500 Miles Is a Real Long Drive Inside a Car

I'm exaggerating, of course. It's really only 462 miles from Bethesda, MD to Yellow Springs, OH, and even with a lot of stops, it takes less than eight hours to make the trip. It's still a lot of driving, though, especially when you do it there on Saturday afternoon/evening and back on Monday afternoon/evening. The things I'll do to get a day off.

There were no sexual escapades on this trip. I had sent out some feelers and had arranged a meeting with a married guy who was very eager to bottom for the first time and who, in exchange, was going to provide my introduction to 420 (yes, yes, very sheltered life here: whatever), but it turns out that your rural Midwestern married man is every bit as unreliable as your suburban Eastern married man. I was fairly disappointed about the weed, though not so much about the sex: virgins are generally more trouble than they're worth. Playing with them is the sort of thing that you do because somebody has to do it, but the benefits from your actions generally accrue to other people.

The lack of sex (unless we're counting all that very fun masturbation) notwithstanding, it was a terrific weekend. I had the opportunity to experience boredom for the first time in recent memory, and, friends, it was sweet. I got to sleep a lot, and I got to spend some time in a very nice (and extremely hippy: I saw as much tie dye walking around the streets as you'll see on the racks of the Haight-Ashbury tourist shops) small town. I got to know the school where EFU might spend the next four years and to satisfy myself that it would be a great place for her (ultimately, though, it's her decision, so I absented myself from most of the parent activities: they seemed like a lot of unnecessary marketing to me).

Most of all, I got to spend a lot of time with my daughter. She spent Sunday night in the dorms, so she was up until 3 am and slept for about half of the drive back, but we still had the drive there, and we hiked to the yellow springs (they're really more of an orange), and we talked a lot. It was a good reminder that there are things that are more important to me than sex. Like my children and... Well, there's one thing more important to me than sex, anyway.

By the way, if you ever find yourself in Springfield, Ohio on a Sunday evening and decide that you're going to check out the bar scene, do yourself a favor and stay in your room and drink instead. It's a pretty good bet that if I walk into a bar and the bartender says "Hi, kid," it's not a happening place. On the other hand, both he and the other customer there were probably old enough to be my father, so you have to give him points for accuracy.