You didn’t need to wait in line for Chipotle pickups.

You could just go to the front.

To the reg’.

How it felt, pulling up, was bank robber-y.

Especially on colder days when I was balaclava’d up.

Like Fuck it mask on.

I got there so quickly the order wasn’t ready yet.

So rolled a cig and posted out front, on a cement pillar.

Took in my surroundings.

There was a girl about my age, sitting across from me, also on an elevated cement thing.

Also smoking.

As I remember it, I started feeling tingles / heightened self-awareness at this point.

I remember bc I couldn’t handle how close to me she felt.

How defined her features.

Mesmerizingly so. Like once I looked, I couldn’t look away.

How I was convinced she thought it weird I’d sat across from her, on such a similar perch.

Like it was too symmetrical, how we were sitting.

Dishonestly symmetrical.

Disrespectfully ordered.

Disrespectful to the Chaos.

Of the city; of the World.

Everything quiet of a sudden.

Pin-drop-y.

Which seemed strange.

Bc cities are loud.

A year after my walk I moved to North Oakland / Berkeley / Emeryville—on the intersecting intersection—with ex bae.

With ex bae’s cat, even though I was allergic.

Working on my Walk Book. About my failed walk.

V went to Senegal.

To join his mom on a cob-house-building mission that was Christian missionary–like even though it wasn’t.

To bike across, from site to site, eventually to Cabo Verde, on Africa’s western coast.

It was the Walk Book 2.0.

One-thousand-point-O.

Actual otherworldly exploration/investigation.

No septic.

Poop fields/shores.

No lights at night.

Muhfuckers out here slanging kerosene.

Real world shit every self-hating woke American would do well by acquainting themselves with. That self-hating woke Americans didn’t have a clue about.

Which fact made his record—blog posts, unlike mine with pictures and less pretentious, if written/inspired by my initial 165K-word Walk Book draft, which he was reading and would read in its entirety while writing/biking—infinitely more important.

Which cast my project as an inefficiently paced view of what any road-tripper could get driving to Bonnaroo: rest areas, highways, trash-strewn shoulders.

And all this to say nothing of the writing.

Reading his posts as posted, sitting in my NOBE studio, railing Benadryls, getting progressively less attractive to ex bae due to domestic overexposure, I was rapt.

Heart beating.

Palms sweating.

His syntax was different.

Sentences shorter.

Pacing effortless.

No theories of writing grafted onto the recounted events.

Flowing in a way in spite of, or maybe even more so due to, typos.

The sense of it being a living record of someone genuinely trying to share about totally new and novel events so apparent in the writing.

Not obstructed by anything technical.

Like mine, I was forced to admit, just like V had said, had been.