i sit alone in my four cornered room starin at candles

a funny thing happens as you get older: you start to realize, slowly but surely, how complete fucking insane things you once thought normal really are. for instance, music, clothes and road trips.

take, again, for instance, this weekend. what do you do when your flight home from orlando, the tourist hell of hells, gets cancelled and you're faced with the possibility of having to stay in that disney world shit hole for not one but two additional nights? why, you rent a car and drive like hell.

well, let me properly rephrase that cause i know travis america is going to read this and think, "what a fuck, he took all the credit." you get in a car with your cohorts and stay awake for a few hours and then pass out in the backseat knowing they're going to need you to come in like the fucking mariano rivera of road trips and close that bitch out.

but that's exactly what happened. friday night at 7:30 we hopped in a car and didn't look back. we drove straight up I-95 from Olrando to the Lincoln Tunnel and only stopped for gas. my boss took the first shift, Travis the Iron Fist of driving drove straight through the fucking night and the dead boringness of Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina while I slept, and then I woke up just as Travis was nodding off at the wheel to report for duty. and i think i maybe dropped below like 80 once, maybe twice.

in retrospect, it was insane. something that in college i would have said, "fuck yeah, let's do this." like the time i drove from columbus, OH to the merriweather post pavilion in Maryland, for a concert i didn't have a ticket to, only to turn around and drive home again afterwards, stopping to sleep in my truck at a rest area for a few hours on my way back. yeah. almost 8 hours of driving, two hours of the shit ass trey anastasio band (not even the real phish) and then 8 hours home again. wtf?

so when my boss was like, "we're driving to NYC from Orlando, get your stuff" my first inclination was "i'd sooner back a hummer over my head than do that." but, somehow i got my stuff packed and...it was like an out of body experience...found myself checking out, putting my stuff in our Ford Freestyle and then starting my watch as we got on I-4. And then 95 and that was all she wrote folks.

Ford Freestyle, Whitey-style

of course we listened mostly to classic rock cause what the fuck else can you really listen to for 15 hours straight? as much as I love nas, you can't do it. and i tried listening to the underworld double CD, but that just hypnotizes you. you really have to have that good, cheezy, sing-your-fucking brains out classic rock (we tried to think of all the bands named after cities and came up with Boston and Chicago before realizing that Kansas isn't a city and that, fuck, that's all the bands named for cities.) but i'm talking like only three AC/DC songs, maybe some David Bowie and Talking Heads songs, Bob Seger, ZZ Top, and whoever sings Radar Love.

we dined on the finest cuisines: McDonald's, Beef Jerky, Sunflower Seeds, Snickers, Red Bull, Coffee, Soda, AirHeads, Cookies and...um...coffee. We saw amazing sights (sup Jacksonville, Richmond and the NJ Turnpike. god I-95 really sucks actually). We sang songs and told jokes. I guess in the end it was pretty cool. Besides, we made it in 15 hours. Google maps had that shit at like 17 hours, which means that we averaged 71.3333334 miles per hour, which is pretty fucking fast.

Besides, we had to get my Irish boss home in time for St. Patrick's Day so we could end up looking like this by the end of the day:
and that's my story.