it's 4 am and i am home from st. augustine, florida about to sleep on a bed for the first time in a week. i never really explained, but i road tripped to florida with three friends for harvest of hope music festival. i'm pretty tired and i resume work tomorrow so i will keep this brief, but while it is still fresh in my memory i should note some things. pictures and maybe details to come.
i went with ashley, rickey, and vinny and we pooled money together for gas and made sandwiches for the trip down and i bought some snacks with my food stamps. we drove all day on thursday to savannah where we slept on one of the boys' friend's floors. savannah is one of my favorite american cities (towns?) mostly because of the romantic spanish moss and ghost stories and midnight in the garden of good and evil and weather and artsiness of SCAD. on friday we drove the remainder of the trip and set up a tent in a fairgrounds that was aptly described as tent village.
the next three days was a blur of music, sunburn, freezing at night in a small tent with three other people and sweating every morning, paying too much money for festival food, dust and dirt and dirty and sweaty, getting beat up in rowdy crowds, schlitz and whiskey and monster energy drink (monster + whiskey =monster mash, not my invention but i appreciate the wit and bet you will too) and escaping the festival to spend less money on subway sandwiches. the only veganfriendly fast food in america seems to me to be taco bell and subway. i feel sort of sick right now having eaten so much of them as well as all the most unhealthy vegan food you can buy in gas stations like weirdly flavored peanuts and munchos and those sweet chili doritos.
we left sunday night after this bike is a pipe bomb because none of us wanted to sleep in the tent for another night. ashley drove the three hours back to savannah and diego's floor. we went to the beach for a few hours on monday and i sunburnt all the parts of me that weren't already. then we ate some sort of unfulfilling tomato pie and met up with ursinus kids who happened to also be 700 miles south of home. we planned on making the brutal drive straight from the pizza place but when they invited us to stay at their motel for the night and get wild with fireworks and cheap wine we couldn't resist. we picked up some 99 peaches to honor the place and hung around in parks, ate some taco bell, bought hurricane for a homeless man called VA and a few for ourselves. we spent a really long time driving to the motel because the directions i wrote on a brown liquor bag were somehow wrong and other horrible things kept happening. mainly, everyone was paranoid about the opened bottle of 99 peaches and the millions of cops that we attracted attention to with our PA plates and driving around in circles and vinny running around the highway trying to find his hat that had blown out the window and he ended up leaving in savannah anyway. after we were certain that a cop was in fact following us, which probably wasn't even true, we decided to dispose of anything that could get us in trouble. as in, a 20 dollar bottle of peaches. ashley and i couldn't really bear to dump it in the girls' bathroom so we stuck the whole bottle in the toilet tank and swore to come back for it.
we arrived at the motel, kindled sparklers and friendships, played kings and the longest game of never have i ever, revealed every secret i have, finished all the liquor, made uncomfortable jokes so that things can finally stop being uncomfortable, jumped on beds, passed out in the middle of everything, and had a really grand time in general. this morning, i can't believe that was really this morning, we peeled ourselves off of a bare motel mattress and left the south, stopping only for gas, discount cigars for dads and taco bell. we were about an hour too late to see jukebox the ghost in baltimore.
i am home, my fish are alive and the landlord and lady got us a new stove. it's way too white for the rest of the kitchen. the cutoff shorts i made on wednesday and wore every single day and night starting friday morning are filthy dirty. ashley loves shotgunning beers as much as i do and we're planning a party at my apartment on saturday inspired by having seen tilly and the wall and wanting to wear the brightest colors imaginable for some event. i feel pretty okay about being back. it seems spring came while we were gone and it's supposed to be 65 and rainy tomorrow. that definitely felt like a way long time and it is tiring to not have a homebase to keep your stuff and rest your head and make food. harvest of hope is a really neat thing and i saw a lot of bands i love and KRS-ONE. I hope nothing has been damaged, as it is sometimes hard to be in such close quarters with people and i guess i become mean and selfish when it comes to what music is played while i am driving. the trip was definitely positive on the whole, i am really excited to have fewer people to feel uncomfortable around in this world and more people i feel excessively comfortable around as well. sunshine is crucial and road trips make me feel a lot better about life in general, especially in the dirty early icy spring. it's nice to see concentrations of people wearing titus andronicus shirts and being friendly to strangers and making having fun a priority. i realized more than ever how much i miss the people i spent my last road-trip-to-music-festival with. i realized i actually miss a lot of things and that is the main thing i ever get really sad about. i don't know if it was the copycat trip or the having lots of time to think in the car or the weather, but i am nostalgic. maybe it is the collective unconscious. i want to go to new zealand or wwoof in mexico or move to athens, georgia in december. that's my new plan. does anyone want to come to mexico or athens with me? we can hang out with jeff mangnum and the cute kids in nana grizol if we do the latter, learn spanish and organic farm if we do the former. i am very serious about these things.
i am also serious about painting my bike yellow, making being friends with girls a priority, adventuring whenever i can, finally getting pretty tattoos this year, and how important kisses, hugs, and dancing are. i'm not talking about romance, just plain old love.
among others, i had the pleasure of seeing:
Tokyo Police Club
The Mae Shi
Propagandhi
The Mountain Goats
Wild Sweet Orange
Her Space Holiday
Girl Talk
Against Me!
Tilly and the Wall
The Bouncing Souls
None More Black
Ghost Mice
Paul Baribeau and Ginger Alford playing Springsteen
Fake Problems
KRS-ONE
This Bike is a Pipebomb
Young Livers
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Also, parts of Savannah really annoyed me. During the day, the Southerners were out. Everyone was friendly and very Southern. But then at night all the mean and pretentious SCAD students were out. Needless to say, I was not impressed by the people, but I don't think I came in contact with many natives, which was unfortunate. But I'm pretty sure few natives live in the historical district. I do wonder where they live, though.
The Spanish moss was beautiful, though I could not stop thinking about chiggers that live in the moss. That that statue from Midnight is not that nice in person. I've never read the book, but it seems good. There was a lot of creepy cemeteries there.
Also, if you go through SC on the back roads instead of the high ways, you see what the state is really about. Whatever road we were on, I felt very hopeless about the South. It was very, very strange to say the least.
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