I know all this because I’m looking at my old, handwritten, pencil-smeared, scratchpost of a journal now, from the high safety of the suburbs, twenty years in the future. I skipped ahead and read the journal of the whole trip, because I am GOD in all this, and, Lord help you, feeble and uncontrolling reader, none of it is as I recall.

I remember that first trip across the continent as a wholly rapturous event. A transforming one, when I left behind all that was youthful, immature, and insignificant. Like college is, for most people. After college, whatever happened to you in your teens, when you were in high school, it all becomes a laugh, and the people, petty inconsequential anecdotes. You have moved on, deep into your intellect, and have new powers of knowledge and authority. This is how I remember that trip. And when I got back... Well... Life begun.

The journal tells a seriously different story. It’s the story of an ugly kid with bad hair and bad handwriting, who has no sense of rubbing two nickels together. He falls in love with every girl who smiles at him, and then thoughtlessly moves on down the road. He considers himself carefree, when he is really just careless. He’s lonely, and it doesn’t take long for him to click his heels repeatedly and wish for home. And all the while, he sees himself a poet, but here is a sample of his unfortunate poetry:

A thousand faces I will see today

But yours is the only one that will turn away

A thousand miles I will travel today

But my mind will echo with the things you say

Elsewhere on the page he has written the word “SHEEPSHIT” in all caps. This cannot be explained.

But perhaps that kid had some idea that he really was full of it, and had some distance to go in the purging. Perhaps that’s why he got in his beat-up old car and hit the road -he felt he had nothing to lose, and only experience to gain. But from this vantage point, the high tower of wisdom in the suburbs of middle-age, it’s clear he was just a kid who wanted to change the world, and all in spite of the fact that he was certain of his youthfulness, his inexperience, and his lack of wisdom. So he drove on. God bless him.