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"Unattended children will be given espresso and a puppy."
"If you have the time, isn't everywhere walking distance?"
-Signs at ________ Inn

I barely made it. Must have drove 20, 30 miles with my fuel light on. Gas stations on the way have 85, 87 octane, and that's it. And that won't do it.

Found a good set of twisties on the state __ out of _____ _____, _______.

As I left _____ where I last wrote you, I stared at the ______ for half an hour, and then drove into them. There's still snow, and the road goes over open pasturelands, down into snowy, tight valleys with icy creeks, and then back up to Blue ____ Lake. And it is blue, bluer than anything I have ever seen.

...

I'm nervous, but I'm turning around. This trip never had any real plan, anyway, so it's time for me to stop acting like it did. I'm going to go down the interstate like a bullet, and hopefully I can do what took 2 days on state highways in a day. Because this is what I have to do.
--

I know there are people out there who say they don't believe in things like 'fate', or 'destiny'. I never did, either. But that day, I had a date with destiny, for the first time in my life. I went like a bullet down the interstates, my head as far down as it would go. There was nothing else I could do. There was no going back from the point when I handed her the tablet. For the first time in my life, I was back to the moment like being born. I had as little control over my life as the point when I first entered this world.

I howled, screamed, and tore through the road. I was doing the howling, the engine was doing the screaming, and the tires were tearing through the road. ______ tried to quench me, once, because I left before sunrise. As my chin caught fire with the cold, I told myself I'd try to get to ______, 70 miles down the road. As I went further, I told myself that I'd quit once my hands went completely numb, because that's more or less when I can no longer interact with the motorcycle--shortly before we part ways.

Twenty miles out from _______, my hands went at about the same time it'd gotten all the way up to my lips. I stopped at a little gas station in _______, which had only 85 and 87 octane, in the old mechanically-metered fuel pumps. I stared at my hands, and then shucked my gear to go inside.

Inside I met an old man named ____ _______, who I have to come back one day and thank. He'd been operating the station since it charged 76 cents per gallon. I was lucky he was there--it turned out to be 27 degrees outside. He had coffee going, he had a restroom, and he had a winter cap for sale. I drank his coffee and I talked to him for an hour while I waited for the sun. Somehow I think we both knew about the elephant in the room, even though we never talked about it but for a moment. I told him I had to get to __ pretty fast, but he never asked why. But when he'd gotten done talking about the collections of minerals he had on display, he said one thing about the geode slice I selected.

"That the color of your girl's eyes?" he asked.
"No," I said. "She has about the same color eyes as me."

I paid him and blew town. I only had an hour or two before the caffeine would bottom out and I'd be tireder. I planned to stop every 100 miles or so to crank my knees and get gas. And so after three hundred miles or so, the feeling of riding, the feeling of needing, and the feeling of dying would no longer keep me alert. So I started howling. My jaw eventually seized from the wind pushing on my head.

I took a half-hour nap in the ground next to my bike at noon. Slept under my jacket, my head on my gloves. I woke up, primed my tires, and took off.

I wish I could tell you something about those events. I wish I could show you the feeling of the land melting away around you. I remember everything I saw, and that's where the fatigue is coming from.

Don't ever listen when someone tells you ____ is a fucking wasteland. I once thought so myself, but that is a terribly beautiful country. But I wanted it to get out of the way, so I took it up to 120.

I made it to the _____ ______ Gorge again, and opened it up. Somehow, sailing through those mountains livened me up. Yet, as I passed through _______ again, my head began to empty of feeling again. I thought _______ would never end.

As I left _____, I stared out into the ________ desert and saw, of all things, windsurfers. People with sails and wheels, parachutes and skis. I would have rubbed my eyes if I could've. But right after that I ended up having to concentrate entirely on splitting two lanes for a mile, big rigs on one side, spaced out snowbirds on the other.

It was welcome, after that, to see a pickup truck hold up a sign that said "HELLO PERSON" in big girly handwriting. I honked, revved, and tore off. One last push before __. But when I got to ________ the cops were going nuts, and they were everywhere. I had to pull off and wait until they'd gotten their fill. And then, there was __.

I got off the motorcycle and just laughed. Laughed like a crazed, half-dead idiot. I can't think when I'm on a motorcycle. The only thing that would run through my head was, "I need to get off the ___ freeway before I -die-" alternating with "It's cold..." over and over again.


The next morning, I woke up before sunrise out of instinct, my body saying, "More. Again. Right?" But all my nerves are shot. I can't think. I barely know what I'm doing. I went back to sleep, and dreamed. Seeing myself, from the outside, riding the motorcycle, the entire view permeated with the undercurrent of that strange inexorable feeling. Looking at myself, hauling down the road at that speed, wondering where I was going, feeling the weight of all those miles pushing on me. And then I turned, looked at myself, raised my two fingers high in the air, and accelerated. Where was I going? I still don't know.

Everything I've ever written has been to you. It's strange now that I think about it. I had to create whole works of fiction in order to remove that fact from the forefront. Maybe I'll show them to you sometime.

But all these thoughts attempt to advance themselves, then stop at a wall. The point I can think beyond, but not around, up to, but not through. It's true that sometimes I see my future actions with great clarity. But there's no way of knowing what may happen tonight. I have some ideas, but there are no probabilities. Anything could happen. I may just catch fire and vanish into smoke. Nothing could happen. I may be no better off than I am now. But I'm beyond the event horizon here. Everything is pointing inward toward a single point. And so there's no way of losing what I can't win.

I sat there and let the memories out. Not in any particular order. I was past being able to do that. But I laid there and stared at my hand, and remembered the things that appeared in front of it, next to it, and just beyond it.

I love you.