I've had my moments of man tears, of course, those annoying tears men try to hide during The Wrath of Khan when Spock is dying or when Brian Piccolo (as played by James Caan, of course, not Sean Mayer) gives his farewell soliloquy to Gale Sayers (Billy Dee Williams) in Brian's Song.
These are not those kind of tears.
I'm crying so hard, the tears streaming into my Wiley X Jake glasses, the mucous draining into my motorcycle helmet's face mask, that I consider turning off, far too early into the ride to Hagerstown, Maryland, a mere 130-ish miles towards the destination, 40 shy of an acceptable iteration.
I had grown tired of my standard XM radio station choices, 1st Wave, Lithium, Octane and Alt Nation, cycling through the same playlists regurgitated across the entire country. Not everything is synth pop, grunge, raging against the machine and weekend vampires.
Instead I decided to sample a wider variety.
I landed on a classical station, not the light, breezy classical pop of Vivaldi; rather the heavy piano of Rachmaninoff, all Bolshoi and Russian revolution, entirely inappropriate for a trip across the east coast.
I was looking for something more apropos, I wasn't sure - maybe Lynyrd Skynyrd-ish. I hit the channel previous to the 1st Wave, the Bridge, XM32, playing classic Fleetwood Mac. I hovered on the tuning button, decided to stick there. Next up on the Bridge, Cat Stevens. Eh.... Okay, the Bridge hadn't lost me, yet. Close. But not yet. I almost gave up when Neil Young began. I like Neil Young. But so far the Bridge's only discernible characteristic happened to be lead singers who somewhat sound like goats.
Then, the Band came on, playing The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. I can't count the number of Confederate Flags I've seen along the highways since I crossed into Georgia but several, very large.
I decided to stay on the Bridge for awhile (believe me, it is difficult for me not to use Star Trek puns here), and came to understand that this channel occupies the mellow, classic rock, smarmy, sentimental spectrum of the XM bandwidth, a rich cacophony of musical schmaltz, every word of which I could sing, loudly and poorly, from Steely Dan, to Paul Simon, to James Taylor, to Carly Simon, to Supertramp, to Elton John, to Billy Joel... Awful and wonderful, all at once, my bygone youth.
My XM tuning thumb, my left, was happily tucked away, gripping the handlebar, when one of the smarmiest, unctuous, fawning tunes ever recorded slithered onto the Bridge, John Denver's Take Me Home Country Roads. Usually, when I hear something by John Denver, or Yanni, my hearing simply shuts down, white noise, unable to distinguish that from the farting noise spitting from my mouth.
This time, however... I feel my stomach turning, my eyes are watering, my nose draining. What the hell? Three lyrics into it and I'm blubbering. I decide to pull into a gas station near Marion, Virginia to compose myself, get a diet Coke. I pull into a space next to a green car, pull off my helmet, wipe angrily at my eyes and my nose, and the passenger, a boy, a preteen, turns to his mother and says something I'm convinced is not flattering. I turn away.
Goddamn John Denver.
The heat and palm trees of Florida have given way to the rolling hills that began in Georgia and that are rollier here, especially in Virginia, and I'm traveling fast through the states, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, now Maryland, at a Courtyard Marriott in Hagerstown.
It took me longer than I wanted to get here but I had to stop at a Best Buy in Harrisonburg, Virginia, to buy a Samsung Chromebook, my Mac Air having lost its file system and quite possibly all of my videos from the trip.
Tomorrow, depending on how I feel, I'm deviating slightly from my original travel plan based on a book I read at the AirBnB house I stayed at last night.
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