I’m home now. It’s taking me some time to recover. I feel like I have been traveling non-stop for months. Well, I guess I have. Now I can rest, but only for a little while. The next time I go, it will be back to Italy, and that doesn’t suck. It is really hard to believe that it has been a year exactly since I landed in Palermo.

This trip won’t be like that one. That one was five weeks long and it was all play. This one is two weeks long and involves major hardships like eating and drinking and leading people on pub crawls around Venice. It sucks, I know, but someone has to do it.

I think I can, at this point, go just about anywhere and have a good time. I am serious. I have some really bad qualities but one good one that I do have is, I can go anywhere, I never shy away from it, and I always find something, at least one thing, to like. Like Oklahoma. Everyone disses on it, but it’s pretty there. Indian Country. Lots of lakes, lots of sky. I went to the bathroom at a truck stop and some of the diner tables had plaques that read “reserved for truckers.” Imagine a place where a trucker has priority. I, for one, think that is hella cool. The highways are long and there is no one on them. On my way to a winery in Haskell, I passed through living ghost towns. So many broken down, boarded up houses, but people still live in these towns. There were bars in structures made out of some kind of thin metal. Budweiser is cheap, and I didn’t see even one cop. You can buy a house for sixty-five thousand dollars and there is no smell of coffee, only lawlessness.

I visited my old friend Prentiss in Muscogee, and then we went to Tulsa, where we rented a little hotel studio with a kitchen and I cooked for Prentiss and his boyfriend Rob and his friends from Tulsa, Mark and Mark. On a tiny stove in a tiny room, we had an eight-foot table, candles, flowers, tons of wine, my IPod, Mark’s CD player, opera, Sigur Ros, Macaroni and Cheese, Italian Sausage that I bought in the Italian town of Krebs, and a lot of laughter. Then we went to Mark Michael’s where he played the piano and it was really, truly beautiful. The other Mark took us around in his car the next day, to see Tulsa. On a Sunday, no one out. Killer art deco skyscrapers.

Then home. I’ll admit, I am weary. But also in love, really in love, with Cat Power’s new record The Greatest. I LOVE it. I lost my very favorite close to my heart Black Fly sunglasses that I had for 10 years on this trip, but listening to Cat Power I can kind of get over it. Kind of. Listen to the sample of “Love and Communication.” The strings on that one song are enough to slay me with happiness.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 7th, 2006 at 7:07 pm and is filed under Tales from a Strange Land. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.