We head to Detriot in an undersized Scion filled with parlor tricks, noisemakers, cereal and dirty socks. Stephen Steinbrink, Ann as Hell Kite, and Glochids as James, are on the Midwest half of their tour. They picked me up from my parent’s home in Kentucky, trying to work up some money for food and rent back in Arizona. I was on my third ear infection, turns out I’m allergic to my birthplace.

To justify my tall frame squeezed in this car, I’ve designated myself as an archivist to record their shows at various DIY or all age venues across this section of the tour. It feels better than returning to unemployment in the middle of the desert’s crotch during it’s summer triathlon, where I’d be waiting for heat-crazed lunatics trading their cars for guns and shooting anything that isn’t an ice cube.

Stephen stops for gas in a thinning industrial section of Cincinnati. We browse duplicated rap and reggae albums with sun bleached cheap labels. People are yelling over a crippled engine as it tries to turn over. A man checks his cellphone from pinstripe pants waiting for us to pick something to pay his lonely hustle. Another man stares at us from an idling car, no music plays, and his hand is sweating on the dashboard. I feel connected to this place, the warehouse sliding downhill. A White Castle employee perches on a wrecked wall for five inches of shade, caging his smoke.

I think about how my family looked when I left my parent’s home. The full Kentucky day hit their faces, expressions of drifting balloons. The first time I left home, it was empty and the dog had died. Most of the people I knew were in rehab or drowning themselves in bathtubs. I packed up in an empty house, trying to find any detail that would connect me to this place and the 20 years I spent in it. I made a sandwich, and left the dish where someone would have to clean it.

I drift asleep, wake up in northern Ohio. This land suffocates my voice, and leaves me mumbling at lichen and tasting tree leaves. I want to stop and jump the barbed wire, but we have an obligation. I know I know. We drive in sunlight, hands cut currents outside windows. Ahead, a thick barrier of rain and fog and within seconds we are covered and can’t see the road. Cars appear, disappear skating on clouds. We pull over and hope the hail doesn’t bust through the windshield’s spreading crack.

I want the windshield to break. All the sticks and rain would blow inside the car. Forced to abandon our vehicle, we’d make camp in the forest, I’m sure there would still be a hidden place dry enough to be comfortable and warm. There are new ways to learn how to laugh. I’m disappointed when the rain breaks, we’re alive, and we start back on the road again.

We pull over at a rest stop. I play with a kiosk labelled, “THE FUTURE.” It shows me videos with ripped up roads. Zooming in on CGI roads and ramps with cars smoothing along a silver sunset. A pedestrian bridge with trianguler humans drifting between each community. THIS FUTURE is the best thing to happen to them, to us. Over my shoulder, a woman with a bad perm stares at me while I study the kiosk. She is guarding the swiss army knife and teddy bears that are one of the many prizes you can win in a raffle.

I take the wheel and immediately get lost. The GPS device patiently tells me to take four right turns and keep left.

“I’m going to drive this shit into a lake,” I keep telling myself.