So the ride is on. We listened for awhile to show tunes, some light and airy conversation occurred and then the question to start the voyage…”King Crimson?” I guess his kids didn’t really dig it, but when I asked the girl child requested to listen to it. The bruthah acquiesced, and we rocked out to “Discipline”. There was one slight moment of “What is this?” but it was drowned in the sea of music that flooded like water to my parched mind, devoid of all things “Crimson” for oh so long.
Sing with me! “Thela hun jin geet thela hun jin geet!” Love that album.
So, the kids were carefully and readily ensconced at the home of my bruthahs Honored Madre, the woman of his birth, and I broke out the “Art of War” in her driveway. We were ready to begin the major push to Vegas and had finished all f atherly activities for days to come.
I don’t exactly remember the entire passage, but it’s a tradition that I started some time back. At the beginning of a trip, a hike, a journey, even when it’s only me, I take a passage from the Sun Tsu’s book and find many instances in which the journey shows that certain passage to occur within reality. Or at least the reality of the journey we’re on at the time. So the passage that sped us on our way was about the attacking of large and small forces, I think. My bruthah chuckled as I gave him the “wow that’s trippy and intense man ya man ya” nod with the raised eyebrow and we entrenched ourselves in the seats for a long and anticipatory ride to Vegas, and what it would bring.
As we traveled my bruthah, the man among men and the true captain of all that is bitchin’, put on for our listening and grooving enjoyment, coast to coast AM. Now these weren’t any C2C, these were ghost to ghost episodes and none of the ones he had were ones that I had acquired. So we grooved and watched the arid desert and watched the thermometer on his dash board rise and rise and rise until the surface of the sun, at least to me, would have been a cooler safer place. But sometimes, so I’ve been told though I think it’s untrue, I have a penchant for the dramatic. So maybe not the sun. Maybe just mercury.
Along the way we stopped at a gyro joint that was pithy in their statements about themselves on the roadside billboards, but upon arrival the prices of the festive feasties were a bit out of our financial reach. We went outside for a bit and stood crisping in the desert sun. While there we saw a homeless guy stagger up with a slightly wet and empty container for water and a sweat shirt on. As the temperature was 109 Fahrenheit seeing this poor man, crumpled and ruffled and forgotten, it put into perspective my life with my wife, our children, and my entire existence. And also put into perspective how close to that edge most of America is. How we go from paycheck to paycheck, barely surviving, always on the perilous edge. We both needed to let loose the golden flow, so we used the facilities and moved on down the road.
