Well, damn, it's been a few days, no?

And here it is 5 p.m. and I'm just getting around to updating now. It's been a busy day today, and I haven't even read any diaries yet. But before I entertain myself, I decided you deserved your shot o' Dano.

[Cough.]

[Crickets chirp.]

OK, so nobody cares. Anyway, on with the show.

Actually, I could've updated easily yesterday, but my dad wanted me to burn him some Springsteen CDs. He and mom went to the concert on Tuesday at Giants Stadium, and I called them in disbelief on Wednesday when I read that he played "Rosalita," which he rarely plays, but has been doing so more often lately, so there's hope when I go to the final show on Aug. 30. The only reason my parents were at the show was because I got the tickets. When they went on sale, I got myself three for Tuesday night because Casey, Dave and I wanted to go and I figured it'd be best to get them for the first night, suspecting just such a thing as "Rosalita" might happen. But when shows were added and Mom said she wanted me to get some for them, I got four for the 30th, which is a Saturday and therefore easier for Casey and me to make, since we're not school teachers with the summer off. So they took the Tuesday tickets and a friend, and we'll go at the end of the summer with Dave and someone else. Hopefully we'll get some rare tunes too.

So I spent most of yesterday � a slow day at work � burning CDs and printing out the track listings. I've still got some CDs for this weekend to burn, for the barbecue, but I'll have to do that tomorrow.

I also got my haircut yesterday, which included the usual empty Korean barber shop, except that this time there was a trainee. At least that's what I assume the other man was doing while he stood behind my barber while I got my hair cut and the barber turned to him occassionally and said something in Korean while pointing to my head. The worst part was his choice of clothes: a vertically striped polo shirt with maroon, mustard, dark green and navy lines and pants that at first I thought were navy blue, which would've been fine. But in looking in the mirror at one point, I noticed that they were navy blue ... with a dark green plaid pattern!!! Even I know how wrong that is. My god, I could see the evidence in the mirror in front of me!

So that's about it. Last night one of Casey's coworkers came over for dinner and we had homemade white pizza and then watched Back To The Future and BTTF Part II on Starz! It's been a while since I've seen those movies without "shit" overdubbed. And we went onto IMDB.com to look at the various trivia for the films. Even more interesting was when Ann asked me to look up the trivia for Nine To Five, which notes the eerie coincidence of a shot of a TWA flight taking off in the movie is the same jet that, in 1996, was Flight 800 that exploded off the coast of Long Island. And we were just talking about Flight 800 at dinner earlier that evening.

As for my five-year anniversary road trip recap, I'm not paying attention to the dates very well, because today's the 17th, and I should've written yesterday about July 16, 1998:

El Paso to Silver City

In New Mexico, I felt I'd truly entered the West. The air was dry and the land dusty. I smelled the desert for the first time � the sagebrush, the yucca. I saw a roadrunner and tumbleweed. I climbed mountains in my car and felt it struggle up the steep grades.

The old-time center of Silver City is quiant and old-West and enjoyable. The outskirts, in some places, felt poor and destitute. Indeed, as cousin Christine explained, the state has trouble with poverty in many areas.

Chris and Jon have since moved to Tucson, and I'm glad I got to New Mexico while they were there. The old Main Street storefronts of Pinos Altos are the quintessential relics of a former gold rush town. It's not far from Silver City and, therefore, still inhabited. But when I took a trip up to Mogollon, I saw more of a deserted town. A few dozen people � "artist types" � still live there, but it's about 45 minutes from the nearest outpost, making trips to the grocery store a once-every-two-weeks kind of errand; there are no such things as "a quick run to the store."

I was fascinated by the ritual I became a part of on the road: along the long two-lane highway north from Silver City, the drivers I passed (usually ranchers in their American-made pickups) would wave, even at me in my Jersey-registered Volvo station wagon. The first couple of times it happened on the open road, I was behind another car and figured the wave was for the driver in front of me. But when it happened out in the open to me, I realized it was simple kindness, an acknowlegement of our common presence in remote western New Mexico. It's not unlike the signals truckers use on the interstates to signal another truck � or a car � that it is safe to move into their lane in front of them by flashing their headlights, night or day. The vehicle that then moves over responds with its hazard lights in return. It's the kinship of the road that brings these rituals to life.

I suspect that over these five years I've declared every part of my trip to be my "favorite part" or "favorite stop." Since that, technically, cannot be true � they can't all be my favorite, by definition � I suppose there was something unique and special about each destination that made it worthwhile to include when I looked back on it all after it was over. The thing about New Mexico was the crystal blue sky I saw every day and hiked under so often. Because Chris and Jon worked and Pablo and Julia were looked after during the days, I was on my own so that the afternoons were spent exploring different parts of southwest New Mexico while the evenings were spent having dinner with family. I hiked up to hidden cliff dwellings, explored a canyon where it was said Butch Cassidy and his gang once hid, looked across the lowlands from atop a plateau, meandered through the pine forests and explored both a former mining town tucked into a mountain and rock formations standing in the desert.

I truly felt Away.