of shortage on hefty citizens and their seniors weren't any different. These were not people turning down offers of AARP covers, either. But, even when the dance floor was empty of the booze-lubed youths that were pulling out the fancy moves, it was the round, polyester-panted old folks who were still out there, strutting their stuff. They laid on each other's bosoms and bellies, really holding onto one another as they shuffled around the wooden floor, the steps to their dances totally subconscious. They weren't fashionable or cool. They were happy. They had rough hands and big belt buckles and even bigger hair and they had an easy, comfortable intimacy of people who had relatively hard, simple satisfying lives. And someone to live it with. Someone whose dance card they had eagerly filled decades ago and now had a family and a house and a lifetime of shared achievements with. A sturdy, comforting partner and attainable goals.

It looked like a warm, pleasant place to be, at least from over my vodka at the bar on the side of the dance floor.

There is certainly something to be said for small towns with rural leanings. Anna and I both think there is a certain indefinite something that is missed out on when you live in the city, some kind of contentedness.

For a moment I really longed to pitch all my discontentment and move to the country, pulling sweet, sincere boys in boots for the rest of my life.

But, to be sure, it is a double-edged sword. There would be something lost in living in rural middle America too. Or anywhere, being anyone. It is such a shame we can't live all of the lives there are out there, kind of sample all the sweets there are.

Meanwhile, my man friend wants me around, except when it isn't convenient. Not if it will, god forbid, make it look like he's "that guy" with the girlfriend now. He'd much prefer to get someone to pick him up, drive him around while he gets hammered (and probably smokes, un-nagged), and makes sure his friend that mercilessly makes fun of other people and is generally a hater (sounds like a fun guy, right?) still thinks he is just "one of the guys," not "tied down" by "the old lady."

Too bad that "just one of the guys," eventually ends up being "just one guy." One. Single. Guy.

P.S. It was a phenomenal Super Bowl, outside of a few minor (but actually fatal) choking incidences on the part of the Cards and a majorly amazing, will-be-talked-about-for-quite-some-time catch by a guy on the Steelers' releve. Too bad, I was cheering for the underdog.