The Highways and GoodByeWays of America: Part 3

In 2007 I was introduced to the wonderful world of disc golf by my sister, seen below. It combines the skill and accuracy of normal golf with the lazy stroll and mindless drivel of regular frisbee. It’s sort of like regular golf meets mini golf with discs.

I only play when I go back home because I’ve never had my own disc set but this year Theresa was kind and generous enough to buy Jade and I each one for my birthday. I have yet to take them out in California because I can’t seem to find any (courts? greens? turfs?) around. If you know of one LET’S PLAY!

Below you can see me taking, what I like to call “My Frankenstein Stance”. I stand very rigid and only bend my arm for maximum scoring possibilities.

Theresa is wearing a tye dye t-shirt. Tye dye is to disc golf as plaid is to regular golf.

This one could be on a playing card……wait, is the disc coming or going? Is Jade throwing or about to get hit?

After our five day stay in Sioux Falls, Jade and I made our way to Mitchell, which is, traditionally a simple one hour drive. However, thanks to the strange vortex that exists between these two towns the drive often feels as though it bends and stretches into a decent half day journey.

Just for kicks we decided to try to make it without the assistance of the interstate or highway. We stayed on dirt roads the entire way and what did we find? A pasture of meat eating cows. That one in the center was drooling, staring at me. His eyes were red and I think he had mad cow disease.

I could tell he was in a gang because he had a pierced ear.

Me preparing for the big shot put competition.

My mother-in-law LITERALLY squatting in a cucumber patch.

I used to have a motorcycle in LA but almost died on it. A guy in a speeding brown hunk of crap cut in front of me on the freeway and I slammed on both brakes, front and back. This was a mistake but, what can I say? I panicked. My bike wavered and began to tip at 70mph. I stuck my foot down and kicked the freeway and popped back up, my stomach in my throat, my mouth dry and my brain raging with anger. I sped up (brilliant) and pulled up next to the guy (moron) who almost killed me. I looked into his window (ie took my eyes off the road) pointed to my eyes and pointed to him. I don’t really know what I was trying to say. Maybe “Watch the road” or maybe “I’m watching you”. Whichever it was, he was probably really afraid. It doesn’t matter how big of a nerd and how heroin thin you are. If you ride a motorcycle, nobody will mess with you.

Because of that incident I sent my bike packing back to South Dakota and now only ride it when I’m home.

You can see how happy I am, cruising down 7th on my way to Taco John’s. Could things be better?

If I’m at an all you can eat buffet I have a very difficult time choosing what to eat. I don’t want to just eat SOMEthing. I want to eat EVERYthing, even if I don’t want it. For some reason I just feel as though I’ve purchased everything and now it is my job and my job alone to get my money’s worth, which usually means shoving hideous amounts of food down my greedy throat until I’m sick.

The nacho buffet at M&H gas station is no exception. I fill the container up with cheese. I dump some salsa in. I put in black olives and onions. I dump in jalepenos and sauerkraut and shredded cheese on top of the nacho cheese. This concoction reeks. It smells like dirty feet and B.O. and has been dubbed with the name Dirty Nachos or B.O. Nachos. This is not a title I have personally given it. This is a label my friends and family members have given it over time of me bringing this overlooked delicacy into their presence.

My dad and I had our first joint birthday party, which was pretty interesting. He was turning 50 and I’d just turned 27, our birthdays being nine days apart. We had all of our friends and family over and just hung out all evening. It was great fun and there was cake and food and flies. There are always flies in South Dakota where there is food.

Look at my stupid little beard. It is so pathetic and weak. I am ashamed.

Look at my dad’s mustache, so proud and vibrant, resting on his upper lip like a Sasquatch caterpillar.

Someday…..

This is Derrick. His grandparents live next door to my folks so we were forced to grow up together, often times playing “Guns”. This is the game where boys have fake guns and pretend to shoot each other but end up spending most of their time arguing over if they were actually hit by the pretend bullet.

Derrick now has a beard and I hate him for it.

Someday we’ll show them all…..

I call this one, “Rolling Thunder”.

Look at Jade’s flowing locks. I use to have flowing locks. That was before I began to bald. That was before…..when I was still happy and confident in my physical appearance.

That was….all…..before…..

My grandma has this fascination with dolls. It’s something that happens to older, older women. It’s just a part of growing up, I guess. First you hit puberty, then you get married, then you go through menopause, then you collect strange little dolls. I don’t know. My mom seems to be hitting her Doll Phase early. She’s got these creepy little things with devious grins hanging out about the house.

We left Mitchell after our five day sojourn and then I dropped Jade off at her home….

Our car was packed…..PACKED…..but I managed to find a little room for My Pet Monster. I cannot yet tell how the dogs are reacting to him. I can say, however, that when I got back in the car after grabbing some coffee, I’d found his fingers nibbled on a bit and clementine with some strange bright blue latex clinging to her lips.

She’s a hateful vandal but is awful at espionage.

Sometimes I think she wants to be caught.

We were planning on driving from Billings, Montana down through Yellowstone. We drive an hour and a half south and get to the Yellowstone entrance and the ranger tells us that there’s a fire or some fallen trees or ice or something and the roads are blocked and we can’t get through. She tells us that we’ve got to drive ALL the way back to Livingston, which is about 45 minutes from Billings.

The morning is shot. We see everything twice.

Here is the Yellowstone entrance, apparently historic.

Here’s what we saw the first time going through:

Here’s what we saw the second time, after it started to snow:

Me looking like an angry old man trapped behind the wheel of his automobile.

Clementine looking depressed as per usual.

After driving the same thing twice we decided to just stop at the next town and spend the day relaxing at the hotel, maybe go out and grab a bite to eat, watch some TV, go to sleep early, read a book.

We pulled over in historic Butte, Montana, a wonderful and antiquated town. We saw this place:

Looks pretty nice. Looks pretty fancy. We call to get pricing, just for kicks. We figure it’s way out of our price range and we figure they definitely don’t take dogs. Truthfully, I don’t know why we even bothered.

As it turns out, they were the cheapest hotel we spoke with and they DID take dogs.

Weird.

We walk inside of this elaborate lobby (think The Shining) and the lady gives us our key and tells us that JFK stayed here once. She tells us to pull in around back….

…..where we find….

……this place….

Okay….this makes a little more sense…..The Historic Hotel Finley where JFK stayed. Certainly they mean that he stayed in the nice part. They should really advertise this as the historic Hotel Ghetto where Lee Harvey Oswald probably LIVED.

Dogs welcome.

Sure, sure….why not? Drug addled maniacs welcome. Prison escapees welcome. Vagabonds welcome….

We introduce Clementine to snow.

It does nothing for her hair.

Room 160.

This is where the magic happens…

….Magic: The Gathering….

Alright my little noobians, just one more blog to go until our trip is over and then it’s back to regularly scheduled programs!

The Highways and GoodByeWays of America: Part 2

We wake up somewhere in Colorado. It’s a bright day but there is a chill in the air. The town we slept in is just as dead as the night before. The streetlights change, green, yellow, red but no one crosses. There are no cars, no people.

The car door slams and I poke my groggy head up to see what all the fuss is. Glaring in at me through the back window is a monster cyclops with a giant black android’s face. It clicks once, twice, three times and Clementine jumps up and stares out the window. Jade has her camera and Kaidance doesn’t care.

I go back to sleep while Jade drives through the rest of the Rockies. It’s like having a bed on wheels complete with engine and steering wheel and driver. “Oh, Chapman, take me to the Dakotas and make it snappy, beep-beep!”

We pull over at a place called Knotty Pine. Was that the name of the town or just the name of the store? I can’t remember. There is a stack of logs out front under a sign that reads, “LOGS $5 A BUNDLE. SLIDE MONEY UNDER DOOR AFTER DARK”. We are no longer in or around anything LA. Inside I order a cappuccino and pay three something for it. The lady gives me black coffee with a squirt of what I imagine breast milk to taste like. I almost buy a shirt that lists the top ten reasons why a hand gun is better than a woman but decide not to.

We arrive in Denver with three hours to kill before we need to be in Fort Collins so decide to visit the old haunts. The above photo with Clementeezy is taken at the park where I proposed to Jade before Clem was even a sparkle in her mother’s droopy depressed eyes. Clemenstein has always wanted to be a rocket pilot so it was nice to be able to openly mock her by placing her on a child’s toy and rocking it back and forth with my foot.

Clementine hates photos but is small enough to overpower and bend to your will. Kaidance is a snob. She stays in the background by the zebra because it too is from motherland Africa.

After the picture I kneel down next to Big Dog and say, “Sorry, Kaidance. It’s just plastic. See – plastic.” I knock on the zebra a couple times and reduce her to tears.

When we lived in Denver, Colfax St. (Ave?) was the part of town to STAY AWAY FROM. It was where people bought drugs and young girls disappeared into dark alleys and bad men lived. Jade’s house was a mere two blocks off it, across the street from an elementary school and neighboring an abortion clinic. Some things are just too strange to make up.

I chose the more clinical, asbestos drenched dormitories to stay in. Second floor, last window on the left. Many wonderful and horrible things happened in that room, mostly horrible.

We arrive in Fort Collins and enjoy a nice game of bowling with out friends Jimmy and Malori. Have you ever noticed that all bowling alleys are different but sort of the same? They all seem to be trapped in some sort of 1970s time warp. Where can I buy the carpet they get? I’d love to put it in my bedroom.

Hungry for snacks, Clementine tries stealing milk from the baby’s lips. I would scold her and tell her to stop if it wasn’t so adorable.

But seriously, you should probably rinse out the baby’s mouth.

Malori, Onyx, John. I don’t grow a “beard” for any kind of fashion statement. It is compensation for my male pattern baldness. It is me putting my foot down and saying, “Enough is enough!” I am uncontrollably jealous of the baby’s long, luscious locks. I want them.

After leaving Fort Collins the Big Dog sleeps in the car. We’ve reached the prairies and it all looks the same. She tires of watching the scenery.

Passing through a small town in Nebraska Jade shouts, “Stop! Stop! Turn around! Stop the car! Turn here! Turn right!” and I’m wondering if I’ve just ran over a family of bunnies or if she saw someone selling Chinese Finger Traps.

We pull around the block and she points, says, “Look. A building. Go get the dogs to sit up there”. I comply because she IS the boss.

We drive on into Sioux City, Iowa. Kaidance is a noble beast. Majestic. Grand.

We stay the night in Sioux City at our friend’s Anna and Kenny’s place. This is their three year old daughter Deidre. She’s having watermelon and coffee.

Then finally, the next day we blow into Destination: South Dakota and take a picture to prove it. Great Faces, Great Places.

Well…..great faces, right-o, Mr. Ed?

Jade’s grandma has a golf cart at her place that I like to ride around on. I pull it into the driveway and do cookies or donuts or whatever you call them and I slam on the brakes and the gas and I bend the wheel and when I go inside Jade’s mom tells me that I’m lucky Grandma didn’t see me because she would be upset.

Well, well, well. Don’t old people just always have something to complain about?

The farm or The Farm is located on a remote desert road about fifteen minutes outside of town. It’s easy to get lost, not because of the complex nature of the scenery but because of the lack therof. It all starts to look the same. Directions sound something like this: go through town. Take a right at the second stopsign. Go over the big hill, you’ll go down into a ditch. Take a right at the purple mailbox. There’s flowers painted on it. You’ll pass a pile of haybails about a mile up. Watch out for cows and dogs. We’re on the left.

We go exploring in one of the fields on my birthday with the dogs and discover some marijuana. Well, not marijuana per se, but HEMP nonetheless. I guess Jade’s great uncle grew the stuff during the war for rope and whatnot. That’s what Jade’s mom says.

Right.

I don’t know how she explains all the poppy seeds and coca plants.

We approach a cornfield and disappear into it. A person could die in here.

Actually that’s not true, they’re only a mile by a mile long / wide. Only an idiot could die in here.

Chances of my survival: sources point to no.

Later that night my parents come to town and we all go bowling again. I LOVE bowling. I CAN’T GET ENOUGH OF IT!

Afterwards we go to a Mexican restaurant called Casa Del Rey or Casa El Ray or something. I don’t know. I only speak English and bits of Canadian. When the waitress brings out my birthday dessert and my family begins singing to me I point to the staring tables around us and make them sing along. It makes them all very uncomfortable.

What’s next? Where do we go next? Mitchell? Montana? Death Valley? Stay tuned!

The Highways and GoodByeWays of America: Part 1

Jade and I each choose 100 of our favorite songs and burn them across eight CDs. They are the soundtrack of our three week journey. Smashing Pumpkins, The Cure, Queen, Nirvana. Weezer’s “Across the Sea” opens it up with Track 01, CD 01 as we leave our house at 5:45. The photo was actually taken one minute late.

We stop for Starbucks before we head out of town; something to awaken the senses for the long journey in front of us. We’d like to fly past Vegas before we bed down for the night. We let the dogs out to use the bathroom and two little butt bullets slip out of Clementine. Kaidance sprays liquid diarrhea all over the alley behind the connoisseur of coffee houses. It is so incredibly messy and sloppy that I don’t even bother picking it up. Instead I just kick dirt over it and run away.

Are the first ten minutes of this trip an omen of things to come?

We leave LA just as the sun is setting. Goodbye you stinking city! Avua (that’s French for goodbye) pollution! Seyonara traffic! Nothing can stop us now! Nothing! NOOOTHING!!!

We are stopped just over the California / Arizona border by the highway patrol. He tells us I’m driving 87 in a 75. He looks at me. He looks at my shaved head. He asks me if I’m in the military. I think about saying yes and trying to play the sympathy card. Just as I’m about to speak he takes a second glance at my “beard” and my girlish physique and says, “Nah, you’re not in the military”. My wife laughs at me. He asks to see my ID. It is South Dakota issued. He asks when I moved to LA and I tell him “oh, just recently” and he says, “when?” and I say, “uh………2005?” and he tells me I need to update it. He lets me off with a warning.

He too had a shaved head and I like to think that we shared a moment of bonding through the curse that is Male Pattern Baldness. Men who suffer from this debilitating disease think of it like that, in all capital letters. They also think of it as a disease. A sickness.

We drive on.

We stop for the night in Kingsman, Arizona at a TA truck stop. We pull our Pontiac Vibe up next to the giant semis and I feel like a fifth grader showering with a bunch of old men at the YMCA; totally inadequate.

Before we go to sleep we let the dogs run around and go to the bathroom. Kaidance is still sick. She jumps back in the car after producing The Brown Waterfall (complete with foam) and when I crawl in I find her sitting on my pillow. She is staring at me and seems defiant about something. I shut my eyes and control my anger. I tell her to move. I only say it once and she does but it’s too late. The deed is done. As she vacates my head space, a little brown starfish is revealed, stained, tattooed, imprinted on my pillow. The celestial Turd Star from the Hershey Squirt Galaxy. My pillow is dog toilet paper.

I frown and am upset but try hard not to laugh. Jade says it’s okay. She picks up the pillow and flips it over. She says, “Look! Good as new!”. Not quite. The pillow (the whole thing, not just the casing) needs to be thrown away. It needs to be burnt. It needs to be destroyed.

That night we share a pillow.

We go to sleep listening to the diesels hum quietly.

In the morning the car smells like dog farts and bad breath. We brush our teeth in the truck stop bathroom. We feed the dogs in the parking lot. We start driving at six am. Clementine doesn’t really do mornings.

On the second day of our trip we arrive at Tuba City, an Indian Reservation in Arizona.

They sell sheep.

Tuba City was a complete bust. The food was gross. My grilled cheese was stale and took forty-five minutes to make. The fries tasted like they’d been cooked in boiling water. The ceiling at the restaurant was caving in. The cook had no teeth and we were accosted by a drunk man begging for money.

At the gas station I bought a bottle of milk that was a month old. When asked if I could replace it I found that all the milk in the gas station was a month old. We left Tuba City.

We drive through Arizona.

It is dry and hot and there is lots of road construction.

We don’t take pictures of the road construction.

We arrive at Four Corners. This is where New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona and Utah all meet. For the small price of three dollars you can enter the unofficial park and stand at the unofficial spot where the four corners of the states unofficially meet.

We decide to take a picture of ourselves at the OFFICIAL New Mexico sign instead.

We drive down the road.

We take pictures at the OFFICIAL Colorado sign.

We drive on through Colorado and into The Rocky Mountains. The roads begin to narrow and begin to wind and eventually a storm sets in. We pull over in a ghost town and go to sleep while rain beats on the top of our car.

We’ve both seen horror movies that begin this way…

In the morning we are still alive. Jade gets up early and drives while I sleep. She takes photos while she drives while I sleep. We are still alive after Jade takes photos while driving.

STAY TUNED FOR PART 2 OF……..4?