Aimless Thoughts: Delirious Recollections

I checked Google Maps when I hit my first gas station. Apparently my destination was exactly 666 miles away. A lot of people in my life were concerned. I told everyone I’d start driving after work on Sunday, hit a motel around Dubuque then finish the drive the next day. Now here I was on Monday, less than an hour from home, prepared to go the whole distance in one sitting. This is the story, as uncensored as I’ll allow myself to be, of the dumbest goddamn thing I’ve ever done. It’s the ugly, messy story of the happiest and freest I’ve ever let myself be. It’s also, unless you’re disturbingly invested in me as a person, a completely worthless piece of writing. Here there be no morals, no lessons, no themes at all. Sound and fury signifying nothing greater than my own incessant desire for sound and fury.

The trip started off on a blisteringly normal note. A couple hours on the open road, music loud as I’m comfortable with, phone charging in the cup holder with the GPS up, Kwik Trip chicken tenders in the passenger seat. And, uh, no working AC. In late August. I asked around, nobody in my family currently owns a vehicle with a working AC or blower. I’m just young enough that renting wasn’t an option. With no other options apparent to me, I sucked it up and shoved a five-gallon water cooler in my back seat.

Until about noon I was having fun. Driving is a favorite pastime, especially combined with music or long YouTube videos. Binging all my old favorites, including some I’ve hardly listened to/watched lately, was great. Seeing the driftless Wisconsin countryside again was nice, even if that part of my route was quickly interrupted by the ass end of Madison. I did, at the very least, hit a pretty nice part of downtown Dubuque. Never been down that way before, but I’d love to visit it more properly. It seems like exactly the kind of historical, industrial Great Lakes city I obsess over. It catches a great stretch of the Mississippi too, though my heart will always belong to the bluffs of southern Minnesota.

The early symptoms of heat exhaustion set in just outside of Dubuque. The sun was peaking, hotter than in Wisconsin and even less bearable between cities in the Plains. My car’s thermometer averaged 100 through the hottest hours of the days. I hardly stopped at all. It wasn’t always by choice. All that was out here were farms and the occasional planned development. Those probably had gas stations. It never really occurred to me, my mind was all taken up by the music and the road and my headache and my damp-ass skin and the handfuls of Tylenol I was rawdogging with a dry throat. Few notes remained of the beauty of the open road.

At some point I looked down at my arm and didn’t see any sweat. I licked it. It was dry and bitter, encrusted by a layer of salt. I was just conscious to realize that was a really bad sign, so I got off the highway in some hellish copy-pasted new build neighborhood between cornfields. Local attractions included a school and a Casey’s.

I spent the next half hour of my life in the Casey’s bathroom, taking in the chill air and not pissing at all. Then I gave my phone and its charger a break next to some freezer-burned ice cream. While I waited for them to cool down I discovered something truly amazing: Donettes being sold frozen. Those plasticky, allegedly chocolate-flavored atrocities are a favorite of mine already, but the new texture and temperature really kicks things up a notch. Or maybe it was the heat exhaustion. Who knows? I’ve yet to try them beyond altered states and have very little inclination to do so.

My next stop was a Sinclar, which I’m always excited to visit on account of a life-long sauropod obsession. This was close to the Nebraska border, not far from civilization but far enough I was a little surprised by the normal-ass girl behind the counter. I always feel bad for rural gas station attendants who seem friendly and well-adjusted. I dunno. Maybe that’s just me, somebody who used to play poker in gas stations.

The sun was setting by Omaha. It couldn’t have come at a better time, given Omaha’s the only place I was significantly delayed by road work. Which, it must be said, is amazing for the Great Lakes/Midwest in August. For most of June and July, and I’ll always hate myself for not mentioning this in 6:16, there was so much road work in Menasha that it became practically impossible to leave the town.

The part of Omaha I was going through wasn’t much prettier than the traffic. I stopped at an ugly old gas station and made a point not to stop again. Nothing against the city, I’m sure I’d love it under better circumstances. Hell, if I can find a way to love Milwaukee…

Milwaukee is five-hundred miles away. I’m over the worst of my childhood abandonment issues, but this was starting to feel weird. What the hell am I doing out here? People like me don’t do this. What the hell could drive me so far as to… well, to drive so far?

Oh, right.

With that in mind my spirits were renewed sufficiently to finish the drive. Before I knew it the heat was down to 93 and I was far beyond the city. Beyond Omaha the Great Plains were more void of life than ever. The highways never dreamt bigger than 55 miles and the gas stations were right off of them. Some were really just gas stations in the most literal sense, without the convenience stores we’ve become so accustomed to. These roads were, as much as the fuel being reanimated in my engine, living fossils. They’re strange and beautiful relics of another time. Delirious at sunset, out on the edge of American civilization, moving the same direction as the storm on the horizon, I found happiness again.

I couldn’t think of a better way to end a long drive. Not that it was over yet, because as it turned out I think I plugged the wrong address in. I pulled over and called her. She gave me the address, I told her where I was, she told me how to get to her. She and her roommates were standing out front when I got there. It was hard to miss ‘em. I stumbled out of the car, gave her a very sloppy hug and stumbled into her room.

After reacquainting myself with a long-time girlfriend I’ve not known physically for some time, and after finding my poor carsick legs again, I returned to the car and brought in my single tote bag of stuff. Everyone was shocked I’d brought so little. What more does one really need but a toothbrush, a razor, a phone and a few changes of clothes? I’m not sure my obsessive, frugal practicality makes sense to a lot of people, though. But it works for me.

In any case, returning to physicality was lovely on all counts. There’s a wide gulf between streaming movies on a call together and watching them from her bed. An even wider gulf separates eating breakfast together and having to awkwardly answer a call from her while I’m eating breakfast alone. Everything about this moment felt right in the way only a mix of hormones and heat stroke can make a person feel.

We were asleep before we knew it. She’s cute. I won’t get into that. But she’s cute. We only had a few days down here together, I’d taken five off and wanted a day to get my house back together after the drive back up. All that left us with, basically, Tuesday and Wednesday in Nebraska. We had a lot to fit in, so many things she wanted to show me.

Much of what follows is, to me, far less interesting than a running narrative of driving 10 hours without air conditioning. Tuesday was about as pedestrian a vacation as one could manage, though even that was shockingly freeing to me. These were the first days off I’d had in nearly two years - by choice, because I have an unhealthy relationship with work.  

We hit an arcade, got Panera bread and bummed around talking aimlessly about whatever was on our minds. About the most noteworthy happening was a jokey argument we got into over whether it was okay for me to park in the lot next to the lot for the business we were actually going to. I was pretty firmly against doing that, and she was equally firm in making fun of my reluctance to do something so trivial. I stood more and more steadfast the harder she laughed.

Like I said, a great trip but also exactly the kind of vacation story literally nobody could make interesting. I’ll spare you the misery of our nearly hour-long conversation about food trucks and a cool WWII-era tank we saw by the side of the road in some small town.

The only important thing that happened while we were out that day was our final stop, her favorite local legal weed store. The woman behind the counter was extremely friendly and knowledgeable, which helped break me out of my shell. See, I’d never been in a weed store before, I’ve never even been high before. Due to a lot of personal shit I’m still very happy to keep to myself the idea of being high or drunk always freaked me out. Which I’ll gladly admit is weird as hell coming from a proud Wisconsinite. Anyhow, my girlfriend is among the first actually responsible drug users I’ve ever met. She takes small doses to help with anxiety and she can provably stop when she wants to. Being with her has healed a lot of my old scars.

Enough scars still remain that I was uncomfortable and uncommunicative for most of my time in the store. You’d be lucky to get more than a nod out of me. Until she started a very lengthy conversation with the woman working the register, at which point I realized I was being weird and rude to a retail worker who was really fucking good at her job. She could tell you anything about anything related to any given product in the store, and she spoke of it all with a contagious passion. I left the store with a good taste in my mouth, and so did my girlfriend - though in her case it was the taste of a cookie she’d bought. While we were out the next day she went back and got three more.

Lately, as my anxiety has worsened over the past year, my girlfriend’s been toying with the idea of getting me to try some low-dose edible or somesuch. So far from home, feeling adventurous, I asked her to save me a small chunk of the cookie. We both knew me actually doing anything with it was a long shot, but I wanted some avenue open to me, I suppose.

We got comfy in bed the moment we got home. She kept the cookie, plus some gummies she’d picked up at the same store, on her nightstand. A couple episodes into Futurama, Chekhov shot me. So it goes.

Wait so has it started yet

What are you feeling

I just feel nice

It’s only been like twenty minutes this episode isn’t even over

I guess I just feel nice being next to you

Yeah that’s it isn’t it

What are you feeling baby

It feels like uh like exactly how you feel the moment after you cum

Yeah that’s it baby feels good doesn’t it

It really does

Are you awake again

How long was I out

Time doesn’t really matter when you’re high

Ok but I wanna know

It’s like 9

Okay wow this is a really good episode I’m gonna try and stay awake maybe

It’s really nice seeing you let go like this I know work is so stressful lately

Yeah it’s nice

I’ve never seen you seem so peaceful

It’s weird

Hm?

I’m literally thinking of the shit that scares me right now and it’s like I can think of it but I can’t think about it that’s so nice I really feel at ease

You said those gummies are low dose right

Baby you’re nowhere near the end of your high you shouldn’t take any more

No trust me

I don’t think it’s a good

I just wanna feel like this more

You will

Can I have more

Okay fine but just half

Okay

You wanna fuck

Uhh sure

Okay

What’s up

Baby you fell asleep right after you asked about sex

You still wanna try

No

Ok yeah me neither

I’m gonna go get food okay baby

Sure yeah I love you

Lily?

Lily?

Lily?

Lily?

Lily?

Lily where were you?

I was getting food just like I said

How long were you gone?

I was only gone for five minutes

I swear I’ve been yelling for half an hour

You weren’t

I wasn’t?

You’re just high I promise

Why do I feel like I was yelling for so long?

You’re just high

I don’t want to be high anymore

That’s the worst thing you can say right now

But it’s the only true thing

Don’t say that

But I don’t want to be high

It won’t help it’ll leave your system before you know it just gotta ride it out

Promise?

Promise

Is there any way to end it faster

No

Why not?

You just gotta ride it out baby

Why?

Did I ask you to marry me when I was high?

Yes

Why don’t I remember that?

You’re still high

I want to remember that

Baby you’re freaking yourself out. It’s all in your head

It’s so important I want to remember it

You will that’s the nice thing about being high you don’t remember anything at all but you remember it all once you come down

But I want to remember

You will

I want to remember you

You will

Why can’t I remember you?

Nothing feels real

Because you’re high

I can’t remember anything

Look at this

That’s us

It is, isn’t it?

We took that at the arcade yesterday in the photo booth

We did, didn’t we?

We were so happy

Just focus on how we felt yesterday okay?

I shouldn’t have let you do this I know how scared you get about losing your memory

No it’s my fault I wanted to try

It’s my fault

Please don’t blame yourself Lily you’re doing amazing at calming me down

I’ll try but I’m high too and freakouts are kinda contagious

Okay

I read it’s not a good idea to let autistic people get high I should’ve listened

Shut up baby it’s my fault

It’s just I do this because forgetting feels good to me and I should’ve realized it wouldn’t feel good to you

Stop talking this is a good episode

Please don’t leave this bed ever again

I won’t

Don’t kiss me my mouth is so fucking dry

Are you guys ok?

They got a little freaked out

Do they need anything?

Do you need anything baby?

My mouth is so fucking dry

Could we get some water?

Sure

I’m hungry

Could you get them something?

Chips sound good and maybe chocolate

Chips and water comin’ right up

Do you have chocolate

I’ll check

Thank you

Yeah we’ve got chocolate

This is baking chocolate dude

It’s all we’ve got

Dog it’s like two inches thick

I’m sorry

Nah this is the hardest I’ve laughed all night

Why are these chips so fucking good

My baby has the munchies huh?

No

You so do

I dunno I think I just like sour cream and onion

Feeling any better baby?

Mhm 

Next time you’ll listen to me won’t you?

These chips are so good oh my god you gotta try them

There’s like one left baby I want you to have it

You’re so sweet

I just want you to feel better

This is the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me

You’d do the same for me

But I was crying so hard earlier

Why would I leave you alone when you need me?

I didn’t scare you did I?

You did

You’re so sweet

The worst part - and the hardest to convey with dialogue - was the way unconsciousness felt like it was actively, maliciously pulling me back into itself. The paranoia over losing track of time and losing my memories kept growing and growing each time I woke up. Several times I dreamt I’d woken up and came to with completely false memories. After regaining sobriety and discussing things thoroughly with Lily I was able to reconstruct the above, which is about as faithful as possible to what really happened. It was weird how, for the first week or so after being high, the actual memories felt like dreams and the dreams felt like real memories. Some time has passed now and I can’t even remember the dreams.

I don’t want anyone to mistake this for an anti-drug message. Half my reservations with posting this publicly are because I’m worried some idiot’s gonna take it and use it as evidence against my actual worldview. I try to avoid such direct confrontations with politics but I feel the need here to state my position clearly: weed is harmless to people who aren’t built like me. People like Lily get a lot out of the ability to completely remove themselves from anxiety and trauma, exist in a headspace where they’re just them. It just so happens a lot of my anxieties - time management, memory loss, abandonment issues and object permanence - are the effects of weed. Most people go to the substance for the exact reason it freaks me the fuck out. We’re all different people. I, for one, think that kind of diversity of thought is really cool. So long as you’re not forcing anyone to do it, and so long as governments and corporations aren’t weaponizing it, I don’t have many qualms. Hell, I sure got a lot out of it. Nothing like getting high and freaking out to make you more appreciative of your everyday life, right? Never before getting high was I so grateful for the normal rate at which time goes by.

Also uh, most of this article was sketched out in my head while I was coming down. The entire dialogue-driven middle section was a high idea. Sober, I think it’s pretty awful. But I can’t deny trying to read that shit evokes the headspace pretty effectively. In any case it sure was a fun writing exercise. Which is kind of all I wanted to accomplish with this: the contents of this article are vapid and trite; it’s an overwritten account of a bunch of normal-ass shit. In the post-Covid era is there anyone who hasn’t written about long-distance relationships or getting high for the first time? My mission with this article, more than anything, was to figure out whether I could make these generic-ass topics interesting in any way.

I don’t think I did so without further ado lemme treat you to a dry lil travelog cause if you’re still reading this I’m pretty sure you’ll read anything.

We slept through Wednesday morning and crawled out of bed around 1 with an ambitious schedule for our last day in town. Lily wanted to show me around the nearby city of Grand Island, and she especially wanted to make sure I saw the comic shop and bookstore. Her roommate drove and we both leaned against each other in the back seat, her freaked out about long car rides and me shaking off the last of my bad vibes.

First stop, the comic store, or rather a general nerd-shit store called Game On. Here you can find everything from modern board games to ancient video game guides. They even have an old Bakugan stuck to a pillar near the register. They also had a remarkably good comic selection near the front, which was why we were there though I wound up striking out. I got myself a couple issues of Alpha Flight and that’s it. Then, chasing a white whale, I visited the carousel of Star Trek paperbacks and - holy shit - instantly found it. It being, naturally, the famously homoerotic uncensored first printing of Killing Time, for around cover price. It should tell you something about me that I consider this find alone worth the heat exhaustion.

While I was waiting in line Lily abruptly bailed for the car. She told me she wasn’t feeling good, that she hadn’t had time to eat anything at all while comforting me and she was just about dying of hunger. I felt awful about that, told her roommate our next stop had to be some kind of quick, cheap fast-food joint. Lily told me she’d be fine, that she knew I wanted a nice dinner before leaving town and she didn’t want to ruin my shopping trip or her appetite.

If the drive and the high are indicative of my own worst traits, well, this incident is equally indicative of hers. She’s all too self-sacrificing, though amazingly she was even worse when we first met. It usually doesn’t last too long. Generally it’s a quick conversation, a “what do you need?” and a trip to the store to get that and then we’re both good to carry on our day. Today it took the two of us a good while to convince her that her stumbling, half-awake on the verge of tears, through every place we went to wouldn’t be fun for us. Basically right up until we were parked outside of her roommate’s favorite hot dog place she was telling us it was okay, that she’d survive and she just wanted us to have fun.

She inhaled three hot dogs and we sat in the car for a bit. Things got a lot better from here.

Our next stop was the bookstore, which, naturally, was my favorite destination in Grand Island. The place was called the Tattered Book. It was, uh, better organized than I imagined a store with that name would be. Still plenty charming. Real school library vibes throughout, down to the spare room in the back full of school tables and chairs (used for board gaming, I think?). Lily was sitting down over there for much of her time, though she did still browse more than she had in the comic store - a major highlight for her was the comic Squee, an impressive find amongst their expectedly miniscule graphic novel section.

Highlights for me were numerous, though I get the feeling I was hardly scratching the surface of the place. The Fifties by David Halberstram (a lifetime interest in ‘60s counterculture has finally left me in want of further context; little embarrassed it took me so long); Mercycle by Piers Anthony (the cover art and plot synopsis need to be seen to be believed); the first Chicks in Chainmail (an old Baen anthology series oriented around female authors and protagonists in fantasy - I was… a big fan of the series’ covers in high school. Nowadays I have a girlfriend and much more familiarity with many of the writers included between covers. Excited to get into the actual prose of the series); The Man With the Strange Head (an anthology of vintage SF ranging from the ‘20s to the ‘40s, one of my favorite eras for the genre); Streetlethal (no fucking clue what this book is but it looks like pure deranged ‘80s sci-fi goodness); and an omnibus collecting Julian May’s The Many-Colored Land and The Golden Torc (the first two entries in her Saga of Pliocene Earth series, a sequence I know next to nothing about except loving the concept and cover art. Never read any Julian May, hyped to check these out!).

The woman who owned the place was nice. I said I thought the store had a great selection. She looked down at the books I’d bought and told me the only reason they had so much sci-fi in at the moment was that all her sci-fi customers were dying off. It’s one of those things I understood, rationally - Grand Island seems like an old town and literary SF is a genre aging past prominence - but hearing it outright felt decidedly odd. Especially when my own grandfather, who’d brought Kurt Vonnegut into my life, is currently dying.

It was on that somber note that we returned home and caught a quick nap before the drive. We woke up, said our goodbyes to everyone and departed around midnight. Lily ate part of another cookie for the drive back. We were alone in the country, traveling wide-open roads unoccupied by any others. It felt a little eerie at times, especially when we were actually in cities. Wayne, Nebraska took on an apocalyptic character and an intangibly miserable vibe neither of us can pinpoint or forget. We stopped at a gas station at the edge of Wayne. There were three guys smoking outside and a guy working the register who looked at me like I was the first guy he’d ever seen with long hair. What a city, man.

Lily’s high kicked in the moment we hit the least occupied stretch of road on the whole drive. Civilization was, at best, glints at the edge of the horizon and storm clouds loomed overhead that we both mistook at some point for some great, distant series of bluffs. Nobody and nothing shared the road with us. Beware by Death Grips came on. I almost skipped it, worrying it’d freak Lily out. She just gazed, wide-eyed, at the open road and said, “this is really trippy”.

My own thoughts mostly concerned trying to turn this trip into writing. What could I say about a fairly normal vacation to make it worth reading? How many of the ugly bits would I end up being too self-conscious to leave uncensored? Four, as it happens. What does it say about me that I’m so much more comfortable posting a semi-fictionalized recollection of events than… well, than doing literally anything more normal than that? In fact, what the hell does this whole trip say about me? If you look back at this article you’ll find plentiful evidence of all my worst traits. That became, as I drove, one of many positive things about the trip. No longer just a road trip with a girlfriend at the end of it, no longer a collection of good moments where some bad lingered in the margins. The bad bits took on an importance of their own, became part of some weird soul-searching journey I still don’t fully believe I actually embarked on. Getting high while recovering from heat exhaustion will never be a good way to find oneself. Driving ten hours through the Great Plains without AC will never be any kind of good idea. But it all worked for me. I had a great time. I’m itching to do something like this again. 

But next time I’m fixing my fucking AC first.