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Andrew is actually not an idiot. He is probably the smartest guy I know. He graduated from Ohio State University at the same time that I did, just over two years ago, with the same degree: English Literature. We had seen a lot of each other in the department, but had stayed largely apart socially - for the first eighteen years of our lives we'd been inseperable, and by the time college rolled around it wasn't that we were sick of each other, but that we were both excited to try new things. For Andrew that meant slam poetry, pot, and jazz guitar. For me, it had mostly meant a few over-intense relationships, lots of travelling, and what some might call an obsession with my work.
It was partially that "obsession" which had landed both Andrew and I in the class of '05 together. He was a year younger than me, started at OSU a year later, but I'd spent a fifth year taking extra credits and writing an undergraduate thesis, while he had breezed through the curriculum in four years.
That thesis was shit. It looked good on paper, which is probably why I got an assistantship at the University of Washington the following year, but secretly it was shit. As much as people - mostly family - liked to categorize Andrew as the "hippie" one and me as the "clean" one, the fact is we overlap a lot more than those simplifications might imply, and while archetyping might help a family function, the truth is that despite my tidy demeanor I had - gasp! - fancied Kerouac more than a bit in college.
This is so stereotypical in retrospect that it irks me to admit it, but at the time I was, in my mind, on the knifepoint of a road-tripping literature revolution from inside my dorm room. So I spent a year traveling off and on, taking grand adventures never a day or two's drive away from home and writing a paraphrase of "On the Road" about them.
There was a contingent on the faculty of aging hippies that lapped it all up, and this mutual admiration society spawned in me the sort of affected man-of-the-world cockiness that can only be achieved by an overprivileged liberal arts major. This attitude was completely destroyed the second day out of my move across the country to Seattle for graduate school nine months after my graduation from OSU. Sleeping in your car at a rest stop wasn't the depths of privation; neither was acting homeless in Boston for a week, mostly because it was just that - an act. I had a safety net, but I pretended like I didn't. Which threw into question the validity of anything I might have to say on the subject of travel-as-discovery. By the time I got to Seattle, I was confused in a very deep way concerning how I could write anything of value from such a high position of privilege. It seemed ridiculous, suddenly.
I think Andrew had known this about himself all along, but neglected to share, and because I saw his Deadhead-like shenanigans as a sign of an obsession with pleasure over "Truth" I never asked. He lasted a semester in graduate school at Penn State, then dropped off the academic radar, started writing music and working odd jobs to stay afloat. I decided to try to change the "system" from the inside, or at least stay at my comparatively cushy TA position until I figured out what I actually wanted to change.
Regardless, when that first summer rolled around, I was sick of reading freshman writing and Andrew was sick of rolling burritos for five bucks an hour, so we took off for a few weeks. I took I-90 from Seattle, met him after a whirlwind 3-day drive to Cleveland, and we turned my ridiculous pickup truck back towards the west and hit the road.
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