The rain was coming down something fierce. All my belongings for the next two days are tucked in the BOB inside the dry bag. I can’t help but worry about the fact that it was little more full than it should have been. It’s not cold, but I know for a fact it will be if we are all soaking wet all night long.
We came up to a pull out on the road.
Some things were shouted and within seconds it was determined that we should do our best to get our tents put up to get out of the rain.
If you’ve never put up a tent in the rain, it’s not the best idea for staying dry. Unless you have a dry place to start, the tent will end up with water in it any way. This was certainly our case, but we forged onward with vulgarities and expletives floating from our mouths as we tried to make our shelters.
As these things tend to go, we got everything up and ready to go and as we were tossing the last of our belongings into our tents, the rain stopped.
We finished setting up camp. We had about six cliff bars, a couple of beers and half a bottle of tequila between us and about 20 miles to go to the next town. We pulled up and shared what we had.
And then, on the side of the road we gathered what we could of some dry fuel and somehow got a fire going. Suddenly, we were just a clump of travelers stuck on the side of the road. We can’t go back and for the night we can’t go forward. So we did what we could and spent the evening chatting around a fire and tried to dry our bones out.
There’s so much that we have allowed to slip away. We were once a place full of farmers, fishers and factory workers. We made things and “any young boy could grow up to be queen.” Now what are we? What do we make? What is it that all of us do? Effectively we buy and sell shit that was made by someone else. I sell it to you and you sell something else to me. We outsourced our souls and found that the things that used to be part of our hardships have become our past times. We spend ours on the side of a road starving and watching a fire dance because for some reason we decided to travel across three states by bicycle instead of jumping in a car and doing it the way that is now what we are.
Stevil posted the above video on All Hail the Black Market on Wednesday. It was like a high five to the face. Not that he was saying anything that all of us haven’t thought but that he put it together in a medium that was involved in the process he was elaborating upon and that the words said what we all long.
For me, hand written prose has long since fallen away from my repertoire. It’s too easy to keep track of the things that I want to say and to hammer them out in a digital form. With that said, my organizing of the drum room has been foiled no more than a baker’s dozen times in the past three years by me running into my old notebooks and reading what is left inside of them. The memories, the ideas but more importantly the words.
Being scrawled in what is at its best chicken scratch and its worst my best form of expression, the words not only hold themselves in an illogical syntax, but the very aesthetic of the chicken scratch becomes part of the medium. I can see my anger as the words get bigger and less legible.
I suppose this also directly relates to me standing in my shed after working nine hours at the shop and finding myself smiling as I wipe down a bicycle or pull a rear shock off just to service it, because you know they won’t last if I don’t stay on top of playing with my tools and doing things with my hands. And it makes me wonder what that says about me.
In many ways, seeing handwritten not is like finding an old friend. You might remember, as you wax nostalgic, the feelings that were associated with those words and the time they were created in, but they have aged and somehow are always different.
And on the side of the road, we sat there warming our hands like a bunch of old time bums who had just jumped off the train for the night.
P. L. and R.
