A man on the trail is seated cross-legged playing a didgeridoo. It is hot, flat, and flying grasshoppers consume the place. I follow one right into a tarantula and my heart stops for a second. Miss Tarantula remains, carries on her business of sitting idly without concern.
I want to see cowboys. Damn, I want to see cowboys so bad. I want to see what they do in real life. I feel like every time I talk about this in public it's sort of taboo, but I can't help my loud-mouthed east coast ways. I just want to know: Would a cowboy try to pick up a loose woman like me? Do they get wildly drunk and shoot guns and hate gays? Do they realize that cowboy culture is the most homoerotic thing in the universe, even before Brokeback Mountain blew up their spot?
Did you know, in Arizona, people shoot guns at cactuses for fun? It's apparently illegal to do this, but as is made obvious by the bullet-chewed cactii lining the streets outside Phoenix, that doesn't stop anyone. I'm surprised this practice doesn't result in anyone getting shot, but then, it's the desert, and nobody's around.
I pose this to my friend back home and he says that it sounds infinitely more exciting to grow up in a place where you get to shoot guns at cactuses in your spare time than in one where you throw beer bottles at street signs on the way to the Chinese restaurant. Bottles are lame. You shoot guns at bottles and they explode. Pathetic. A bottle would have nothing on a cactus, anyway.
These cactuses don't fuck around, either. There's apparently some kind of cactus that has needles that are so invisible people get mysteriously pricked by them and believe that the cactus can actually sense motion and is spraying needles at you as a defense mechanism. I wouldn't be surprised if they did. Bitches look so cute and fuzzy but they are NOT.
I have to say, there is one thing I have found that exists in Connecticut and other New England states (except Massachusetts) that seems to be nowhere else: Aimless driving as entertainment. The back roads where I'm from are so curvy and empty, and really, since there's almost nothing else to do, pretty much everyone I know kills time with friends by driving around in circles for hours on end, playing new favorite albums and talking. I feel sad at the lack of aimless driving available in the west. It's all so gridded and boring, you would fall asleep if you tried it.
Oh, America...
I wrote before about trying to understand this country. It's clearer now. We are a land of land. A land of interstates. A land that is all about freedom. I see what it is the red states don't get about the coastal liberals “socialist” ideas about a more community-oriented economic and social system. Yeah, when you live out here, of course you can't get what the hell it's like to be cooped up in Boston, Massachusetts, having to deal with four million other people rubbing themselves all over you on the T every day. Places like that require this kind of thinking. How do we make this work? Well, public health care seems like an obvious start. Get your teeth cleaned by some Tufts Dental School Student for FREE in twelve short visits!
But in the west, you can just wander into some piece of land, build a shack out of clay or old car parts, shoot a cow for food, and never have to answer to anybody about anything. So why pay for some sickly cancer-ridden human to get chemo way the hell over there? All things considered, it's not entirely flawed thinking. This country is still pioneer land. There are no twelve-year-old Americans working in sweatshops to support their destitute families out in the countryside. They're all here, digging their scrap of land, thinking it's their right to keep it just this way, make their money, and be left the fuck alone. Something about it makes complete and total sense. It's isolation. Living in a white room with only distant knowledge of madness on the other side of the door. Why bother trying to solve their problems? Everything in here is alright and I made it that way. I deserve peace.
It's an unfortunate privilege. A blessed privilege that closes our eyes to the myriads of places, all over the world, that are ancient, over-populated, starving, and rotten. How this country managed its prosperity and its quality of living is astounding in light of it. Here in America, we aren't at war. We don't have some unbearable gap between the standard of living in the country and the city. We don't have the issues with resources that most other developed nations do and have therefore not needed to adopt the same kind of practices that European and East-Asian countries have in terms of recycling, clean energy, transportation, water use, so on... Our government can afford to support our impoverished, more or less. People here do not go hungry for very long. Think about it. Obesity and illnesses related to poor health on account of chemicals in the food we over-consume and lack of exercise are the largest killers in this country. We know nothing of desperation and cannot understand it when faced with it. Everything we've created spins around us making little explosions wherever they land and we remain relatively unscathed. And we forget. Or fail to see.
We've managed to do something here no one else has. A land of all races, where anything goes and does, and where the individual can dictate his fate if he can find his way. It's worth fighting for. But someday soon we need to wake up, too.