Day 1
Got as far as South Carolina. Walmarts are surprisingly difficult to find in the state. Saw Pedro at South of the Border. Gouda. Tylesle.

Day 2
Resort is huge. 2 bedrooms, whirlpool, balcony, dining room, fully equipped kitchen, projection TV. Floridians don’t know how to drive, but at least they do it at 95 MPH. Met up with Bri and the tension was thick. Reminded me of when my parents would close the kitchen door and fight in the living room, as if the thin piece of wood would protect me from the screaming.

Day 3
Downtown Disney. Picked up something for Laura. Tension continues to build. Bri left for the night.

Day 4
Hugged the mouse. Spent 11 hours in the Magic Kingdom. Fireworks at the end of the evening were nice.

Day 5
Notes in all my stuff. Met up with Geoff outside Atlanta. Stayed in a dive motel. First of many, I’m sure. Fuckin’ hate Georgia.

Day 6
Dropped by Kristy’s. Brother said she was sick. Came up to Dezzy’s a day early and took her and Kat out to dinner. Saw Tennessee poetry night. Just imagine it. Yes. It’s like that.

Six down, 15 or so to go.

There are some situations in which no positive spin, no amount of good PR work could ever make them better. These will always be sad and will leave permanent scars.

I’ve truly despised Berks County, but I’ll still miss it.

The last time I left Kutztown, I packed all my stuff into my car haphazardly and drove off down Rt. 222. I stopped in Trexlertown to visit Bri, Jess, and Tyler but only Bri was home. He was hanging out with his old friend Rob who just got out of jail.
“You want to stick around for a bit?” Brian said. “I don’t know when Jess is getting back.”
“Nah. Can’t. If I don’t get out of this area now, I never will.”

That was the last time I saw them in that apartment. Tyler moved in with friends somewhere in Allentown, and Jess and Bri moved to Maryland then Florida. I saw Rob again when he, Jess, Bri, and I met up to go to Dorney Park.

I took backroads on my way to Levittown and, as I entered Quakertown, called [name removed to protect the innocent] to see if she was home. She was…and sloppy drunk. But she said it’d be okay to stop by. I wound up staying the night. In the morning, she had to meet up with a relative so I continued on to Levittown.

I wasn’t sure if I was ever coming back to Kutztown at that point. As it turns out, I tried. But Levittown wasn’t done with me and wound up dragging me back. This town, however, seems more than ready to let me go.

I’ve used up its resources. I stayed for a night and wound up taking over the couch for months. I ate all its food, used all its dishes, and finished off all the hot water before it could take a shower. Time to move onto the next town.

Last night I dreamt you came back. You acted like you never wanted to leave, like it was just something you had to do. And you were back and had no intention of leaving again. It was nice. But we all have to open our eyes after awhile. Or so we’re told.

From New Scientist’s Life’s Top 10 Greatest Inventions:

DEATH
COULD evolution have brought the Grim Reaper into being? Yes, indeed. Not in all his guises, of course – living things have always died because of mishaps such as starvation or injury. But there’s another sort of death in which cells – and perhaps, controversially, even whole organisms – choose annihilation because of the benefits it brings to some greater whole. In other words, death is an evolutionary strategy.

This is most obvious in the many varieties of programmed cell death or apoptosis, a self-destruct mechanism found in every multicellular organism. Your hand has five fingers because the cells that used to live between them died when you were an embryo. Embryos as tiny as 8 to 16 cells – just 3 or 4 cell divisions after the fertilised egg – depend on cell death: block apoptosis and development goes awry. Were it not for death, we would not even be born.

Even as adults we could not live without death. Without apoptosis we would all be overrun by cancer. Your cells are constantly racking up mutations that threaten to make your tightly controlled cell division run amok. But surveillance systems – such as the one involving the p53 protein, called the “guardian of the genome” (New Scientist, 18 December 2004, p 38) – detect almost all such errors and direct the affected cells to commit suicide.

Programmed cell death plays a central role in everyday life too. It ensures a constant turnover of cells in the gut lining and generates our skin’s protective outer layer of dead cells. When the immune system has finished wiping out an infection, the now-redundant white blood cells commit suicide in an orderly fashion to allow the inflammation to wind down. And plants use cell death as part of a scorched-earth defence against pathogens, walling off the infected area and then killing off all the cells within.

It is easy to see how an organism can benefit from sacrificing a few cells. But evolution may also have had a hand in shaping the death of whole organisms. The cells of all higher organisms begin to age, or senesce, after just a few dozen cell divisions, ultimately leading to the death of the organism itself. In part that is one more protection against uncontrolled growth. But one controversial theory suggests this is part of an inbuilt genetic ageing program that sets an upper limit on all our lifespans (New Scientist, 19 April 2004, p 26).

Most evolutionary biologists reject the idea of an innate “death program”. After all, they point out, animals die of old age in many different ways, not by one single route as apoptotic cells do. Instead, they view senescence as a sort of evolutionary junkyard: natural selection has little reason to get rid of flaws that appear late in life, since few individuals are lucky enough to make it to old age. But now that people routinely survive well past reproductive age, we suffer the invention evolution never meant us to find: death by old age.

Bob Holmes