All of my good ideas are lying in pools of vomit alongside the highway between West Virginia and Virginia. They were there earlier, at the forefront of my mind, great new blogs I couldn’t wait to start writing. Then we began driving on the curvy roads of the Virginias, which proved disastrous once mixed with my hangover and tendency towards carsickness. Tonight I am idea-less and also possibly a pound or so lighter for my efforts. I can’t even remember how many times we had to stop the car so I could purge my soul along the interstate, whatever the number, it was enough to clear my head.
How is it that an idea you can develop so fully as a mental note can suddenly vanish like the remnants of last night’s dream? At some point I will learn to keep my journal with me or to figure out how to use the voice recorder function on my iPhone , thus ensuring that no good idea is ever lost. For now, however, I continue to trust in my clearly and repeatedly disproven memory retention abilities.
I wonder if the good ideas I spat out today along I-77, I-81, and I-66 will linger among the roadside weeds before slowly filtering in through the air conditioning of a passing motorist. What if my good ideas become someone else’s story simply because I could not hold my liquor on an extremely curvy (I dare say unnecessarily curvy) stretch of road? And what of you the reader, now deprived of the numerous blogs of wisdom and genius which no doubt would have laboriously dwelt on my insecurities, self-destructiveness, poor choices? You deserved to read about my latest catastrophic effort to find my way in the world. It is for you I grieve, dear reader, well you and my new blouse that is soiled with the remnants of my good ideas, now lost.
This was better, more evocative. When I was growing up, we went every year -- often three or four times a year -- to WV, to visit cousins, grandparents. The roads were worse then; there weren't interstates that went anywhere. The two-lane roads twisted and turned relentlessly. To drive the fifty (?) miles from Charleston to Logan took an hour and a half. Endless drives past trains full of coal and shacks and hills and a smell I cannot get out of my head to this day. And it took us three hours, because I could not manage twenty miles without throwing up. Even as an adult, when I head home, and I get nostalgiac for the back roads, I often have to stop and get my bearings . . . or else. I couldn't care less what great ideas you lost along the side of the road. This was better. Made me want to vomit. That's good writing always, isn't it?
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