Charles Kuralt, via travelhighlights.
So to add to the ongoing list of little known facts among those who little know me, when I was eighteen I was going to go to college just like every other overly privileged upper-middle-class suburban white kid I knew but I was “different” and a “free spirit” and had probably been reading way too much Beat Generation bullshit which meant I was really just confusing “different” and “free spirit” with “fucking stupid” and as a result I went a little overboard with one of those regrettable moments of “teenage rebellion” and just before graduating high school I pretty much ran away from home and hopped in a van full of dirty hippies and started following this band around and before I knew it I looked like this.
We try not to talk about it.
Now because I was eighteen and stupid I really had no idea what I was getting into and everything I thought I knew about this alternative subculture was what I’d read in books or seen in documentaries and so I figured it was going to be all flowers and yoga and incense and dancing and free love and socialism and “mind expansion” but it turns out that documentary films and personal memoirs are a pretty shitty way of getting any sort of grip on what it’s all really about because these films and books were all probably written by aging boomers feeling guilty about their Wall St. corner offices who needed to console themselves by romanticizing their youth because it is NOTHING LIKE THEY SAY IT IS AT ALL but I digress.
Now because I was eighteen and stupid and also highly impressionable I pretty quickly got sucked into this subculture and it all seemed perfectly normal and before I knew it I was living on the road full-time and following around a lot of other bands and when there weren’t any good bands on tour there were weekend festivals and when there weren’t weekend festivals it was probably because it wasn’t summer anymore.
When it wasn’t summer I’d be crashing somewhere like northern Vermont or Lake Tahoe or Montreal or Santa Cruz or—once I got my hands on a car of my own—I’d spend months at a time camped out in national parks eating granola and “getting lost” and not showering and praying that my money wouldn’t run out before the next show so I could get back to drawing a paycheck from my various “business operations” that we probably shouldn’t talk about in mixed company.
There’s a lot to regret here (obviously) seeing as I was usually pretty filthy and I would willingly “noodle dance” in public and I used to address my peers via “brother” and “sister” and I honestly thought that tea tree oil was a legitimate replacement for shampoo and then when I finally gave it all up and cut my hair and got a job I was only twenty years old and I didn’t have a college degree like everyone else and I felt kind of awkward and I had trouble readjusting to society and I was working in the financial district and I was around a lot of brokers and bankers and so I had a lot of panic attacks that might have been acid flashbacks and then this happened and so I finally went on a “college vacation” and there was this girl there who is basically dead to me now because one time she told me I was like the real-life “Van Wilder” and yeah I was probably the oldest guy at graduation and now I feel really behind everyone else—BUT!—but at the same time I have to remind myself that I’d driven over a quarter-million miles in two years while traveling through forty-eight US states and seven Canadian provinces and a good deal of Mexico all before most people had got around to taking that expository writing requirement they’d been putting off for three semesters and, well, that’s actually pretty fucking cool.
I just wish I’d spent less time on an interstate and could say I’d really seen these places.
