I picked the route that would take me through places like Kansas and Idaho. Those places can become somber, desolate collections of crumbling small towns very, very quickly, but at least the landscape changes to a certain degree. Even someone who feels a legitimate spiritual connection to the desert is going to find themselves wishing for something, anything that doesn’t resemble the background of a goddamn Roadrunner cartoon, if they go through the entire American southwest by car or bus. 

The kind of life I liked to lead on the road is the kind of thing that’s cute when you’re nineteen. When you’re twenty-nine, you start to wonder if maybe, just maybe, you’ve wasted your entire goddamn life. After getting back from Denver, I had to deal with this question. I also had to decide if traveling at a near-constant rate was really something I enjoyed as much as I used to. 

The last time I was in Chicago for more than a day, I didn’t want to waste my time on the bullshit that tourists tend to waste their time on. To be fair, I was in love, so that’s where a lot of my attention was going. I was seventeen. The fact that I was going to Chicago at all didn’t really interest me. 

People, including children, suffer and die in unspeakable ways every hour of the day all over the world. That doesn’t make the Newtown, Connecticut tragedy any smaller. Nor does the fact that it happened in this country make it any larger or more significant in some way. Any event in which innocent lives, especially the lives of children, are lost forever because of some monstrous, almost unimaginable sickness, is something that should be mourned and recognized. You don’t have to memorize the names of every human being who dies in a tragic way, but we sometimes forget the faces and names a little too quickly.

I guess the only thing that truly disappointed me about last night’s election was waking up this morning to find that Donald Trump’s call for “revolution” did not come to fruition. Some people took the news of Obama’s victory last night a little harder than others. But, in fact, it seems as if the world is roughly the same out there.