Suddenly you’re 21 and you’re screaming along in the car to all the songs you listened to when you were sad in middle school and everything is different but everything is good.
For everyone opening up Snapchat today, “Tel Aviv” is a colony built upon the stolen Palestinian city of Yaffa, and the destroyed villages of Sheikh Muwannis, Jammusin, Salame, and Summeil, in 1948. The original residents of this place, who come from families that have lived there for centuries, were either murdered or forced into exile by the descendants of the people you’re watching snap photos of themselves tanning on beaches that double as mass graves and partying in clubs built on ruins.
-seriously from california to new mexico is terrifying like it’s eight straight hours of pale red desert and the sky is so large that everything, even your car, even your hands, looks like a tenuously small and fragile diorama placed on an endless pale red table and left there to dissolve.
-a gas station that for some reason has large dinosaurs made out of scrap metal. they are 1000% awesome. sometimes they move. take a million pictures.
-a fruit stand that sells the best fruit you have ever eaten. later you won’t quite remember which fruit. strawberries, maybe? peaches?
-small black birds, subtly different in every state. some have gold eyes and some are a little iridescent and some are black from beak to toes. the sparrows they compete with for crumbs look exactly the same wherever you go.
-a completely empty rest stop. no one eats at the concrete tables. no one plays in the tiny strip of grass or gravel. you will find a small and beautiful stone.
-a hawaii license plate, somewhere around ohio. i still don’t know how they get the cars across the ocean. i don’t know why anyone would leave hawaii for ohio. i don’t know why anyone lives in ohio.
-an incredibly weird duck. you had no idea ducks could look so incredibly weird, and you wish you were still ignorant of how incredibly weird ducks can, apparently, look.
-a small folksy roadside waystation that sells fudge and incredibly tacky statues of eagles and wolves and cowboys. if you like fudge, eat the fudge from here.
-a lizard doing pushups. if you are particularly fortunate: many lizards doing pushups.
-approximately one gajillion starbucks shops. don’t bother counting them. it will make you angry.
-a storm somewhere around oklahoma, if you’re lucky. the clouds tower up in fantastic fluffy castles miles and miles into the air and are painted pink and gold and purple and the sky turns a dozen impossible shades of blue and when the rain comes down over your car it sounds like the world is ending.
-weird burrs will stick to your legs. you’ll flick them out of the car eighty or eight hundred miles from where their parent plant was grown, and not be sure whether you should wish the little hitchikers well or not.
-a dog wearing sunglasses with his head hanging out of a car window. this will be the high point of the trip.
-the world’s most depressing restaurant. you will know it when you wind up there and have to eat the terrible food, and listen to the terrible music, and look at all the listless waiters and want to tell them get in my car, for god’s sake get in, i’ll take you out of whatever crapsack little town this is that you can’t get out of on your own. but you won’t say that because it’s rude. maybe they have family here. maybe they even like it here.
-a painting of a sailboat in a motel located at least a hundred miles from any significant body of water.
-several genuinely hilarious postcards. buy them.
-a cat that will not let you pet it. this will be the low point of the trip.
-corn. so much corn you will get scared. who the fuck is going to eat all this corn?
-a small stream in some small woods and the light will come down perfectly and the water will be beautiful and the grass will be beautiful and there will be flowers maybe or the leaves of the trees are starting to turn gold and there are birds chirping and it will be so perfect you will want to stand there and stay forever and live in this little magical painting off the side of the highway and be some kind of highway druid. but instead, you’ll get bored after a while, and get back in the car.
Hey y’all! So, I meant to do this many months ago on my old blog (thisblogwillbeyourdownfall RIP :/ ) but better late than never I suppose. Haha. I want to do something to say thank you to all of y’all for your support over the years, especially over the last few months. I did not think so many of you would follow me over to this new blog and I am grateful, so grateful for the love and support this lovely community continues to show me. You are all so delightful and I’m thankful. So, anyways–the giveaway!
Likes and reblog count so everyone can have 2 entries!
Must be comfortable giving me your address, i’ll ship worldwide
Please have your ask box or fan mail open so I can contact you
Giveaway ends June 15th, I will randomly pick one winner for the CD bundle and 3 for Halcyon Album Samplers. If you do not reply within 48 hours, I will pick a new winner.
What if clouds and lakes switched spots and every time you looked up you’d see waves being pulled by the moon and we’d wade through the clouds on a hot day. What if birds grew grass and the ground grew feathers. What if flowers were as tall as trees and trees as small as flowers.
Not all who wander are lost.