01.17.03
Spring 1998
--------- Summer - Now it was just starting to bleed into summer, though it was still very cold outside. We arrived in New York and delivered the package. But because our work was finished, we had to give up the car as well... so - more hitchhiking... We caught some Phish shows there at Nassau Coliseum and then went to the Rhode Island shows as well. Afterwards we met up with some friends at one of the shows and caught a ride back to Georgia. Fun Times. After hanging out in Atlanta for a while, Helen and I got into a MAJOR dispute about her ex - Nick - and the relationship that was growing between he and I... As I look back now, I wish I would have told him to fuck off. He wasn't worth losing my friend. He wasn't worth much of anything. But I was naive and agreed to travel with him instead of her. She was all too happy to leave us together, feeling justified since we had "shown her who her REAL friends were". I was pretty fucked up most of the time and didn't really care as long as I had Nick. So he and I traveled for the entire summer, about 4 months from June through the beginning of September. I saw the entire United States... We got one of those National Park passes which allows you access into the National United States Parks and we spent the summer camping out in-between Phish shows. Alan drove & Emma came too. We watched the bats fly out of Carlsbad Caverns at sunset, sat on a ledge at the Grand Canyon, rode innertubes down the rapids at Zion, got scared by HUGEASS bears at Yosemite & Yellowstone, waded through the rainforest (Emma: "It sure does rain a lot here.") Olympic (WA State), Glacier (Montana), and back to Zion - cause it was our favorite. We spent time in Seattle... staying with some of our friends that blew glass.. Alan sells glass for a living, so he mostly set us up for the summer with different people in Washington, Oregon, etc... I was standing at a payphone outside a vegetarian market in Seattle and some dude that I went to high with walks up to me and says hi. Random. I was 2000 miles away from my highschool. I also went through San Francisco, again with the whole glass thing. It was really fucking COLD there in August. There are pictures of us standing outside of Ben and Jerry's on Haight & Ashbury, all bundled up like its the dead of winter... I hated SF. Then we went down to San Diego where we were to meet some people & do some business... Ocean Beach - I remember it was super nice. All I had taken with me that summer was a single backpack. Inside were 2 t-shirts, a change of underwear, a few sheets of LSD, and a camping pillow. My dreads started to stink after a week and I gave up on the hope of clean clothes... We stopped at a thrift store outside of St. George, Utah, and I bought a couple of shirts and a skirt. Outside of Shoreline Ampitheatre in SF, I found a big tick on the back of my head. Emma 'cleaned up my dreads' by shaving the underside of my head. VERY NICE, but I had no other choice. Anyone who was there that day may remember me - little dark haired dready girl running and screaming bloody murder through the lot... wearing no shirt. Remember? I remember camping in Zion. Under the stars because I had failed to bring a tent. Tripping balls, because I had brought my business with me. We tubed on the rapids and hiked up to the falls. I often found myself daydreaming and falling more in love with Nick. I dreamt out of car windows with bare feet and sweaty heads... My feet were blistered because the only shoes I had brought were a pair of shell-toed adidas, and we had hiked for miles. The nights were all cold - even in the summer. And the night we stayed in Flagstaff, it fucking snowed... That summer was all about wishing away. I wrote a lot... it's all there in my journal... tattered and torn from the following years of clutching and reading... over and over... I wrote and fucked and sang and slept and dreamt and loved and laughed and explored and stood at the very edge of my life. -------- "Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves�that�s the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives�experiences so great and moving that it doesn�t seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before. -- F. Scott Fitzgerald ----------- And that is the fucking TRUTH! |
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