Over Labor Day weekend, I took off on a whim (as much of a whim as I can do, having to convince my parents to take my dog for a week, making it necessary to plan such trips ahead) and drove to South Dakota. Why South Dakota, you ask? Why not?

Originally the trip was meant to be completely unplanned, but the first two days ended up centering around the Dials/Detholz! show in Madison. After that, I started west on I-90, and I'd like to say I was meandering, but it quickly became evident that my final destination was Mt. Rushmore. I think this was my failing: the whole point of the trip was not to have a destination. Once Mt. Rushmore got into my head, the actual journey became trivial and I stopped paying attention to the details along the way to focus only on that.

Thus, this trip didn't turn out to be the grand "spiritual journey" I had intended. There was no real reflection, no epiphanies, no enlightenment, and I didn't meet my animal spirit or whatever that's supposed to be called while camping in the badlands. I did see some bison, some prairie dogs, some goats, and heard some coyotes and/or hyenas at night, but I'm pretty sure they weren't animal spirits. I'd be pretty disappointed if my animal spirit were a prairie dog anyway. Imagine me waking up in a hallucinatory trance to see, yonder on a hill (because they use words like "yonder" there), my whiskery inquisitive rodent mentor peeking out from a hole in a mound.
It would beckon me over with its begging-like paws and instantly I'd be beside it. I'd crouch down, and it would look at me with its beady little eyes and squeak, "Your journey is not over. SQUEEEAAAAAAK! Squeak, squeak, squeak!" Then it'd rush down its hole before I can reply. I'd try to follow it, but alas, this wouldn't be Alice in Wonderland. I'd wake up trying to dig into my sleeping bag.

"But, Julio," I'd say (his name would undoubtedly be Julio, and he'd spell it Julio da Prairie Dawg just to annoy me), "Oh Julio, what does it all mean?" But he'd be gone forever, and I'd have travelled one thousand miles west just for that useless piece of information.
Actually, that was pretty much the outcome. Well, okay, there was no spirit mentor in the form of a rodent, but I did travel about one thousand miles on some sort of spiritual quest only to find nothing. I don't know what I was looking for or what I expected, but the only answer or conclusion that I came to was that I'm not as impressed with man-made monuments as I am with natural formations. In fact, Mt. Rushmore raised more questions than it did answers, the main one being, "Why?" Frankly, this was not a big surprise as I think anyone who knew me could have guessed as much.
So yeah, I loved the badlands. The landscapes for that entire thirty mile stretch of road were amazing. Despite the constant presence of other tourists, the sense of desolation and vastness was just as relaxing as I'd been hoping for. In fact, it was maybe too relaxing; another reason for this trip was to get the nagging feeling that I need to move out of Chicago out of my system, when instead it had the opposite effect. As soon as I entered Wisconsin on the way back, the traffic reappeared, and along with it, the stress. I remembered how impossible it was to simply relax in this city, and wondered why I was coming back at all. Again, more questions than answers: "Why?"

More images of my trip are here, here, and here.

listening to: pink floyd
in my sink: two cups, two spoons, a plate, and one still dying plant hooked up to my faucet through an iv.