I am half a country away from my own bed, I have 130 dollars to get me home and last me until the fifteenth of the month, my nephew will be here at 9:30 to ferry me to Stockton and Mary and I hope to be on the road by noon. We have no intricate plan beyond aiming ourselves in the direction we need to go. We are, as I always do, winging it.

Some thoughts about my brother that I had last night while falling asleep:

Andy is seven years older than me, when we lived in Brillion Wisconsin in the early eighties and PM magazine was all the rage Andy bought a Rubix Cube. Andy went to the library and checked out a book on how to solve the cube. He photocopied the book and read the copied pages through several times. We kept those photocopies pages in the coffee table for years. He was soon able to solve the cube rapidly, but not so rapidly as my method. After playing with my cube for a short time I discovered that you could take the cube apart with a screwdriver and reassemble it correctly, without having to learn “the method”. I would simply and effectively break the cube and then fix it. Andy and I have a great deal in common, he’s reminded me about so many things from our shared childhood that I had completely forgotten, but a key difference between us would be his propensity to plan (and to stick to that plan) over my propensity to deal with what is strictly immediate. These are of course only general distinctions, but I am amused by this childhood story illustrating them, leading into the current manifestation of my seat of the pants return to St. Louis. Andy is a planner and I operate strictly on the whim principle.

Well grasshopper, the summer is here, break out your fiddle and hop yourself over to Amarillo for a rattlesnake appetizer and a bucket of Lonestar beer. As is typical of late with your tailspin gyre, you’ve made this trip before. Please take a minute to note the shape of the galaxy later tonight when you are pissing by the side of the road in the middle of the Mojave, the nearest light pollution will be the trailer park two hundred miles to the east. Dear reader, if you ever get a shot at that starscape I suggest you take it.

Hiatus until arrival home I’d assume, sometime in the next four days, but as I said we’re not on much of a schedule.