thus far...

The trip so far has been fun, scary, strange, unexpected and most of all thought-provoking. I've met a lot of good people who act as reminders of my family and friends back home who have been so good to me always, even at times when I really didn't deserve it. Thank you. Your friends and family are all you really have in this world; Life's too short to take your people for granted.
Having said this I hope to God I used that semi-colon properly (I know at least one person who will correct me if I’m wrong) and I suppose I should explain my, at times bewildering, whereabouts during the last few weeks. I rode my bike through some of southeastern South Dakota and quickly grew frustrated at the lack of suitable roads to ride on and to be honest, it got pretty lonely. Riding on a small shoulder spider webbed with cracks while huge semis fly by at well above the limit of seventy, moving faster than Mark Foley and Gary Glitter in a foot race with a young Indonesian boy at the finish line, wasn’t a very good time. I consulted townspeople, bike stores, other bike riders, my maps and the internet (which by the way, my laptop, despite being a dead weight at times, was a great idea to bring with, kind of like having a midget crammed into my bag that doesn’t talk much but knows thousands of songs by heart.) and found as usual the locals were the best and most accurate source for regional info. They mostly told me my goal of the badlands was a little nutty for A. riding by myself in some pretty desolate places and B. It had snowed there earlier in the week and while the weather at the time was tolerable, it was considered unpredictable at best. I don’t mind the cold so much but my skinny tires can’t handle those conditions and quite frankly, my Bicycle, recently renamed Special-ed from good ‘ol Lucky Joe, deserves better. Alright so I realized I had lost my wallet along the way somewhere, very possibly while evading that vicious anomalous seven foot tall wild turkey which by the way now lurks in the filthy swirling oily darkness of my nightmares nowadays, revealing its presence only by a pair of red slits and a fiendish “gobble-gobble” that would shiver your timbers unless you, like millions of others, don’t have timbers in which case you would just be scared. I decided to relax in S.D. for an entire week contemplating my next move and marinating in the town’s juices to really soak up that authentic Yankton flavor which was a pretty decent place with the people to match. Not like Mormon decent, more of just an honest and hardworking decent. Many Mormons are better described as being an eerie hybrid of what I would describe with the title “Nazi super clone-wholesome” as I would later find out.
I awaited my replacement temporary ID from the state of Illinois in the town, growing increasingly impatient and poorer as the week wore on. Especially in the first weeks of the trip, the electric exhilaration of being homeless and unemployed had become something of a monetary aphrodisiac, ridding my wallet of its everyday life inhibitions. Being down and out in the middle of the boondocks had forced me to live a more frugal lifestyle for fear of not making it to California. From kinglike caches of delicious Payday bars and beef jerky, and eating heartily in diners I descended into a world of 10 for 10 frozen dinners, ramen noodles, frozen burritos and even once had an entire meal of samples from the grocery store that consisted of a pretty good artificial crab salad and ham, which I deftly impaled six to seven trial size pieces at a time with toothpicks while nervously eyeing the employees trying to suppress an eruption of spastic laughter from my hungry but jolly gut. One day I was exiting the library and I saw a sign in front of a church that offered a free “banquet” and “All (were) welcome”. I certainly fall into the category all, I figured, and what better way to sneak a glimpse into the inner workings of Yankton than a church function. I went back the night of and enjoyed a meal of savory beef stew with a salad covered in what must’ve been a cross between thousand island and the salty-sweet blood of the cow used in the stew. It was here, surrounded by actual homeless people, sixteen year old hard up teenage mothers that I realized there was a difference between being poor and being broke. Poor is a state of mind, a mental shroud that will hold you back, while broke is a temporary financial state easily overcome with the right attitude and some work. I was definitely nearing broke and ,not to be callous or sound uncaring, being surrounded by the poor and derelict of spirit depressed the shit outta me at the time so I took off without eating all of my post meal artificial vanilla flavored ice cream product.
I spent my days in the library on the internet, writing or reading and enjoying that super tasty, cold water you can only find in libraries for some reason as if they all had secret frosty ultra pure natural springs deep in the earth beneath. My nights consisted of wandering the town talking to folks and sometimes hanging out with Julie and Ben, the nice girl who ran the hotel a few nights a week and her boyfriend...