Monotony, Kansas

Greetings from Lawrence, KS.

Lawrence holds a special place in my heart.  My wife, Megan, lived here at one point.  And Lawrence is home to the Kansas Jayhawks, a formidable basketball school that is a distinct rival to my alma mater, the UNC Tarheels.  In fact, I saw a shirt in a store window that said:  Kansas.  Home of North Carolina Basketball.  If you know your college b-ball history, you'll get that reference.  It should get under my skin, but I'm simply amused.  Two of North Carolina's greatest coaches, Dean Smith and Roy Williams, have roots as Jayhawks.

Lawrence is also home to the Free State Brewery, which kicks ass, and is worth stopping for.  I enjoyed a couple of Ad Astra ales before coming back to the motel tonight.  Lawrence is an excellent college town that is similar to Chapel Hill, so I feel at home here.

I visited a friend in Denver last night and drove 550 miles today through eastern Colorado and western Kansas.  Here's a picture.  Just imagine any place in Kansas and this is a photo of it:

I spent the day wishing a tornado would appear on the horizon to take me away to a better place or at least give me something to look at for a few minutes.  Alas, I got a couple strikes of lightning and that was it.

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When I moved to California, I drove the Southern route on I-10 with my cat, Sweetpea.  She was a royal pain in the ass, starting our cross-country voyage by puking all over my stuff and otherwise being difficult.  While I was living in LA, Sweetpea died at the age of 16.  Despite her proclivity for being a pain in the ass, I was overwhelmed with grief, and I kept her ashes.  After a while, I didn't know what to do with them, so her remains ended up in our garage.

In the moving process, I realized Sweetpea was in a canister in the garage, so I decided it was time to get some closure.  During this trip, I've slowly spread Sweetpea's remains across the West.  When I reached Bozeman, MT, I saw they were having their annual Sweetpea Festival to celebrate the blooming of a rare flower, and I knew it was fate.  I let Sweetpea's final ashes go in a beautiful spot on the Yellowstone River near the entrance to Yellowstone National Park.

I was fine until the last ashes floated onto the wind, and then, I became emotional.

Today, while I was driving through Kansas, I was listening to David Sedaris tell the story of his cat.  Like me, David was overwhelmed with grief and kept the ashes.

And like me, he wasn't sure what to do with them.  Eventually, he realized his cat hated the outdoors, so he spread the kitty's remains on the living room carpet and then vacuumed them up.

His mother wrote a check for the procedure, and at the bottom of the check, it said:

For:  Pet Burning.

I laughed so hard, tears were streaming down my face.

Again.