| Travel Quote: |
"I have left my native country; I have pledged my estate; I have forsaken my comfort and delivered myself into the arms of Fortune to lead where she will." |
Journal
[10.09] July 4th, 1998
I don’t know whether it was the Vicks 44 we had drunk to enhance our enjoyment of the fireworks, or just the natural tendency of young men not to want to let each other down—but at around midnight on July 4, 1998, when the day should have been coming to an end, Mike, Ritchie and I were about to embark on an asinine odyssey that, by morning, would find us in upstate New York, some 500 miles away from our origin in Charlottesville, Virginia.
I was coming out of the bathroom applying ointment to the rash I’d gotten from the overdose of cough syrup, when I found Mike and Ritchie in the living room crowding the computer screen. It was filled with the banner of a webpage that read, “The Church of the Subgenius”.
“Holy shit, man,” Mike was saying. “I’d give anything to be there when those jackasses wake up and realize the spaceship didn’t come.”
As it turned out, all that the universe asked in exchange for this indulgence was a couple tanks of gasoline and a grueling night of driving that would probably truncate our youth.
To this day I don’t understand what The Church of the Subgenius is and, looking back, it's clear that neither Mike nor Ritchie did either. But according to the website, they were camping out in Amish country waiting for space aliens to pick them up in their mother ship and take them back to their paradisiacal home world on the other side of the galaxy. The rendezvous was scheduled for sunrise, the morning after the anniversary of our nation’s independence. more...
