“The current is becoming wilder, more capricious. It’s all absurd, and I’ll never understand why I set out on this enterprise. It’s always the same at the start of a journey. Then comes the soothing indifference that makes everything all right. I can’t wait for it to arrive.”
— Alvaro Mutis, from The Snow of the Admiral
PM, Shawn, and I are back in the Yukon heading north. PL and Victoria are up ahead somewhere in their own vehicle. We’re picking up our badass steel player, Dave Zirbel, in SF tonight. Stage two is underway. Right now we’re listening to The Herbivores, the Hempfest organizer’s band. It’s jammin’ reggae/ska with a John Scofield-like rhythm section. The Herbivores go on at 4:20 pm. They’re right after Leon Hendrix (Jimmy’s brother) who’s right after us. We’re getting psyched up for the fest. It’s really the focus of this leg of the journey. What the reality of the scene will be none of us can know.
I-5 is so familiar it doesn’t feel like we’re leaving anywhere yet. We tried to gas up in Grapevine but they were gouging at $2.59 a gallon. Not cool. So we got ten bucks worth and drove down the road. I passed an ARCO offering $1.98 so we hit the breaks on the Yukon and took her into the median for an illegal U-turn. Lucklily, no cops. Got the cheap gas. Fucking gas.