Let This Moment Be No Exception

I have problems sitting still. It's no secret; anyone could glance over at me at work, and in the years before this in school, to see the cartoon frustration squiggles eminating from my shoulders and the peak of my skull. I'm a motion kind a' guy. I pace when I talk. I gesture when I'm on the telephone.
I was getting at this in my last entry--this, in a way, is the physical manifestation of the fact that I have this urge to pack up the car and start driving. But what I didn't clarify was that I have a history with this. Four years ago, as a college freshman, three friends and I drove from my home in Los Angeles back to school in central Ohio at the end of our first spring break. Before then, this whole notion of road-trips was something with which I was of course familiar--it's all over the place, fuck, ESPECIALLY in a place like Los Angeles that sits watching over the end of historic Route 66, where bookstores sell copies of ON THE ROAD by the boxful to discontent adolescents (although through some fluke I managed never to read it) and even Britney Spears gets to make a road-trip movie. Where the vast emptiness of the Old West still lingers in the collective desire to chase down the sinking sun, where the sky's so big it feels like you could disappear under it forever, without a trace, where national parks and forests comprise entire states (whose populations are dwarfed by those of sprawling Eastern suburbs), where places still have names like Truth or Consequences and Death Valley and Zzyzx and Big Sky and Tombstone, where folks like Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson and Robert Pirsig defined the philisophical climate of their times by bearing down upon the empty pavement and the only death fit for rebels like James Dean and Richard Farina and a million anonymous others lay inside the confines of a fiery wreck. Oh yes, before my friends and I embarked on my trip in the spring of 2000, I had a pretty good idea of what it was going to be like. But I hadn't felt it yet. And let me tell you, feeling it makes all the difference. It was like crack. I couldn't get enough, and my teeth started falling out.
It got to the point where I was driving back and forth across the country every chance I could, any vacation from school that would allow me enough time, which led to twelve trips in all over the next three years--not a lot by the standards of many, but enough to allow me to establish a slight familiarity with the experience of being on the road, and some of the places I'd encounter here and there along my way. My graduation concluded with one final all-out journey, taking two weeks and leading us on a new route through the northern United States, zigzaging through Montana, Wyoming and Idaho to the Pacific northwest and down the coast to good old Los Angeles. It was a great and moving experience, and my compainons (four in all) and I had adventures and felt things. But it didn't last forever. It's been over a year, like I mentioned last time; and I want more. I need more.
And in this lies some of the restlesness that I've been talking about. All the boo-hoo bitching and moaning about my job of last time is in part a product of it, of course, because really, so I work five days a week, big fuckin' deal, I have an easy job and of COURSE I or anyone else could handle it with his or her eyes closed--it's no travesty, like I may have made it out to be (and herein you'll discover a particular talent of mine--making anything seem more or less tragic, even, as the case may often be, if only to myself), but instead a reflex, almost, an involuntary reaction resulting from these romantic images of freedom on the road with which I've been bombarded for as long as I can remember, coupled with the fact that I've really experienced it a little bit and it was actually everything it's cracked up to be and more. And of course it doesn't help that I can look east from my apartment and see the San Gabriel mountains extending dramatically off into the horizon....
And this can all have the effect of making me discard any rational thought, let alone any practical commitments I've made, to achieve this kind of motion, just as I arrogantly vowed to do at the end of my last entry. And let this moment be no exception: for I've found a way out. In nine days I will be permitted a six-day reprieve from the tedium of the office, and will race frantically and purposefully to Las Vegas, Nevada to participate in, and of course observe (and perhaps even document) a frantic effort to drive the youth of the city to the polls on election day and in doing so oust George W. Bush from the presidency.
This is a new thing for me, this political stuff. In the past, politics couldn't have intested me less (which is not to say I didn't CARE about them, just that I wasn't by nature INTERESTED). But an opportunity has presented itself, championed by my old high school friend Eliot Abel (who is now a full-fledged politico with U.S. PIRG and also, as it happens to be, the son of my employers--and subsequently a locksmith, of sorts). Eliot is himself traveling to Vegas to campaign for a couple weeks and insisted not only to myself but to his parents as well that I join him for the last six days leading up to the election. Well. Let no one say I shirked this great responsibility. Let no one say I shrunk in the face of adversity. This could be a historic moment for this country, and CERTAINLY let no one say I turned my back on history, no, not me, not Andy Hyman. Hell, I'm wearing my Historical Footprint Shoes anyway.
And somewhere, in the background, I can here Moses Josh begin to chuckle.