FIELD NOTES : Jacob Perkins :: From the Cannery, Part 6 : Return of a Fast Food Drifter
On top of the Olympic Range I am skating over snowfields and looking through something I’d only impair to describe as ‘fabric’ at night. Deep nostalgic chest throbs: the mushroom chocolates were a good choice. There was supposed to be a meteor shower but the corner of the moon rose over Mt. Angeles and since then we’ve been yelling ‘Good Job, Moon!’ as if to say ‘You are a Capri Sun Vessel!’ and it is orange and growing and we won’t stare at the stars again. I have a tiny day bag of shirts and toothbrush and pens. It is cold but my friends are here and we are talking about the Real Tom Hanks outside our tent and singing a song called Country Livin, which is really something we made up and consists lyrically of its title and nothing more.
Country Livin. I’d like to think that what I’m doing right now could be called Country Livin if it were a song about sleeping on different floors each night and seeing my favorite bar through open and close. What a way to get back to where I started. You might jump off a cliff or work the glass shard out of your heel with so much time after Alaska.
“What I’ve been doing since Alaska:”
In the back of a State Patrol car I am not handcuffed but talking about prospects of hitching a ride from the next exit. “Pretty good,” the cop says, and he let’s me out at a gas station and I buy a pepperoni stick and he’s fueling up the squad car smiling. Thanks. Getting down to Portland is hard from the city. Big sedans stare you down as street grime but I’ve worked my ass off, Microsoft Bro, and all I want to do is Country Liv.
Interesting Life Change: you may lose all desire to represent yourself accurately now. That’s what I’m thinking, sort of, as I begin a series of fast food exposés which are really just comments about burgerlust or spiraling into cardiac depravity. Truth is, I’m not eating fast food. I’m trying to save my money, and aside from bar fries I’m mainly eating bread and cheese and road trip snacks like trail mix and Gatorade.
Some of my Facebook entries:
“It’s fair to say, if I could, I’d eat country gravy just. For all of time.” followed by a photo of a Carl’s Jr. Big Country burrito slathered in country gravy.
“Running low or out of shirt choices mainly due to Ranch.”
“Basically only living to discover new Buffalo-related sauce realities.”
And so on. Is it real? Yes, it is real. I think about this stuff nonstop because I live in a world where published veganometry and photos of filtered organic roux inundates my guilt spectrum. How will I learn to cope when I ‘murder’ fish all summer to feed a jaded populace? Guess I’ll just have to make my way back to Brooklyn and find out.
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…missed Jacob’s previous Yukon epistolaries?
FIELD NOTES from the Cannery :
PART 1 ; PART 2 ; PART 3 ; PART 4 ; PART 5
find Jacob’s poetics from this journey and beyond on his blog,
http://howthefuckdidweenduponasteamboat.tumblr.com/
