Manassas, VA.

I'm not even sure where to begin, so I'm just going to jump right in to writing this.

I'm twenty-six-years-old. I've had to live at home because my English degree and subsequent "real" office job paid me so little that I had to go reside with my mother. I used my English degree to write airline menus--which, to someone who wants to write creatively for a living, was like some kind of prision sentence.

So, I quit my job. My buddy EGo quit his job a long time ago. We're driving cross-country, stopping at friend's houses/apartments. We'll be camping when we don't have someone to stay with.
This is something I've wanted to do since I read Kerouac's On The Road in high school. I wanted to do a trip like this right after graduation, but it never happened. Various degrees of responsibility sank their daggers in--responsibility that I'm ignoring now.

Everyone seems to say the same thing to me: "Do this while you can, while you're young."

So, now I'm sitting in Manassas, VA, in my friend Jon's living room, typing this up. EGo and I hit so much traffic leaving New Jersey that a 4.5 hour trip turned into something like 6.5 or 7 hours. We need better timing. And practice. I tend to want to fall asleep if no one is talking to me, and EGo was so tired that we had to change driving positions about 2.5 hours in so he could nap.

We will perservere! We will conquer the miles and miles of rolling black pavement. The hours of getting trapped between SUVs and tractor trailers that belch exhaust. The high gas prices that will empty our wallets and have us howling at OPEC. We will get rained on. We will have the sun shine down upon us and burn us. And our knowledge will be the knowlege of gods when we return home, triumphant, dirty, smelling of tar and grass and cheap fast food.