June 15th. Now I’m in Amarillo, Texas. How, you may wonder, did I cover the two hundred and forty miles from Wichita Falls to Amarillo in just two days? Simple. I cheated.
I lazed around Midwestern University all day yesterday, goofing off on the internet and living the simple life. Watched Slacker, got really homesick. Half that movie musta been shot on the Drag. Took a nap, read a book, wrote a little. Took another nap. Went to the cafeteria and pigged out on ziti. Took another nap. Checked my email. Took another nap. By this point it was 3 AM, and I was just about motivated enough to go. So I checked my email again. Now it was 4 AM. According to facade.com, my physical biorhythms were at their absolute nadir this morning. Now, I don’t know from biorhythms so that may be absolute bollocks, but it sure felt that way. I rode to the edge of town, ate some donuts at the Ramada Inn, and about 6AM I actually got on 287 heading west.
I quickly realised that the stretch of 287 from Wichita Falls to Amarillo -sucks.- It’s a major trucker route, and even though the road is nice and smooth (except for all the retreads thrown at the side of the road), I quickly tired of diesel fumes.
A small airplane had crashed in a field by the side of the road, sometime during the night, and I got there about five minutes ahead of the FAA investigators. I thought that was neat and I took some pictures of it. But the road kept getting more crowded and louder as the sun came up, and I decided to try hitch-biking. My first ride, a a pickup truck piloted by one Ed Stevens, took me ten miles and dropped me off. Then my second ride came along — Jan and Stanley Weinstein, cool cats from Albuquerque. We coaxed my bike onto their bike rack and rode to Amarillo. So I made two hundred miles before 10:30 in the morning, a trip that was originally going to take me three days.
We talked as we went, and I took yet another nap. It takes about four naps to equal one night of sleep, by the way. Stanley’s some kind of nonprofit poobah and bicycling nut, and they had a lot of interesting things to say. Some of the nicest people I’ve met on this trip. We had lunch at the truck stop and I was on my way.
To the library, where I am right now. Surfing the internet and doing essentially nothing. To misquote Rimbaud,
“Lazy than a toad, I have seen the world.”
Ed Fitzgerald said that about me once, and believe me, Ed knows from lazy.
Now it’s only eighty miles until I reach Texas escape velocity. It might rain on me, it might not, but the wind is right, the sun’s not too hot, and I’ve got nothing better to do.