Disappointment is the fact that Alaska Air doesn’t fly to Tasmania. Minor disappointment, anyway. Over in a few moments. Next is the possibility of Titusville, but Florida isn’t compelling enough. It’s the place at the end of a cross-country walk, ride, or drive, not the destination. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of space work these days. Have to wonder what’s left to see. Unfamiliar beaches facing East, stretches of humidity. I’d feel drawn to a woman or two, but not enough to make the effort.

Feels like it ought to be far enough away. Hard to tell unless it’s across an ocean, which is the next far enough.

Christmas is locked in. I’ve marked it as the family time of year. Right around that day. No more than a week, and if a week, including plans to drive out a ways in a borrowed pick-up truck. Out into the desert in those cold months. That’s a path what’s been trod before, but that was then. I hear now lots of places out away from cities are more barren than ever. Just quiet sorts of visits. Lots of fences where there used to be open land.

The jailbait I saw for a while recommended a knife for my travels. She worried too much and spoke little before I knew they were signs that it will not work. I told her she shouldn’t believe the movies, though the only movie that came to mind was Easy Rider. She wasn’t the type to watch that, and I wasn’t the type in the film. I associate her ways and preferences with flowers and flower-related activities. Our most memorable pillow talk was a story we concocted about the future. She was a single mother with a couple of kids out on a front porch in Georgia or some place. I was the road-weary visitor whose relation to the family went unspoken. There and gone again. It was a fantasy then and it’s an amusing thought now.

Now I know that I don’t go to visit any person except my parents and brothers, and only because they covered twenty-some years of my life. There is a debt there that cannot be repaid.

There’ll be a decision. Closer to the date of travel and more costly than it might have been. The rigmarole of considering places is just wistful fantasy, like flipping through an issue of National Geographic.