Rites of Patches

Seriously, fuck Nebraska.

I recently drove out to Colorado from Minnesota. It required driving through Southern Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, and the Southeast corner of Wyoming. I left with an appreciation for the rolling hills of Western Iowa. Wyoming was quaint. I’ve lived in the Twin Cities for the last three years, so there’s something amusing about seeing a billboard for a business in your state’s capital city ten miles out of town (Hey! We’re in Minneapolis! Look! There’s a sign for Pete’s Salvage Yard! It’s only five miles away in St. Paul!). Colorado is breathtaking. But fuck Nebraska, because Nebraska sucks.

Louis C.K. has a bit where he explains that until the age of six or seven, nothing a child says matters. It’s great that they are talking, but if you didn’t hear anything they said for the first six years of their life, absolutely nothing in your life would be different. In this sense, Nebraska is the four-year old of the United States. It’s great that it’s a state and all. It really helps balance out our flag. But if Nebraska got nuked tomorrow, nothing about the United States would be different. We would lose nothing but six-hundred miles of flat land, some cows, and some sort of Southern, sort of asshole people.

Sad Day...

The trip was well worth it, though. Time of my life, thank you for asking. Here’s my trip by the numbers:

7:30 AM – Left Elk River, MN
8:30 AM – Cleared Minneapolis
9:39 AM – Albert Lea, MN
9:49 AM – Into Iowa
11:56 AM – Des Moines, IA
2:00 PM– Into Nebraska
8:40 PM – Into Wyoming (See how there was nothing of note in between the last two times?)
9:19 PM – Into Colorado
9:53 PM – Fort Collins, CO

6 – Number of stops made along the way

1 – Number of times almost run off of the road by dumbfucks

10 – Average speed (in mph) that the average Coloradoan enjoys driving below the speed limit

84 – Number of times I said or thought “Fuck Nebraska”

4 – Number of phone conversations with friends or family members to help get me through Nebraska without passing out from boredom

14 – Number of albums listened to in their entirety
1. Coheed and Cambria – Year of the Black Rainbow
2. The Dear Hunter – Act II: The Meaning of, and All Things Regarding Ms. Leading
3. Falconer – Chapters from a Vale Forlorn
4. Lacuna Coil – Shallow Life
5. Lo-Pro – Lo-Pro
6. Shaman’s Harvest – Shine
7. Soilwork – The Panic Broadcast
8. Between the Buried and Me – The Great Misdirect
9. Patton Oswalt – My Weakness Is Strong
10. 3 – Revisions
11. The Dear Hunter – Act III: Life and Death
12. Fair to Midland – Fables from a Mayfly: What I Tell You Three Times Is True
13. Lo-Pro – The Beautiful Sounds of Revenge
14. Butch Walker – Sycamore Meadows

(Person Whom I Should Not Have Entrusted with My Computer’s Note: Maranda is awesome.)