So, it’s been two, maybe three years since Michael and I took our cross-country road trip with the dogs from Seattle to Buffalo (Michael will probably correct me right here and say, “Actually, it was Rochester,” but the thing is, then I’d have to specify Rochester, NEW YORK, because not only is there a Rochester in Washington, there is also a Rochester in Minnesota (which we stopped at on our trip), whereas there’s only one Buffalo, so for the sake of simplicity, I’m saying Buffalo; okay Michael?), and I still haven’t written my tell-all blog post about our adventures.
I mean, I started writing it, and then tucked it away into my “blog ideas” folder with the master plan of eventually publicly exploring the treasure trove of experiences from that trip. So, whenever I think, “I should write a post,” I pull up the folder and see this excerpt, but then dwell on the time it would take to write all these stories. This usually turns into me emailing Michael a crazy long message about not having the time to write, to which Michael would say (and I’m referring to my email right now, which is kind of funny when I do a search for “blog”… hang tight, and I’ll tell you more), “Your blog is more a collection of ‘short’ stories. Perhaps you should try writing stupid bullshit garbage quick posts (they don’t need to be stupid, or bullshit, or garbage)… like a paragraph or MAYBE two.”
My interpretation of his feedback is not so much that I ramble (although he does put “short” in quotes), but more that I spend waaaaay too much time writing and editing and trying to tell the perfect story, and I get so caught up in this that I never post. But the problem is, when I write and then post those short-bullshit-garbage-posts, I don’t like reading them, which turns into me having to email Michael because I can’t remember how to remove posts.
And actually, this is a good spot to pause and share some fun phrases I found when doing an email search for the word “blog:”
- How do I get into my blog?
- “Treat musk” is a really good phrase. I need to work it into my blog.
- I can’t remember the password for my blog .
- I don’t really read other people’s blogs. I find them annoying. I don’t care about other people’s lives and what they think.
So, for the sake of posting something, and to remove this from my folder of “blog ideas,” I’m sharing what was supposed to be the beginning of a novel-length story:
It’s hard to vacation with pets, either taking them with or leaving them behind. We are going to Buffalo this summer to see Michael’s family, and we decided a couple months back that we’d just drive instead of fly, so that we can take the pugs with us (Atticus wants to see Niagara falls before he dies). Which means a two-week trip, which means camping, which means camping gear, which means there’s no fucking room in either of our cars for all the shit we will no doubt need along the way, so we started looking at beat-up old vans to buy, trash, and dump when we return. The problem with this plan was that I wasn’t willing to risk breaking down in hillbilly land in our beater-van.
Our search for the perfect vehicle escalated. Maybe we should get a sweet Dodge with fat tires and a bubble window? Should we just buy a tiny camper instead? Or maybe we should get a super tricked-out van that we can keep after the road trip, for camping and weekend getaways? And not just any van, but like a Volkswagon Vanagon (which would fulfill my junior-high fantasy of dating a cute boy who owns a VW van, but clashes with my 40-year old self’s reality of not wanting to camp. Then again, it would allow Michael to relive his youth….although, when I think about it, his youth sounds a lot like his current life, except now he has a better car). Unfortunately, sweet refurbished Vanagons are not cheap, at least not the ones we are looking at.
So, Michael starts toying with the idea of selling his current car, which he literally uses only once a week, and having the Vanagon as his main vehicle. This plan petered out quickly when Michael realized that selling his car would probably involve vacuuming it, and given that there was already a dental appointment on his calendar, 2016 was pretty much booked out.
This is not the year to vacuum, please don’t even ask.