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2006-04-23 - 3:48 p.m. I only thought of you once in the past month, and that was Friday afternoon/night. As usually happens, I wound up driving in a random direction, my head hanging out the window because in eighty degree weather I happen to be wearing all black. Ten minutes down the road I see a hitchhiker going the opposite way from where I'm driving. Immediately I take the first chance I get to turn around, and pull up beside him. "Need a ride?" After we've gotten all the formalities out of the way, like his name being David and mine being Matt, I ask him what kind of music he likes, and reach in my center console for some of my mixes. "Heavy metal," he replies. "Metal and rock and maybe a little bit of trance. Pretty much anything except country, rap, pop, or that shit they call 'emo'." I look down at the mixes in my hand, and slowly put them back, "Tell you what, do you have any cds on you that you wanna put in?" He's almost 21, and is probably one of those kids that got picked on a lot in school. I'm wearing all black because I randomly pick clothes from out of my 'clean or near-clean' pile. He's wearing all black because he has a thing for the macabre. He has a disposable camera in his pocket that he takes out whenever we pass something interesting. Something interesting, in his mind, means graveyards. I ask him where he's going, and he tells me highway 80. Highway 80? I don't know where that is, mind telling me how far it is? He thinks it's just a couple miles down, at milemarker 313. We're at 311. Two miles pass and, as I suspected, there's no highways around here that I haven't travelled yet. Eventually it dawns on me where he means.. I-80. The one seventy miles north of where he thought it was. It might lie on milemarker 313, but set in another state. Across that border is Laramie Wyoming, not a place I particularly want to go. He asks me if I've ever heard of a site called "myspace", and I grin and reply in the affirmative. He tells me that he's on there, and how he can't understand the people who collect thousands of 'friends'. I tell him I want to make an account, get ten thousand friends, and post a bulletin asking each of them for five bucks. He rode the greyhound from California to Illinois, to meet a friend. But she blew him off. I don't ask whether this friend is someone he met off of myspace, because I already know the truth. He left on Monday, got to Illinois on Wednesday, turned around and has hitched to Colorado by Friday. Week-long adventures are the best kind. I tell him I can't take him all the way to the 80, but I'll drive him to Fort Collins. It's a good college town, and he can meet some nice people while waiting for somebody else to pick him up. I only thought of you once in the past month, and that was Friday afternoon/night. Because you have a thing for boys like me, but only when we pick up hitchhikers.

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