This has truly been an amazing week. I just heard from a former co-worker and good friend whom I haven’t heard from in a number of months. Now it seems like we are e-mailing each other everyday! I also just got a voice mail from a guy I used to date over ten years ago. We were pretty good about keeping in touch with each other even when he moved to the East coast with his (then) boyfriend. But you know how it is. It becomes hard to keep in touch with friends once they move out of the city. He even said in the voice message that he got my number from a letter I wrote him over five years ago. How cool is that?

I will also be packing for my ‘trip’ to po-dank, Arkansas. I think I will bring my banjo, my overalls, a flannel shirt and let’s not forget my Sunday-goin’-out-to-meeting clothes. That does NOT mean I will be going to church. My family can stuff it if they think they are dragging me inside one of those backward ass Baptist churches. I swear almost every time I go to my dad’s church they let some half-wit get behind the pulpit to testify and the next thing you know they are saying something bad about somebody. I’ve even seen them go off on their own church members. Crazy! Yes, I couldn’t think of a better time to go on a road trip than the first big holiday weekend of the year. Yeah, I’m sure the roads will be open and there won’t be any construction on the way. Hey, what was that I just saw? I do think it was a flying pig!

It looks as though my Memorial day weekend will NOT be filled with bar hopping and scoping out all the hot men in Chicago for IML (International Mr. Leather). No, I have apparently sacrificed the first true weekend of the summer season to travel with my father by automobile (how 1950s) to Pine Bluff, Arkansas. That is where my father is from and where many of his family live. I guess they are my family also even though I probably see them once every five years. Since I’m poor and my dad doesn’t like anything I buy him for his birthday I decided to do something different this year and give him my time. So I told him I would travel with him. God, what I wouldn’t do to have an extra $50 to $75 to buy him a gift! I hate going to Arkansas. It’s boring as hell! These people don’t do anything but sit around. No theatre, no concerts, no culture. There just isn’t anything to do.

As if that wasn’t bad enough my dad also wants to go to Texas to visit two of his brothers. OK, these two live on the ass end Texas near the gulf in Corpus Christi and Victoria. They don’t even have the decency to live in a real city like Dallas or Houston. I figured what the hell. The weekend is shot anyway why not go for broke. I have seen my uncles within the past five years but I haven’t seen my cousins since I was seven or eight years old. I shit you not. I wouldn’t know them from a stranger on the street and they are my first cousins. And there are a lot of them. One of my uncles has over ten kids and most of them are older than I am so there is a whole group of second and third cousins that I have not even met. Yeah, this trip should be interesting. Kinda’ makes one want to be a drug user. There is always alcohol!