9/18/13, day 28 of the Gran Turismo Bead Tour, Liberty, Missouri

 Hello buddies. Do you know what a cicada sounds like? I thought I did, but purely from movies that occur in the South. But both myself, and the foley artists of said movies, were wrong. They sound like electric bird ghosts. I at once like the sound, and wish with all my heart it would stop. Welcome to the midwest.

  Denver. Thoughts on Denver. Denver has a whole lot of shitty drivers, I'll tell you that. Angry people. The overwhelming need to be one car length ahead, and the intense hatred of anyone who stands in their way. Once, when I opted not to let a car into my lane, and I was almost past its rear bumper, the driver of said car slammed on her brakes, got behind me honked her horn, flipped me off, and then pulled up next to me to repeat said actions for about 30 seconds, before she cut off two lanes of traffic to make her exit. I found this to be not unusual. I found it particularly annoying because almost everyone in Denver has tinted windows. It's odd to try to place blame on faceless, metal objects with little more than a sillouhette of a person with a phone in their hand on the inside.

  The floods. The 100 year floods of Denver. I WAS THERE!! And I didn't even get a t-shirt. After my dismal mountain state sales, Nir felt bad and flew out to do the Denver Bead, and Mineral show with me, to try to make some extra money. Then it rained, and kept on raining. From the Wednesday I picked Nir up from the Airport, to the night I dropped him off at his motel on Sunday, it rained. It's understandable when people don't come to a bead show when the mayor is telling them not to leave their house if they don't have to. Personally, as I was staying 20 minutes south of Denver, the worst of the flooding I experienced was sitting in a booth in a warehouse, watching all the other vendors around me mirror my expression of boredom. But, when it was over, Nir paid me $500 cash anymore. Not bad pay for basically sitting in a chair for four days.

  Kona and Kai. They who let me stay in their house with no charge for two freaking weeks. Kona made me dinner multiple times (as I did for her and Kai, once), and kept bringing home giant bottles of cheap French wine. I thanked her by doing the dishes, doing light housework, playing MarioKart with Kai, and bringing to the house too many bottles of tequila. She saved me hundreds on motels, I helped destroy her liver. YOU'RE WELCOME, KONA.

  The second to last night in Denver, Kona and I took the light rail downtown. By the way, the train in Denver costs $4 a ride. The ticket only lasts an hour, which is BS, because if you're taking a train somewhere, you're almost certainly going to be gone more than an hour. Makes me like the MAX in Portland all the better, even if I barely ever ride it. Anyway, we went downtown to meet Jon, and his friends at a karaoke bar called El Charrito, after pausing to grab a pizza from a spot down the street. The details of said night will be jammed into quick descriptions from here on in, due to me already getting tired of writing: whiskey, beer, bachelorette party, "Blues Cowboy", inflatable saxophone, DEVO!, bullshit KJ, more whiskey, Jaeger bombs, more DEVO, Sister Christian (by me), Kona getting passed over by BS KJ, bar shutting down, wandering back to train, more whiskey, finding man riding home from work with neon green socks, singing ALL of "Bohemian Rhapsody" with said man (who was stone sober), a few people join in, stumbling back to Kona's to watch Archer/pass out. Done.

  Needless to say, Nir could tell I'd been up to no good when I picked him up the next morning, from my beer sweat, and wrecked voice. But, I figured it would be my last contact with friends for about a month; better to tie one on, than to stay sharp for the last day of a washed out bead show.

  Hastings, Nebraska! Wooooo hoooooo! Fucking Nebraska! But, you know what happened in NE? A 5k sale, that's what happened. I showed up early to an 8 am appt, praying my coffee would keep me awake, and ended up surrounded by six women who all looked pretty much exactly the same (pear bodies, ham arms, faces in various states of sagging, all dressed from Target) who, with the efficiency of a pride of lionesses, went through nearly every box in my van until they'd had their fill. And that fill was my largest sale to date. Not a bad way to make $700.

  Same day, Lindborg, Kansas!! Three and half hours later, I pull into a teeny town where pretty much everything has a Swedish name. After convincing the client to not do the sale directly from the back of my van, she ended up buying $5 shy of two hunny. It rains, and it...barely sprinkles.

  Next day: Manhattan, Kansas! Which, though I don't plan on moving to Kansas, if I had to choose between there, and Great Farts, Montana, this town would win. It's a college town (GO WILDCATS!), and the area that the "bead shop" was in a pretty epic bar spot. Probably about 12 bars in a three block radius. And college girls. Oh, college girls. Sometimes I wish I was a dirtier old man. Give me time.

  And I said "bead shop" because the shop was reeeeeeeeally about 10% bead, and 90% hippy. All in all, it was a head shop, and the rest of the shit was there to take up space. They weren't interested in the glass beads, because a) they never sold anything for more than a dollar, and b) the holes in the beads are too small for hemp string. After selling them a whopping $249 worth of semi precious stones, and other crap, I bought a sandalwood candle to help clear the funk out of motel rooms, and went on my way.

  TO LIBERTY, MISSOURI!! And the first thing my second appt said to me when I asked what they wanted to see was, "Well, we're really not interested in glass beads". Oh good, so you don't want to see 80% of my stock, maybe some semi precious? "No, we've got a a trunk show from you guys for that." But, I managed to keep my smile plastered on, and somehow got them to spend $494. I'm learning the art of the sale for this job is staying happy, and pleasant when really I want to scream in their faces: WHY DID YOU MAKE A FUCKING APPT WHEN YOU'RE NOT GOING TO BUY ANYTHING? But hey.

  How's the job affecting me, you ask? Well, about like you'd expect. Imagine if your only social contact with real people is mostly from the people you're trying to get buy shit from you. I actually look forward to appts, because at least I'll have some real conversations for a bit. Everything else is through the phone. Texts that I sometimes can't answer I'm driving, and phone conversations I usually don't want to have because I'm tired, and I never really liked talking on the phone.

  So yeah, shockingly, the long distance relationship thing isn't going all that great. Janine is not liking it, and vents to me about it, which just makes me feel shitty because there's not really anything I can do about it. My dude brain translates it to: girl has problem. Fix problem. Can't fix problem. Fail. So that's fun.

  Facebook is a double edged sword. On one hand, I get to see what my friends are up to, and on the other, I see what my friends are doing without me. Like my friend Michelle's 41st birthday karaoke party.

  Everyone keeps asking me if this job is worth it, and I really don't know yet. I had a long talk with Nir in the bead show (nothing else to do), and he informed me on some points I'd been wondering about. According to him, most salespeople who work for him make at least 30 to 40 grand a year. Which ain't a lot, but it's a shit ton more than I've ever made. Fuck, I'd be lower middle class, with four-five months off a year to do what I want. But, there's the rest of the year that I'm not even in Portland.

  Let's face it. I need a plan b. But plan b doesn't begin with "a", and art does, so art is not going to work. Sorry, I'm a little drunk. I'm in a motel room in Kansas. I went for a walk to get some new deodorant, and in the six blocks I walked, the only other people I saw walking had just gotten out of their cars. People actually looked at me funny for being on the sidewalk. I'm out of my element. I needed a few glasses of wine.

  But..you knoooooooooow...as long as I'm drunk, and alone, and bored, and rambling, I'll go ahead and say: we're doing it wrong. From a young age, I've had a sense that this world is bullshit. And the more I'm here, the more that theory gets backed up. And I know, I know, I know: I see what I wanna see. I attract what energy I put out there, yar yar yar. But this just doesn't feel right. We're from a world that works wonderfully, and on it we're building another world that doesn't work well at all, and isn't that much fun anyway. We eat wrong. We travel wrong. We entertain ourselves wrong. We love wrong. We fuck wrong. It's just all wrong.

  Don't get ME wrong. I didn't go to WALMART, and buy a shotgun with my wine. I'm not going to ruin the motel maid's day tomorrow when she would come in and see my brains on the wall. No, I'm going to finish my wine, watch some tv, and repeat the process tomorrow. Stupid and wrong as it is, I'm going down with this ship. It's just a lot like the problem I mentioned above: girl has problem. Fix problem. Can't fix problem. Fail. Except replace "girl" with "humans".

  Or, maybe I'm just projecting.

  Well, them's my thoughts for the night. Time to join the rest of Meh-dle America, and watch some tv.

  Goo'night, buddies.