Hello Lambpoonies!
What you’ve got in your greedy little hands is a free essay from your favorite Lamb. Feel free to share and subscribe and whatever else it is you animals do these days.
I am currently on vacation out in the wilds of northern Idaho. I needed a break from the hectic lifestyle one enjoys working from home out in the middle of the country. If it isn’t the constant peace, it’s the unending equanimity one experiences being far, far from any sort of protest disguised as a freeway dance party.
I don’t have a problem with their message, whatever that was supposed to be, but I don’t like anything that encourages people to get killed. Dance parties on freeways be like that. Ghoulish things, and the music is horrible anyway. If you want me to dance, bring the skank. Also, don’t do it on the freeway. You’ll get killed.
The good news is if you die for The Cause, the city won’t defund the police, anyway.
Staying away from this kind of garbage is easy out in the country. Our biggest challenge recently was convincing Waste Management to replace our tiny recycling bin. It took three weeks of constant advocacy on the phone.
Still, a change of scenery is usually a good thing. Swapping one country for another.
I’m quite lazy by nature and find the only activity I never tire of is sitting and chatting with Rebecca down at Waste Management. Until I spend six or seven hours driving myself across Washington State. Six or seven hours spent grumbling and grousing on travelers rolling sixty in the passing lane.
The views are great and it’s an excuse to dig into the audio research portion of other stuff I may or may not write. But my poor buttocks don’t thank me for it in any way. Still, their terminal numbness is but a means to an end.
The destination, in this case, trumps the joy of the journey. Mid-state deserts are like that. Also, I may or may not still have a bench warrant issued for my arrest in the county. Possession of a controlled substance, they said. I don’t recall possessing any substance whatsoever, myself. Controlled or otherwise.
So, eyes on the road, young man who is forty-one years old.
We have a wild horse sculpture installment somewhere along the way. No horses were harmed in the making of it. I assume. I don’t actually think or know anything about it. You can see it as you drive by. It has the same drawing power of Ohio’s cornfields but feeds less people and is the location of far fewer horror movies.
The real joy is the Colombia River. This thing is mighty. Majestic. Powerful. Like my own stream. It travels almost exactly through the center of the state, untamed and primordial as a titan’s craggy ass crack. But with windmills dotting its cleftal horizon. Not the beautiful, old-timey windmills one sees in Holland, though. Dystopian, hideous things mostly inert made entirely of steel or some similar dwarven magic.
I made the trek in my old ‘06 Mazda3. The gas mileage on this thing is incredible. We had a ‘07 Prius for a while, but its catalytic converter got jacked some time back. The Mazda outperforms in every way. In the city, on the freeway, doesn’t matter. The car zooms for cheap and it zooms well. Even against Washington State’s absurd sin taxes.
Yes, progressive-minded Washington State has sin taxes, like the neo puritanical shits we are. Sin taxes, inert windmills to save the environment or something, and the kind of Pilgrim-minded approach to social issues that helped ensured the Pilgrims are no longer among us. Still, no income tax. That’s why I live here. That and Megan.
Downside to the Mazda? I didn’t spring for power anything when I bought it.
No power locks, which isn’t that big of a deal. But no power windows, either. This means whenever people say roll down the window, they are being quite literal rather than clinging to an unthinking, old idiomatic tradition.
No power seats, either. Whatever those are. I assume they massage the butt. I don’t know. But I don’t have them. I have numb buns and a fatter wallet pressing my cheeks due to not springing for power anything. I didn’t see a need then and still don’t.
No reason a road trip can’t also substitute as arm day at the gym, you know? I’m not hot boxing the thing, after all. Not anymore.
My ultimate destination, from which I write this now, is the Pend Oreille River where my parents live these days. They have what they somewhat humbly refer to as a cabin right on the east bank of the thing. It has all the amenities of modern life, but without most the headaches of modern life.
I gaze over my little laptop at a river lazily winding by. Osprey soar, dip, dive, dodge, duck, and dodge again into its surface to pull out prey from unheeding aquatic dance parties. Hummingbirds buzz about busily doing whatever the hell it is they do. The cutest, pygmy panther on the planet named Flopsy hunts the grounds and ignores the slings and arrows tossed her way by outrageous lying, slanderous squirrels.
Lazy ska and rocksteady fill the air. I’ve seen to it. The Skatalites currently. One of the world’s greats. Black coffee fills my gut and scents the air as they provide a forever unparalleled soundtrack for the entire affair.
I got to meet and greet with the family again after a long hiatus. Seattle life was so utterly draining - mentally and financially - I could never afford to get away. I’m making up for lost time now. Ostensibly, it is my birthday. But the family knows I never really care about my birthdays.
I don’t like to be seen. Ironic, considering all the writing I do. The good news is hardly anyone ever sees the writing I do. On an unrelated note, do me a solid and share this thing if you enjoy it. Life is full of little contradictions and even smaller contrarian dicks it turns out.
You didn’t really think I’d get through an entire essay without a dick joke did you? So naive.
Visiting family is important. This gets said a lot, to the point it becomes a trite aphorism. But it is said so much as it is so obviously true. Your family can be anything of course. Your parents, your siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, friends, Dungeons and Dragons nerds, whatever you choose. You start life with one, hopefully. If you’re lucky.
Sure, you got a mother and a father or whatever the fashionable terms for those things are these days, but you may not be lucky enough to have a mommy or a daddy. I got one of each and I love them immensely.
But as you get older and personal agency grows alongside your pubic hair you do have the power to choose what family you have. Every interaction is another brick laid in an enduring social institution of our own individual making. Relationships, despite a constant stream of feel-good bullshit provided by artists, poets, contract lawyers, the FBI, think tanks, and the State, are intensely temporary. Nothing is forever.
I will die. You will die. It probably won’t be pretty. We all sort of know this. Some more than others. But it isn’t what truly matters. The end of the road? It’s just that. The end of the road. It isn’t special aside from its bookend nature. It isn’t the conclusion which concerns us over the vast, veiny majority of our lives, but the time spent between the beginning and the end.
It isn’t trite to love your family and it isn’t sappy to say you do. It is necessary. And it must be done while they and you live.
It is trite to only do so at a funeral. To show up at the end. You have grievances? Forget them while you can. Before they become eternal. Or choose a new family if forgiveness is for some reason beyond your ken. I repeat, for myself, I am lucky. Fortunate far beyond the cozy bounds of reason. Not all are.
I am learning this, though I already knew it. These are the greatest lessons. To learn anew, to regenerate a long-neglected truth enduring over millennia of generations. To relearn something which simply cannot be captured in words or images. Only experience.
Well, that and learning how to manipulate advertising algorithms into serving up Ana de Armas basically all of the time. If that woman ever ends up selling hand lotion, I’m afraid western civilization will simply collapse.
But at least I’ll be able to watch it from the country. Whether right or left.
Sic vivitur.
I know and miss that drive well, at least as far as it goes to CDA (those horses don't move by the way, no matter how close you get to them). In fact, the first real big road trip that I drove by myself was from CDA to Marysville. I was a scared young pup, made sure my smokes and drink were in arms reach and didn't have to go searching for anything or take my eyes off the road. That was before I became a confident (cocky) menace on the road and wouldn't care about rummaging through the back seat for a half drunk coke I got at the ellensburg McD's while barrelling down the freeway at 80mph. Hit the weed after Moses Lakes? Sure but why not before too? And perhaps as we approach the mountain, and exit.
I need a new reason to make that trip again, but having sick folks here makes leaving an anxiety inducing feat that I have yet to overcome. Could also be that CDA found a way to be more conservative than it already was when I left the place over 10 years ago.
I am glad you are taking the time to visit family. As cliche as it is, family is important and even more so when you can all tolerate each other. It took a while for my family to get there (mainly my fault) but the struggle has been worth it.
Safe travels back, friendo!