Aimless Thoughts: Sex, Dogs and Rocky Roads

 Every single name in this story has been changed, sans the name of anybody I’ve written about before. The reasons for this will become obvious pretty quickly.

About two weeks before, in a parking lot

“Didja know he used to sleep with a police radio on and bike over to anything happening close to the house?”

“That sounds exactly like something my dad would do.”

“No shit?”
“Yeah.”

“...”

“I hope they can settle their shit before they die.”

“Me too.”

“Dad’s just so fuckin’ stubborn. I figured your grandpa might be more willing to say hi, with how bubbly and nice he is.”

“Don’t let him fool you, grandpa’s just as stubborn as your dad.”

“I guess they are brothers.”

“Yeah. That’s all we got in this family, isn’t it? Just a buncha stubborn men.”

About two weeks before, after finishing an episode of Breaking Bad

“I’m on Walter’s side, honestly.”

“I dunno, I’d hate to be Skyler here. Just trying to keep your husband alive and he refuses everything you offer him.”

“Well, it’s his choice.”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s his choice when he gets to hurt his family.”

“If I were in his shoes, I’d try whatever I could before I tried chemo.”

“No you wouldn’t.”

“I guess not.”

“...”

“...”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to-”

“It’s okay. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“No, you’re fine. Jesus, Lily, I just… it’d be hard, but, shit, it’d be your choice. I’m just sorry. I know you’ve told me before I’m so controlling and I just-”

“Wait, are you still upset about that fight we had in Milwaukee?”

“What?”

“I didn’t really mean any of that, baby.”

“Then why did you say it?”

“We were just getting to know each other again and the first thing we did was go on a trip that you and your dad obviously had planned out way before I was invited. We’d spent most of that week driving and I was tired from the concert. I was exhausted and said something stupid.”

“So you don’t hold that against me?”

“No, baby. I had some fun on that trip, too. And I loved seeing you have fun with your dad.”

“You’re not mad?”

“I’m just mad you won’t stop beating yourself up over it.”

About a week before, in the break room

“I had a good conversation with my dad recently.”

“That’s rare. Well, I mean, maybe not for you, but, uh, for me it is.”

“No, we’ve had problems too. We’re on the mend though.”

“Love that for you.”

“It’s a lot easier now that I’ve got my own place. Mom said she told her therapist recently it was hard having all four of us under one roof.”

“Yeah?”

“We’re all fuckin’ stubborn as hell. And I’ve got terrible anger issues. That’s what dad and I were talking about.”

“You control your anger issues really well.”

“I hide ‘em.”

“Actually, hey, don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re on the autism spectrum, right?”

“Mhm.”

“I wonder if anger issues were a misdiagnosis. Autistic people get stressed out ‘cause they feel like they’re not being understood, and that can lead to outbursts and stuff.”

“Yeah, maybe. I was just thinking I wouldn’t be surprised if dad’s autistic, too. If he was a little younger maybe he would’ve been diagnosed with something.”

“Isn’t that so tragic? There’s whole generations of people who could’ve lived better lives and understood themselves better if they’d been born a couple years later.”

“Yeah, it’s fucked up. Dad’s found some ways to cope, though. I mean, there’s shit he said like, three years ago that I can’t imagine him saying now.”

“Wow, that’s awesome. I’m really happy to hear that.”

“Me too. Hope I can figure my issues out like that some day. I’ve been trying to take his advice.”

The night before, in bed

Lily and I stayed up later than we’d planned on, eating what I’d jokingly called our “last meal”. I whipped up a whole big buffet on our kitchen counter; two kinds of shrimp, two kinds of rice and orange chicken. A couple hours ago every stovetop was on and I was running between them like an idiot, trying to stop anything from burning. Now we were watching Scrubs.

After the show we sat and talked for a while, ending up on the topic of cult classic Adult Swim show Xavier: Renegade Angel. I showed her the scene where Xavier travels back in time by smoking and eating bacon as fast as he can - the logic being, for those who haven’t seen it, that “every slice of bacon takes 9 minutes off your life” and “every cigarette takes 17 minutes off your life”. From there we got into talking about other Adult Swim shows and ended up falling asleep to Morel Orel.

Naturally, I woke up in a cold sweat during the bit where Orel’s dad shoots his son on a camping trip. It could’ve never ended differently. I drifted in and out for a bit after that, fixated on the TV whenever I could be. While I was awake enough for sounds but not words, a song played in the show that I knew I recognized, though I couldn’t place it. My brain filled in the gaps and created a Weird Al cover of Karma Police that eventually, disappointingly faded into The Mountain Goats.

I fell back asleep for another hour or two and had weird dreams.

The morning of, in my kitchen

Getting out of bed sucked. I hadn’t slept well and I had a hell of a day in front of me. Lily and I showered together, finished packing our shit and got to the car as soon as we could. The belongings they’d find by our bodies in the case of a fatal wreck included Lily’s purse, my MP3 player, our phones, a couple snacks, a tote bag full of medicine and a suitcase containing some of her old roommate’s shit. It also included a few late Christmas presents for them. And at the last minute I tossed on a Jamaican bracelet my trustafarian cousins got me for Christmas. For good luck, or something. I think I envisioned a bizarre potential future where somehow those guys were the only people available to identify my mangled remains; they'd see the flag of Jamaica sticking out from amidst disintegrated bones and frozen skin and find some inner peace knowing I appreciated their gift for about a month before I went to meet Jah.

I didn’t go into much detail on her roommates in Delirious Recollections, so let me get everyone up to speed. The person who owns the house Lily used to live in is Alex. They’re older than her and have some issues, but for the most part they’re alright. Then there’s Lily’s brother, Zeke, who lived there through most of 2024. He left a couple weeks after we did. His ex-girlfriend Megan still lives there, on account of her breaking up with him for Alex about as soon as we’d made it home. I remember Lily on the phone with Alex while we were in Milwaukee, literally begging them not to do anything stupid. She told them it could break up their whole friend group and that Megan wasn’t all that great to begin with. Alex was, at the time, a virgin approaching middle age. Could it have ever ended differently?

As expected, Megan Yoko Ono’d Lily’s whole social circle. Zeke was out of the house as soon as he could be and didn’t talk to Lily or Alex for months afterwards. He’s talking to Lily again now, at least. But yeah, this left us in a weird spot. Lily’s old home was quickly becoming uncomfortably distant from the place she’d left behind only a month ago. Megan had never liked her to begin with and now she was one of two people in a house full of Lily’s possessions. Not to mention her dog, Artemis.

Megan, who’d grown more bitter towards Lily as time went on for the baffling reason of believing she’d slept with Zeke, began harassing us around October. By November her incoherent picture of Lily included the belief that she was secretly in love with Alex and that, upon returning to Nebraska, she’d beg to stay with them. This doesn’t make much sense given how the people she’d be begging to stay with had been treating her lately, but in her defense it’s a little less insane if you consider how the house is all set up. Lily had a whole separate side - a bedroom, a bathroom and a den- to herself. Only she and Artemis ever set foot in there and you could tell; she held it to a much higher standard than Alex’s side. Megan saw it as a waste of space with Lily gone and wanted to turn it into a guest room. She made us very aware of that over the phone.

I also want to say, in the name of fairness, that we were slightly at fault here. We could’ve been much better about communicating with the people of Nebraska. Right before we left, we told everyone we’d be back before the end of 2024. For a while, our plan was to commute back and forth so she could live with her family and friends in Nebraska but still find time to be with me. Zeke told her she’d end up wanting to stay with me permanently. She laughed at him. Then the break-up happened, and we started talking logistics. It’d take about 20 hours of driving both ways and a day to pack, so we’d have to spend two nights in Nebraska. She wanted to celebrate Christmas with me and I didn’t want to spend ten hours of my life driving to Nebraska through holiday traffic, so we’d be coming up in January. Then that turned to February, so I could financially recover from Christmas.

Less than two months after Lily moved out, Megan was blowing up her phone daily asking why we kept moving our return visit back and why we couldn’t, basically, just be there tomorrow in a U-Haul and get done with it. She doesn’t really understand that the people in her life have other things going on. It took the two of us about a week to drill February into her head, and to her credit it was basically radio silence from then on. Silence on her terms, though. Megan had increasing control over Alex’s phone; she read all their messages and half the time Alex’s number called us, it was Megan. When it was Alex, things were pretty much how they’d always been. Their friendship with Lily goes back fifteen years and nothing between those two had changed. Even Megan usually wasn’t too bad, now that we’d gotten through to her.

It wasn’t until early January we discovered Megan could hold a grudge with the best of ‘em. All that had actually changed is she stopped making her vitriol apparent to our faces. We only found out about that when, out of absolutely nowhere, Alex’s mother sent Lily a long, aggressive series of text messages. I have to double down here on “absolutely nowhere” because she swears up and down that Lily somehow started it. No, that’s not fucking true in the slightest. Lily’s been cordial to Alex’s parents since she moved to Nebraska. Their text history before this was a bunch of Lily saying merry Christmas and happy Thanksgiving and shit like that with little to no response. She assumed Alex’s parents liked her and even went so far as to say they felt like surrogate parents while she was living so far from home.

The truth, or whatever qualifies as the truth in the minds of the psychotic motherfuckers who raised Alex, came out fast and hard. Despite inviting her to family gatherings and buying her Christmas presents every year, they now claimed to have never liked her to begin with. But she wasn't just texting her to vent this vaguely-formed aggression, no; they’d caught wind of our plan.

“You guys can call a motel [...] No reason for y’all to stay at Alex’s”, one text reads. Another opens, “Not staying 3 days. We got your stuff in a day. So can you”, referring to Lily’s move to Nebraska, which she’d spent a week packing for before Alex and the gang swung by. In one of my favorites she says, in a laughable attempt to trivialize the mere idea of wanting to get her stuff back, “all you have done is take take take”. Morgan’s a big proponent of this idea that Lily, who went into $5,000 of credit card debt so Alex wouldn’t lose their house, was leeching off of them the whole time they were roommates. We were dating by then and I frequently offered to help her pay that off, knowing damn well she couldn't afford it on her own. She never let me. She tanked her credit score instead of asking her partner for money; meanwhile, Alex has been living with just one person for the first time in ages and somehow their finances are already bad enough again that they’re talking about losing the house again. Their parents are totally okay with that, though; obviously Lily was the gold-digger here.

It doesn’t make much sense unless you’re a fucking idiot or you’re already predisposed to disliking Lily. Thankfully Alex’s mom falls into both categories. Her real name is very appropriate to her personality, by the way. Part of me wants to be petty and share it here, but I’ll be nice and call her Lucy. As in Lucifer, because as far as I know she’s religious enough that that would piss her off. 

When I say “I’ll be nice” I of course mean I know exactly how litigious people like her are. This is a woman who saw her kid get into an obviously abusive relationship and sided with the abuser over the only decent woman in her kid's life. This is a woman who could be spending her retirement with her family but chose to spread lies about mine. This is a woman in her sixties who has nothing better to do than start shit with some twentysomethings ten hours away. I'm well aware me and Lily are the bad guys in her story and I am more than goddamn fine with that; if anything, knowing she thinks I'm awful has given me more faith than I've ever had that I'm doing the right thing in life. I only regret that I spent so little of my life insulting her to her face. I’ll remedy that some day, when we’re both burning together in Hell.

Lily was a little more level-headed than me about all this. “I’m staying three days. You’re not in charge. We are, as the adults who stayed in this house.” Lucy stayed rational. “We will call the cops [...] I’ve talked to a lawyer and since the house is only in Alex’s name you have no legal rights to be there. [...] We tolerated your behavior for Alex’s sake [...] We know the lies [...]” And they sure do know the lies, seeing as that's all Megan's been feeding them.

This all happened while I was at work. I became aware of it on break through a group chat Alex and I are both in, where Lily shared a whole ton of screenshots. Which is also how Alex became aware of what was happening; yeah, in case all Lucy’s shit wasn’t bad enough, she did it entirely behind her kid’s back. Alex and Lily are still totally chill by the way. They were hanging out like two days ago at the time of writing. So yeah, the whole “you have no legal right to be there” thing was horseshit seeing as she and I have about the same amount of legal control over the house Alex owns.

I knew she was just blowing smoke up her own ass but I also knew she’d pissed me off and probably got Lily pretty upset too, so I asked to leave work early. She and I started talking. We knew if we stuck to the original plan, that plan would now involve Lucy, Megan, cops and Lucy’s super real lawyer. After carefully weighing our options, we decided the best bet was to drive up as soon as we could so Lucy didn’t have time to pull her Karen shit, grab whatever we could fit into my truck and fuck off as soon as we could.

We also decided Alex should probably be made aware of our new plan. It’s their house, after all, and they could help us get a few things packed before we arrived. Lily messaged their number, trying to make it as clear as possible she didn’t want to speak to Megan. A few days later, Alex called her during a work break - work being one of the only times Megan didn’t have access to their phone.

I was home for this. They called through a Discord server Megan wasn’t in and agreed to our new plan. Immediately afterwards, Alex called Lucy to let her know what was up. We got to hear their side of that conversation. They put their foot down more than I expected, telling her off for making us feel like we had to rush down as soon as possible without actually getting most of the big stuff we were coming for. This, as far as I could tell from Alex’s reactions, made her cry. Crocodile tears to go with her crocodile lawyer, of course, but it got Alex feeling like they’d fucked up. They immediately called up Megan, told her everything and ended it all with, “was I mean to my mom?” Megan said, “yes”. They believed her.

This is the mostly true story of one of the worst clusterfucks I’ve ever been involved in, though I’ve changed some names and abridged or removed certain events for the sake of flow and privacy. With that out of the way, well, I guess I was driving ten hours in one day again. We picked our dates: we’d start driving on the 12th, after work, and get to Nebraska on the 13th. Then we’d pack up the night of the 13th - Megan worked until midnight - and hopefully get out of dodge in the first couple hours of the 14th. It went about as smoothly as you think it did.

January 12th, in Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin

“Wait, what the fuck is that?”

“Hm?”

“D’you see that shit? They got like, a giant outdoor McDonald’s playplace and go-karts and shit.”

“Yeah.”

“Why the hell didn’t I ever go there when I was a kid?”

“I dunno.”

“I guess I always just heard Fondy sucked and believed it. Sorry, were you tryin’ to sleep?”

January 12th and 13th, in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin

It turns out I was pretty goddamn tired after work on Sunday. Look up directions from Oshkosh to Beaver Dam on a map; I know people whose commute is longer than that. We stayed at the same AmericInn my family used to visit yearly, back when absconding to the Horicon Marsh area in November was something we could all agree on. As we got older I found work and my brother became less patient with nature. His idea of a vacation shifted towards getting drunk in Mexico, my idea of a vacation looked more and more like just staying home for more than two days. The hotel’s started to fade from memory, but the important details still linger in my heart.

The pool is sorta bean-shaped, with arching fountains you have to ask an employee to turn on and a big glossy frog standing in one corner, offering his tongue to children as a slide. There’s a pretty sizable hot tub in the other corner, and near the doors is a pool table. Yeah, a pool table in the pool. Back when I had a sense of humor, I did a decent comedy bit about the miscommunication that must’ve led to such a weird feature. I wonder if my brother remembers how that went.

The hotel’s main lobby is dominated by a set of stairs, parallel to the front desk, leading up to a loft that also constitutes a decent portion of the second floor's main hallway. To one side of the stairs is the area you’d eat breakfast, to the other is the desk and the door to the pool. Across from that is a comfy seating area built around a fireplace. You can get tea and coffee there, nothing fancy but good enough for me, and there used to be a couple desktop computers - maybe there still are, I didn’t check - flanking the fireplace. Back in fifth grade I spent much of my trip using those computers to peruse the Super Mario Wiki, writing up the “level select” for my own made-up Mario game. As an aside, does anyone else remember back in the early 2010s when the Nintendo Independent Wikis used to get all kinds of ads for dodgy porn games? What the hell was up with that?

Anyhow, yeah, lots of good memories in this hotel. One more for the road: about tenth grade, when having a smartphone was still a novel new concept, I spent a night out on the loft reading Finn Clark’s reviews on the old Doctor Who Ratings Guide for the old ‘60s Annuals and eating Pizza Hut. We always ordered the Hut in Beaver Dam, and basically nowhere else. So strong is this weird memory that I still think of obscure early-internet Doctor Who fandom and this one particular hotel whenever I pass by a Pizza Hut.

After I’d finished my pizza, I went back inside and watched Svengoolie with my dad. Think it was either Spielberg’s Duel or the amazing old TV movie Gargoyles. Good times. This was all in my head as Lily and I drifted into a restless sleep, still too damn close to home.

January 13th, just outside of Madison, Wisconsin

“I never told you how Lucy got with her wife?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Well, she was married to the guy she had Alex with. He had a girl best friend. Lucy was into her, they got divorced. Then I think, like, Lucy ended up with a friend of that girl or something. I don’t quite remember.”

“Jesus. No fuckin’ wonder they think all that crazy shit about you. They’re living in a soap opera, they think we’re playing by soap opera rules too.”

“I can’t wait to see the look on her face when I just get my stuff and leave.”

January 13th, at the Five Guys on Zeier Road in Madison

Lily got hungry and I needed to hit a bathroom, so we got off at the next available exit in Madison. Which turned out to be the exit right before the exit that led to all the restaurants, naturally. We hopped back on the highway for about two minutes and then found our way to Five Guys. I’d never been, and Lily hadn’t been in ages. Before going in, she Googled whether the local Hooter’s had this Cajun shrimp the Hooter’s down by her parents in Florida had, and I looked up the Vietnamese place next to Five Guys. It was still “coming soon” I think, and Hooter’s didn’t have Cajun shrimp. Five Guys it was.

We entertained ourselves while waiting for our food, particularly amused by a sign advertising “Five Guys gear” between soda machines. We marveled at such absurdities as Five Guys-branded coozies, wondering who the hell that didn’t own a Five Guys franchise would ever buy those. Then our food was ready. Gotta say, it was pretty great. Dad told me not to eat much since digestion can make you sleepy, but man, getting a big burger in my stomach might be the reason I made the rest of the drive in one piece.

While we ate, I read an article from the impressively nerdy “Love in the time of Chasmosaurs” blog about the depictions of dinosaurs in a favorite childhood PC game, Dinosaur Adventure 3D. Sure not as pretty as I remembered it, but nice to revisit. Come to think of it, that’s a pretty common sentiment on this blog.

January 13th, at an intersection in Dubuque, Iowa

“I remember on the way down in August I thought Dubuque was a really cool-lookin’ city. All old brick buildings, industrial shit, bridges.”

“That bridge we just went over was really pretty.”

“Mhm.”
“And I love the rolling hills out here.”

“We gotta actually, like, stay in the driftless area some time.”
“We should do an actual road trip!”

“Hell yeah. I’d love that. Gettin’ a little sick of just drivin’ like a psychopath with no downtime. I wanna take it easy and see the country with you.”

“In an old hippie van.”

“Well, obviously.”

January 13th, at a gas station in Cedar Rapids, Iowa

I had a good laugh driving through Cedar Rapids; see, there’s a specific turn you have to make in Marion that I fucked up in the same exact way on both trips. You have to make a left onto 151 at an intersection that, on Google Maps, might as well be inside of the intersection on 62nd. So on both trips, I made a left onto 62nd and had to turn around in the Victory Sports Center parking lot.

I was relaying this story to Lily when we got a call from Megan. She was deeply apologetic; I think the direct quote is “I’m sorry for all the trouble I’ve caused” but don’t quote me on that. She ended a short, weird conversation by asking if we might drop by her workplace on our way out of town, so that she could get a farewell hug from Lily. Once she was off the phone I made it as explicit as possible to Lily that I wouldn’t hug Megan under any circumstances. She understood, said Megan probably wouldn’t want to anyway but made me promise that if refusing to hug her started any shit I’d back down before it got serious.

The apology didn’t sit right with me. I tried to figure out why as I bought Lily two bottles of some really great apple juice from the convenience store. Came up blank, but man, something about this girl just freaked me the hell out.

January 13th, at a Starbucks in Des Moines, Iowa

Des Moines was the first place we drove through in the dark, though the sun hadn’t fully set yet. I want to say it was about six. It looked gorgeous at dusk, especially the currently unoccupied Adventureland amusement park. Something about rollercoasters and sunsets fills me with a kind of abstract awe, somewhere between nostalgia and abject fear. I couldn’t possibly explain this. The term “megalophobia” gets tossed around a lot online these days, but it’s not that. I love big man-made things, no matter how ugly or how disastrous for the environment. I’ve only been on one roller coaster in my life, the wooden Zippin Pippin in Green Bay. Maybe it’s that lack of comprehension, the feeling of having never fully experienced what’s such an essential piece of so many of my friends’ childhoods. It’s like I’m longing for a memory somebody else inflicted on me, a constructed childhood experience so powerful it’s begun to encroach on actual memory. I dunno.

We stopped at a Starbucks, and I should probably explain that now because it comes up again later. Lily’s only comfortable using single-occupant public restrooms, which basically every Starbucks has. Regardless of how I feel about their business practices, they’re an essential piece of our mere ability to travel such long distances and will remain so into the foreseeable future. It’s maybe the only instance in which the company’s faux-woke veneer has actually accomplished something resembling an act of genuine “allyship”.

Anyway, yeah, the Starbucks we hit in Des Moines was pretty nice. They had their Valentine’s Day cake pops out early, and I was already planning to get a cake pop. We got two and took some cute selfies where we fed them to each other. We sat in the car for a moment. I took a sip of her coffee for the caffeine, she laughed at my retching over the taste. I hit shuffle on my MP3 player and Wheatus’ “Teenage Dirtbag” came on. That also comes up again later.

January 13th, in the middle of goddamn nowhere

I told Lily as we left Des Moines that it was basically the gateway to the Great Plains; that we wouldn’t see just about anything else from here to Omaha. I wasn’t entirely correct. We were, briefly, engaged in a pretty freaky battle of wits with a truck driver who was obviously both tired and quick to anger. That makes two of us. I try to empathize but no, this dude was swerving like a motherfucker while he was trying to pass a bunch of people and kept trying to go around me even though I was easily going ten miles faster than him. Just call it a night, man. You’re gonna kill somebody.

Lily called a bunch of people around then, letting them all know we were close to Omaha and the worst of the drive was probably over. Her parents told us to be careful and all that. Zeke told us he couldn’t talk too long cause he was eating Oreos. He stayed on the phone longer than a man with such hefty commitments probably should have, and was nice enough given how turbulent things had been in his life a couple months ago.

Once she was off the phone, and once we were safely past the trucker, I asked Lily if she’d ever seen Spielberg’s Duel.

January 13th, back in the old stomping grounds

We made good time through Omaha and did a lil half-circle around Lincoln. There’s a specific feeling to being on the highway just outside of a city, the skyline on the horizon but not quite there yet. In this case it never arrived, we just sat there like we were still in the middle of nowhere with a whole city of lights beaming in through the driver’s side windows.

Once we were past Lincoln, Lily told me she could probably navigate the rest of the way home on her own. I told her to leave Google maps on just in case, but once we hit the Grand Island area I let her do it herself. She navigated the whole last hour from memory. And just like that, we were home.

January 13th-14th. Home

On the outside it looked exactly as it had in August, but for a thin layer of snow and ice. We sat in the truck for a bit, trying to calm frayed, tired nerves before we got to work.

The stench of cat piss just about kicked my ass back to the car when Alex let us in, and we came in through the fucking garage. The living room was worse. The couch Lily and I had watched Scary Movie on was slathered in piss and the whole floor around it was stained wherever there weren’t any cans or boxes. The table we’d had breakfast at was full of junk, too, and it didn’t look like there was room to pull any of the chairs out. In the kitchen - fully carpeted, by the way - days-old food occupied most of the counter and floor space, a deep brown slurry of cardboard, fast-food grease and homemade meals cooked in appliances it’d take a fucking gymnast to reach. A mouse fell from a hole in the ceiling and died a few weeks before our visit. Its body was still there.

Every time I stepped in piss I wondered again what the fuck Lucy was smoking. This shithole is the most tangible evidence you could possibly ever have that Lily was pulling her own weight. She’d only been gone since September and somehow the place already looked like a goddamn episode of Hoarders. On the way down I was half-debating checking out the basement, which was entirely Alex’s domain and thus a complete shitshow before Lily left. That’s because the house’s only shower is down there and, since Lily and I combined are too big to fit in the bathtub on her side, we bathed together down there. Although actually, the shower was hardly any wider than a phone booth and looking back neither of us are fully certain how we both fit in the damn thing. Lot of good memories regardless, many of them involving the most magical, romantic, uncomfortably close-quarters shower sex you could ever imagine. But for once in my life I decided not to think with my dick, no matter how sentimental it apparently is. No need to descend any deeper into hell if I don’t have to.

Lily’s side wasn’t any better. We’d been told in advance that her dog, Artemis, might be a little dirty. I believe the exact description was, we might need to wash her paws before we take her home. We made our way over to that side of the house and found an entire half of the living room floor coated in dog shit. A river of piss was beginning to form from the hallway’s plush carpeting, destined to some day meet and erode the dog shit like some scatological geologic catastrophe. The dog smelled like five months of shit and piss. They hadn’t taken the poor thing out once. The only upside of all this is she remembered Lily and couldn’t have been happier to see her. She leapt up into Lily’s arms, instantly staining every single thing she was wearing. Then she did the same to me. Yeah… I missed you too, Artemis.

The bedroom and bathroom were unrecognizable. Her tub was coated in dog hair, for reasons Alex couldn’t explain. The mirror, where Lily had long ago placed a sticker of an anime girl telling you to “wash your hands!” was cloudier than I remembered. The toilet water Artemis had been drinking didn’t look quite right. Her bedroom was a mess of torn-up pillows and her mattress, a nice new Tempur-Pedic and the main reason we’d wanted to rent a U-Haul, was also covered in fucking piss. Her favorite pillow was still in-tact, but guess what the fuck it was drenched in?

We agreed, after Lily realized how wiped I was from the drive, that I’d nap while she and Alex packed. I didn’t love the idea, I was adamant on helping them move, but eventually I came around to it when I laid down for a second and immediately passed out. Artemis cuddled up next to me. I drifted in and out a couple times, basically whenever what they were packing up happened to be in the bedroom. It probably amounted to about three restless hours of sleep. Hopefully that would be enough.

I came back into full consciousness when the truck was mostly packed. Lily told me not to go into her computer room, and I happily obliged. The room was, last I saw, a sorta bubblegummy pink color and absolutely filled to the brim with shelves of knick-knacks, collectibles, cool rocks, bookshelves and corkboards of holiday cards and the like. All I heard of it this time is there was now a bucket in the corner. Written on it in sharpie was “official puke bucket”. It had puke in it. Nobody knew how old the puke was.

Oh, and Megan was back from work. Not sure when that happened. We didn’t talk much. I said hi, she hugged Lily, she seemed cordial enough. I found my bearings and hobbled out to the truck to check out the remarkable packing job Lily had done. Not everything fit; we’re currently talking to Alex about getting a couple odds and ends mailed up. But this was most of her life packed in the back of a truck with room to spare for the two of us and a greyhound. Impressive shit.

I stood still in the front yard, taking in my surroundings. Nauseated from sleeping in piss, still tired, but doing well all things considered. The second time around, being ten hours from home barely registered. Somewhere out there my brother was doing some dumb shit with his friends. Somewhere out there my own friends, mostly in college or working third shift, were waking up or trying desperately to get a couple hours of sleep. Somewhere out there my grandfather was dying, and I’d decided a better use of his final days on Earth was driving ten hours to spite an old woman.

Down the road to my left was a wide clearing. Back in August, the first night I spent here, there were a bunch of weird-ass noises coming from that clearing. Like a goat or something. I asked Alex, they said something like, “yeah, some local kids got a hold of some kinda animal”. In the middle of winter that clearing, like everything, was quiet. I had Teenage Dirtbag in my head. We got moving as soon as we could, peeling out of Nebraska to the sounds of Wheatus’ only good song.

January 14th, in Omaha

I was feeling the most predictable, but dumbest, kind of regret I could’ve been feeling. In the foreseeable future we’re never coming back to Nebraska. Never going back to the place Lily and I did so many things for the first time. Never going back to that lovely little bookstore, the Tattered Book, nor Lily’s favorite local Mexican joint. And she’ll never get to show me all the things we never got to do there, all the things she’d been so excited to show me. Even if we do go back, it’s a crapshoot whether any of those places will even be open. Since she moved down to Grand Island, businesses have been shuttering left and right. When we do go back, it might be a whole different place.

Lily told me a little ways down the road that even her side of the house hadn’t felt like home anymore. That she felt she’d wasted five years of her life down there, only for it all to go to shit through a couple months of neglect. She said she’d expected the visit to feel like going back home after a vacation. What she got was a stranger’s house full of her things. I told her that pissed me off, cause I didn’t want them to take her home from her. She told me it was okay; she’d found a new home with me.

I just hope that’s true.

January 14th, on the open road

Lily was struggling to sleep, leaving me alone in my head. I started thinking about myself, which is all I ever seem capable of. Self-centeredness is at the heart of these Aimless Thoughts; everyone but me is thinly characterized and I consistently pull other peoples’ suffering into my orbit. My grandpa’s dying, my girlfriend’s being harassed, and all I ever say about any of it is how it makes me feel. I parasitize other peoples’ tragedies and sometimes I even go so far as to turn them into content for my fucking blog. I knew an Aimless Thought about this trip was inevitable and took no pride in that.

Hell, my fucking feelings are why we’re on the road right now. We only left early because my dumbass ego wanted to spite an old woman.

January 14th, at a gas station on the Iowa border

A dinky little gas station was our first stop in Iowa. I used the bathroom; they had the sorts of first-generation touch-free toilets and sinks I can vaguely recall being revolutionary as a child, back when everyone thought the future was hands-free. Living as I do in that future, I wish I could go back and tell them the only significant advancement we’ve made since the Bush admin is the hands-free orgasm. In this instance I have to say the future looks bright.

I bought what must’ve been at least my tenth cherry Pepsi and chuckled to myself.

January 14th, pulling out of a different gas station in Iowa

The one major downside of Lily’s packing is that I couldn’t see straight back, I had to rely on the side mirrors. This is a problem millions of people have contended with, it’s hardly some insurmountable issue. But it sucked. Especially when some dude decided it’d be a good idea to shoot past me going like fifty while I was trying to move into his lane. Slammed the brakes, something fell onto a sleeping Artemis in the back so now there’s a fucking greyhound howling on my lap and this dude and I are still swerving all over the place trying to avoid one another. Lily’s up from her nap, Teenage Dirtbag is on again, two equally wimpy car horns are blaring, my heart’s fuckin pounding.

We pulled over maybe a hundred feet from the gas station and moved everything around so nothing could fall on Artemis again. Once she was asleep, I got back on the road. Lily stayed up this time.

January 14th, Neola, Iowa

The adrenaline rush subsided too fast. All my energy was in fingers frozen to the wheel, I couldn’t talk for shit. I kept mumbling “I’m crashing, I’m crashing” and she made me get off the highway in Neola. The whole main drag had angular parking. I took a spot in front of the post office, I think, which turned out to be an awful idea. I had a paranoid kind of tiredness going on and across the street from the post office was some business or other playing oldies all night long. I kept thinking people were talking right behind me, only to check and realize it was still just Frank Sinatra haunting dead midwestern streets.

I opted to turn the truck off before we slept, since we were running on fumes as is and I had this bizarre fear in my head of us waking up to a cop knocking on our window, fining us for loitering; alternatively, a bunch of locals pissed off that one of very few parking spots in this tiny town was being occupied by some assholes who weren’t even the kinds of assholes who’d spend any money before moving on.

Lily gave me a blanket, a cotton candy-colored, fuzzy thing that she’d kept in her closet while she was away. Which is to say, it was entirely piss-free. The joy wasn’t lost on me, even in this state. She covered herself and Artemis up and told me she wouldn’t be sleeping. Temperatures in Neola would be reaching a low in the negative teens. She had to stay up to make sure I didn’t freeze to death. I told her she didn’t have to. She was tired too. Anyhow, I’m a midwesterner, a third-generation Polish-American. I’ve slept in worse.

I’m grateful she stayed up for me. Sleep was restless at first, mostly just my head rolling around on the steering wheel and bolting awake whenever Frank went from crooning to belting. I told Lily, I can’t sleep like this. We gotta get back on the road. I’ll sleep at home. My heart’s still flippin out from the near collision. Let’s get out of this ass end of nowhere town.

Next thing I remember is waking up at like, seven in the morning with Lily watching over me. My fingers could hardly move, the window was all frosted up. None of the silhouettes outside were moving, at least not the way people move. None of them were knocking at our window. Streets were still empty, then. Wonder how many people would be walking around Neola today. Think the high was negative four. I held my fingers under my ass for a minute then got the heat going.

We sat there, holding each other under our blankets, watching frost drip down the windshield.

January 14th, Anita, Iowa

Some forty minutes down the road I remembered I had nothing in my tank. Anita was coming up, but I don’t remember if I saw any signs for gas. I decided I’d risk it, that Anita probably wouldn’t still exist if somebody hadn’t put a gas station there. I was right, of course, and it was my favorite gas station of the trip. Maybe it’s because I’d finally gotten some good sleep. Maybe it’s because just down the road from the gas station was a brick building with a bright-pink mural that Lily and I both took a moment to appreciate. Yeah, that’s probably it.

But deep down part of me knows it’s because this was the only Sinclair we stopped at. Sinclairs are my favorite Western stations. They’ve all got a statue of a sorta generic green sauropod somewhere on their property. I always try and get a picture with one when I’m out west, which proved somewhat difficult in this case because it was situated on top of a stout brick wall, behind a fence and up some stairs. I got a picture of it, at least. It was wearing a white Christmas wreath around its neck like a lei.

The convenience store called itself the ANITA DINO MART. I got myself another cherry Pepsi. Sugar-free this time, because all I could feel in my mouth by now was syrupy sludge. Perusing the snacks I found a box of cherry mash. Cherry mash is, in short, some whipped cherry filling coated in nutty chocolate. They’re like Twin Bings, but a little softer and sweeter. Years ago my dad and I had a couple after a camping trip out this way, only to immediately forget what they were called because in Wisconsin all we’ve got is Twin Bings.

I texted dad immediately to ask him if these were the things we’d had, because as it happens it’d come up in conversation like a week prior. He said yeah, so I bought four of ‘em and stashed one away for him. Lily told me they were all over the place in Nebraska. Then she told me she’d be trying to sleep again, now that I was lucid. Off we went, about four hours behind schedule but at least I was awake enough to get us home alive.

January 14th, outside of a Hy-Vee in Iowa

“Fuck, seriously? Only Starbucks in town is in a Hy-Vee? Wait, Lily, didn’t this happen last time?”

“Did it?”

“Yeah, remember? You had to go, we looked up a Starbucks off the highway. Led us to a Hy-Vee, but then there was a regular Starbucks down the road. Bet it’s the same town.”

“I’ll check.”

“It was only like ten minutes away I think.”

“Nearest Starbucks is forty minutes from here.”
“Jesus, how many Hy-Vee Starbucks are there in Iowa?”

“A lot.”

January 14th, in Des Moines

Des Moines has some shitty highways, man. The bridge spaghetti situation is awful and damn near nobody in Iowa knows how to drive. Lily was back asleep at this point. Glad she missed this, she always freaks out about city driving. Nothing really happened, mind you. It just sucked. You don’t hit a lot of cities on this route; a little bit of Madison and Dubuque, a little bit of Omaha, but in between that is the entire length of Des Moines. Basically by default, it’s the shittiest stretch of the trip. Depending on when in the day you pass through Madison.

I’d switched from music to my MP3 player’s “audiobook” section by now. Most of what I keep in there is YouTube videos I like that don’t necessarily require visuals. I used to have a security job, this player got me through some long nights. Since then I’ve kept downloading long, favorite videos but haven’t done much with ‘em. Until I started dating a girl in Nebraska.

On the drive down in August I mostly kept to one particular channel, Hazel. She does long-ass videos about obscure anime and other tangential ephemera. The closest thing she’s ever done to a sponsor was shouting out the video store she rents a lot of her material from; she also has a band and partially soundtracks most of her videos. Very high-effort, idiosyncratic stuff that’s well worth a look if you want somebody a little afield of the typical anime-YouTube algorithmslop.

Aside from having a genuinely great channel, she’s a favorite of mine for reasons of nostalgia. I first discovered her videos in July 2022, a cataclysmic time in my life that I’ll probably write about some day. I was unemployed. My friends were all in college, about to be in college or prepared to move out of state entirely. Lily and I were newly dating and I was still fucking terrified of being in love. There’s this one night I remember. Sitting on the shore of Lake Michigan, her a million miles away. We sent songs back and forth over text. El Scorcho, Colorado Sunrise, Kanye’s Homecoming. She went to bed and I stayed on the beach, tossing rocks into the water and scrolling YouTube until I found something worth watching.

A couple weeks later Lily and I started a Minecraft server. Hazel’s videos were on in the background while I put together a lab for the tech mods we had installed, and while I dug out a river spanning the outskirts of our base. Good times. To really cement this sentimentality, I also happened to relisten to a bunch of her videos on the drive down in August - The Anime Countryside even helped me to recall the name of Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, a half-remembered manga I’d been wanting to get into. Going through Des Moines I put on a newer one, A Normal Creepypasta Retrospective. The premise is bizarre; basically, she and a friend retell the entire early history of creepypasta entirely through stories they made up. It’s so fucking funny, especially now that I have the memory in my head of Lily waking up in rural Iowa with the video almost over, confused as hell as to how she missed out on all these creepypastas and why they were claiming Slenderman was “obscure”.

Once she was awake and the video was over, she started telling me about a comic she was trying to plot out in her head. A semi-autobiographical fantasy, tentatively titled Puppygirl Dropout. Like my own comic, its major hurdle is our not knowing many artists we can afford. Sounded like a great premise to me, though. Hope she can get it off the ground some day.

January 14h, at a gas station in Iowa

Megan called us again, asking a few clarifying questions about the stuff we hadn’t taken. We were talking about maybe getting some of the smaller stuff shipped up to us, we told her, but that the furniture was all theirs. We hoped maybe Alex could sell some of it to pay off their debts.

A sort of childlike glee overcame her voice as she thanked us for being so kind as to leave all those expensive things behind. Now, she explained, she wouldn’t have to spend any money converting the place into a guest room. Lily was polite through the call. “See,” Megan said, “we can get along! Everyone thinks we can’t get along, but we’re getting along just fine!”

Now I got it. Now I knew why she freaked me out. This whole fucking time she’d been using us. The harassment, the too-little-too-late apologies, everything. We played right into her hand. I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt we’d win a legal case against her, on the grounds of harassment or at least animal abuse. I’m just too fucking tired, dude. That phone call was the most fucking defeated I’d ever felt in my life. At the very least, we have all Lily’s important stuff now. She doesn’t have that leverage over us anymore. She won. But it’s over. Gotta keep movin.

January 14th, in Madison

Trip went smooth from here. We passed through Madison on the tail end of rush hour, let Artemis out at some country gas station not far from the city and meandered our way home. Teenage Dirtbag came on again; I asked Lily to loop it till it got out of my head. It’s still in my head. About two loops deep I told her she could put on whatever she wanted. I unplugged my MP3 player and she started this standup routine from one of the Impractical Jokers, telling a story about the time he got fucked up on weed during an opera performance. It’s a funny story, but once again it’s all the funnier because of Lily, because she’d had to comfort me through a deeply paranoid high just a few months prior.

February 9th. Home

We backed the truck right up to my front door and went to move everything in. It all went smoothly, sans Artemis briefly running away. She’s smart and loyal enough that we weren’t seriously worried, plus she hates the cold. It’s a little funny; moving my furniture when I first got this place, I also pulled up to the front door. But the ground wasn’t so hard then, so the tire tracks flattened out overnight. Now we’re almost a month past all this and I’m staring out the window right now, looking at tracks that are just as fresh as they were on the 14th.

I’m going to see my grandparents in a couple hours, and since I’ll be close to Appleton I might check out a gyro place on College a friend told me was good. Or maybe I’ll take Lily to Mihm’s, an old classic I try to take all my friends from out of state to. Best old-school fast food burger you can get around here, far as I’m concerned. Wish “a burger with the works” always meant just cheese, pickles and onions. And, ah, the entire stick of butter they melt onto the fucker. Like I said back in Little Detroit it was my maternal grandfather’s favorite hangover cure. Worked every time.

I also just woke up from a dream about Christmas, feeling disappointed because my first Christmas with Lily had gone so well. Cutting down a tree with my parents, Lily immediately made a habit of pointing out stumps and stumpy trees and commenting, “that one looks perfect!” Which I’ve been doing for most of my life. At Christmas with my dad’s side of the family, she met our cousins’ dog Lily and made a habit of responding whenever somebody was talking to/about the dog. Both times she elicited comments, mostly directed towards me, asking how I’d ever found a woman with the same dumb-ass sense of humor I’ve been burdening my family with since birth.

The answer only occurred to me as I was making my second twenty-hour marathon drive for that woman. It’s because both of us suffer not only from a dumb-ass sense of humor, but a dumb-ass sense of loyalty. It’s one of the better kinds of stupidity, as far as I’m concerned. This fucked up situation led us on an impromptu road trip that only brought us closer together. The first thing I read when I sat down inside that night was a text from my mom. “You just did an amazing thing for your girl.” Just before departing, Sean told me he thought I spent maybe a little too much of my time in this series on self-effacement. Just about every fight Lily and I have had was about my tendency for self-blaming. So you know what? I'm fucking proud of this. I'm proud of myself, I'm happy with the stupid little adventure me and my girl went on together. I did something moderately impressive that helped my family out of a rough spot. 2025's already lookin like a crazy one. I’ve  just watched an American rapper definitively end his beef with a Canadian pedophile in what might genuinely be, to this day-one hater, the most euphoric moment in recent pop culture history. At the same time a prominent American child rapist is in the early stages of his own beef with Canada. God only knows where this road leads. Least I can do is try and weather the storm with some confidence, right?