Daily Log of a Fresh-faced College Graduate
May 1, 2013

It takes almost two hours to get to Interstate 15 from Palm Springs.  Then the next leg of the trip really begins.  It is, all total, over 1,000 miles to Aurora, Colorado.  We decide that since Duluth doesn’t get there until Friday night – and that since it’s only Wednesday – we can stand to break the trip into three days.

The first day took us through the Mojave National Preserve, which is a long way of saying “desert.”  We let the radio fill our silence as the brown and yellow and dun of the scenery flies past.  Annie just seems to be there.  It’s maybe a half-hour before Don-o finally breaks the silence.

“Look,” he says.  “I didn’t mean to piss you off last night.”

“Yeah.  I know.”

“I just screwed up.”

I think about it for a minute while I listen to the radio station actually playing Teenagers from My Chemical Romance.  “Did you know I was named after Neal Cassady?” I ask.

“Who the hell’s that?”

If there’s a perfect response to sum up my life, that’s it.

“Some loser from my grandfather’s day – a free spirit kinda guy, to hear my dad tell it.  Some dude wrote a book about him.  I think my dad wanted to be him.”

“Neal Cassady… Casey Neal.  Cool.”

“Yeah.  I guess.”

Not really, though; that’s what I think.  My dad sold appliances at Sears for ten years before bugging out.  He used to tell me I should go grab life by the ass-end and shake it, but he just worked at Sears.  When he left, did he go on his big road trip or do anything important?  Not unless you rate working a counter at Walgreens as being up there in international impact.  Grab the world.  Live.  Breathe the moment.

My dad would have loved Don-o.

He would have lived through him.  Maybe he would even be here, wandering the western United States under a big blue dome of sky and enjoying the crap out of it.  Maybe he wouldn’t be tired now like I am, or looking forward to having three days in the same place to watch Duluth play Aurora.  Who the hell knows what Dad would be doing now if I were more like Don-o?

But I’m not. I love the outdoors, and I love baseball.  The idea of working in Sears or Sofa Center makes me want to puke, but at this moment, I feel this need that I’ve never before felt.  I can’t describe it, but as we passed the gauntlet of dune grass and sage, I wanted a place to be.

“What if you were a girl?” Don-o says.

“What?”

“What would you be named if you had been a girl?”

I laugh.  “I don’t know.”

#

We pull into Vegas again that afternoon and again get comped.  I pocket another $400 at the poker table, but Don-o gives back $350 doubling-down on blackjack and losing to a natural twenty-one.  We go out and see an indie band in a basement bar that smells of cherry and vodka and is just… sticky.  The walls are a whirling mash of graffiti with alcoholic memorabilia stapled, taped and glued in cracks and other nooks.  The music is loud enough that it boils your joints.  This is Clearly.  Not.  Frank.  Sinatra‘s.  Vegas.  The music is outstanding, though.  The group calls itself Hish and the Slash, and it plays a punk-pop kind of scream rock that makes you feel like they have something to say merely by being there.  The lead singer wears a red vest and the guitar player is a blonde chick that seems to be in a world of her own as she channels some hyperbolic combination of Carlos Santana and Tom Morello.

#

May 2, 2013

So, uh, yeah.  We get a late start the next day and don’t hit Utah until maybe 2:00.  To top it off, when we get to St. George, it actually starts to rain.  First time we had seen rain since Don-o bought Annie, and Annie, having no top to speak of, provides no solace against the storm – which is really just a short mountain burst that soaks us to the skin.  At first, I bitch and moan, but Don-o loves it and I admit that once I get used to the idea of just letting it rain, I feel pretty good.

We do eight hours that day, me driving the second stint and Don-o drinking and holding this rambling conversation about the Borealis and their chances this year.  By sunset, we get to Grand Junction, just inside the Colorado line.  It’s at an altitude of nearly a mile.  By now, Annie’s old 1960s-caliber motor is struggling more than a bit as she hauls tail up the hills, and… well… she’s happy to be stopping.

Grand Junction probably has more cows than people, if that tells you anything, and it seems like most of the people are kids.  I mean, this is, like, a total family town.

“This place needs a single-A team, like, now,” I say as we sit in a burger shop and slurp down a real fountain soda.

“They already host the JUCO World Series,” Don-o replies.

“Seriously?”

Don-o looks at me with his cheesiest grin.  “You shoulda known that.”

We go to Suplizio Field that evening and eat stale popcorn and a snow cone while we watch the last three innings of a high school game played in a park that’s just drop-dead gorgeous.  A plaque says it was the Colorado Field of the Year at one point, and I believe it.