Road notes from the tail end of February

Girls are little angels for the most part on our oddysey across Snoqualmie Pass in a rented minivan. Stop to buy chains since traction tires are required. Drive half an hour up the mountain. Pull over to chain-up. Chains are wrong size for tires (that bitch at Shucks with the cute smile; if you work at the bottom of a mountain pass you should know yer friggin' chain and tire sizes). Attempt to jerry-rig at the behest of dudelio who charges $25.00 a pop to help morons chain their rubbers on right. Drive 1/4 of a mile. Decide this could potentially be a terrible idea. Flip coin. Smoke cigarette quickly in massive blizzard before it gets wet. Turn around at exit, unchain (with massive complications). Wash filthy hands and sleeves in freezing stream. Girls wake up from twenty minute nap (note spike in loss of hair at this very moment). Drive back to North Bend. Exchange chains. Force smile. Get right size this time and proceed over Snoqualmie Pass once again. Get almost all the way to the top. Pull over to chain up. Guy in orange vest with truck approaches saying: "Don't know if I can push you out or not..." Rob responds: Oh, we're just putting our chains on." Man advises us to proceed without chains. We make it. One hour and $48.00 later we pass a semi-truck where something (propane tank) has blown up in rear of living quarters. One cowboy boot, pair of levis, one smoke stack, contents of fridge litter highway. Girls ask for more food. Their backs hurt, they say. Their feet hurt, they say. Their necks hurt, they say. I think they lie about 85% of the time.

Drop Rob in Moses Lake. Quick social play time, apple, coffee and smoke for Road-Papa with Rob's Ma and step-pa.

After jumping on enormous, comfy bed girls sleep all the way to Walla Walla. Wake up and play with G-ma & G-pa for a while before cuddling with Grandma to sleep. Papa reads and works on the computer until the wee hours, subliminally sorting huge loads of crazy information, emotions, stress, etceteras behind these curtains of night.

Why is it when we stop looking for something sometimes that something suddenly finds us? I refer, of course, to the human heart and head and the myriad number of emotions we seem able to process, compute, acknowledge, disregard, freak out about. Time steps up and slaps you in the face with all your past sins, a glove and hate relationship meant for dueling tongue in someone else's cheek until your fragile urn cracks and your contents spill all over the closest hearts. Bemused and befuddled by my own ambitions and desires and shit, how can I sort through the jewels and gemstones, offal and silt of other people's souls hoping to find my fix, my fill, my fantasies?

Part of me wants to turn inward only, the other part argues. My head butts itself. I banish these thoughts from my mind with a simple spell, for a simple spell, but they always return with friends in tow.

My girls get grandma time. Grandma gets girl time. I get some time to write and write back to my multitudinous friends whose words fill my self-imposed void(s). Schedules whirl around me and I loathe them but depend on them as well. Walla Walla tacos fill my belly. Burgess elucidates on the terrible state of world affairs in regard to human rights violations and gross actions on the parts of corporate lawyers. That's a phrase we should hear more of... "parts of corporate lawyers littered the streets today in the imagination of one young rebel father..."

When Rob and I came down Snoqualmie Pass there came a little bend in the road beneath an overpass where we both held our respective (or not so much, if you know us) breaths and made eye contact. Right then we both saw the wide Eastern open spread out before us, home, if you will, to a couple of tumbleweeds such as ourselves, who do not tumble nearly as much as we meant to.

I inhale this dry, fresh air and try to remember. Anamnesis kicks in, courtesy of the human sense of smell, and I revel in the vague memories of sense which a well-haunted place ellicits. I vow to myself to be better friends with the other single fathers in my vicinity. I vow to try to start over with my conceptions of giving love and being loved. I vow silently to work harder to better myself in the face of this challenging dawn. I vow my act to clean. I vow my hands to sully. I vow my dreams to fruition.