Ravie and the Road
One car. Two people. Thirty days to see if the road would bring us closer or pull us apart.
The Route
Google Maps estimated the drive would take around 62 hours, covering close to 4,000 miles.
We got a start, it wasn't early and it wasn't late.
Left ole P-Land in the rearview.
This trip was a first for Nicole and me and it sure as hell will be good test since we’ve only known each other for five months and now we were about to cram our sorry asses into the tin can of Ravie for a whole month. Thirty days of close quarters, trapped in a metal rats nest and breathing one another's stinky-ass morning breathe. You never really know a person until you see what kind of strange beast they turn into after midnight.
I was excited to see how Nicole would fare wild camping as camping for Nicole meant rolling up to an organized campground with neatly numbered plots, bathrooms with hot showers, a quaint little restaurant, a mini market selling fresh bread, croissants and cold wine, music every night for the kids along with a schedule of activities throughout the day. The kind of place where your neighbor is just a snot-rocket away.
But for me, camping meant pulling off a dusty forest road miles from town, pitching a tent, casting weak ass beams of light from battery powered flashlights, cooking dinner over an open flame and digging a hole when nature called. No outlets. No espresso machines. Nobody within eyesight. Just you, your giant shitty flashlight and the rustle of the leaves.
Before I got the chance to see Nicole take her first shit in the woods, adventure struck via a bolt of philosophical parley. I threw on a podcast, JRE Episode #2152 featuring Terrence Howard, a famous actor, thinking it would be an easy listener for the drive since Nicole magically drifted off in the passenger seat. Instead, it veered into the deep end with a slippery disscussion I could barely keep up with. Terrence spoke with a prophet’s certainty about gravity, consciousness, and the hidden architecture of reality. I kept having to replay sections and took about 400 screenshots of places i wanted to go back and listen to again.
In summary, he described what he calls the “Wave Periodic Table”, claiming the standard periodic table is incomplete because it’s based on particle theory, (seeing atoms as solid “balls” of matter) instead of in waves, interconnected vibrations moving in predictable, harmonic patterns.
He argued that atoms interact through vibrational relationships, like notes in a musical scale, with more resonance and less randomness which he says better explains molecular bonding, gravity, and consciousness than current models do.
He created 3D models to illustrate his ideas, constantly telling Jamie, Joe’s assistant, to pull them up, (jamie pull that up). Through these visuals, he argued that geometry and vibration are the true language of the universe.
To someone dumb like me, having only an elemetry understanding of mathematics, i keep thinking “these ideas challenge the foundations of how the universe works, how in the fuck is this not been addressed yet”?
Joe was on the same page: “you need to sit down with someone who actually understands this stuff and have a debate.”
That conversation did happened on JRE Episode #2171, when Joe brought in Eric Weinstein, a mathematician and physicist, to push through the layers of Howard’s ideas.
All this swimming in the deep end of the metaphysical inevitably dragged me back into my ever-bubbling hot tub of existential dread, a mental prison where I spend my time rattling my tin cup against the bars, waiting for the breakfast gruel of meaning.
So, in a desperate bid for fresh air or maybe just a distraction, I decided to wake Nicole’s ass up for a pit stop, though "wind stop" would’ve been more accurate. We ended up taking refuge behind some well built shitters after a wrapper flew out of Nicole’s hand like it was rigged to one of unka Elon’s SpaceX prototypes.
It was time to find camp for the night so i turned to thee trusty ioverlander, website/app, an invaluable tool to scout everything from potable water sources, mechanics, places for giant RV’s to unload their 30 pound shit containers and most important of all: free camping spots.
I’d been using it for years. Entirely free to use, iOverlander is an assembly of real-time updates, reviews, and GPS coordinates shared by a community of travelers. That said, it’s always a bit of a gamble. Some locations may already be occupied when you arrive, others might sit right next to a noisy highway and some filled with empty shotgun shells and broken glass. But then there are free gems, like this, where we spent our first night.
that is, until we stepped outside and got piss-pounded by the wind. I put ‘er in reverse and backed into this spot right behind it..
It was our first night, not just heating up left over apple pie and burning a sick-ass cat clothing rack, but embarking on a whole new life.
A full send.
The chemistry between us felt ancient and cosmic, like we’d known each other in another life, but the reality was that we’d known each other for five months.
Five.
Two of which were long-distance and the other three were swallowed by the frenzy of planning, selling things off, saying goodbyes, figuring out how to pack two lives into a Rav 4. When you're in motion like that, it's easy to feel in sync, and top it off with a scoop of hot and steamy honeymoon-phase-sex and you’ve got yourself a ride!
But once the dust settles, once there’s space to breathe and routines start to take shape, the question isn’t just who are we, it’s who are we, now that everything’s quiet?
And that’s the beauty of the leap: you never know, never will.
But maybe that’s the point.
It brings me back to an Alan Watt quote...
“Let's suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream that you wanted to dream. And that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time. Or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say "Well, that was pretty great." But now let's have a surprise. Let's have a dream which isn't under control. Where something is gonna happen to me that I don't know what it's going to be. And you would dig that and come out of that and say "Wow, that was a close shave, wasn't it?" And then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream ... where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today.”
And here we are
Living the dream we didn’t plan and only makes sense in reverse.
SO MIGHT AS WELL BREAK SOME ROCKS
eat tacos, stoke the fire and be dat light baby
