This is a long drive for someone with nothing to think about

Every time I come back to where I grew up, my friend's group has a show (if it's hip-hop, does group supplant band?) and I always some of those people who've known me for almost two decades now and others with whom I shared the unenviable task of trying to negotiate teenagerdom.
And inevitably it makes me feel sad. Yeah, sad, that three letter word, devoid of meaning in certain contexts and always connoting gray rainy cumulous clouds for me - I guess it's the tangible sense of how much is lost no matter where you are or what you're doing.
I traveled eight hundred miles in the past two days, past the Pintlar Range, the Tobacco Roots, the Sapphires, the Crazy Mountains, the Gallatins, the Beartooths, the Absarokees, the Black Hills, the Badlands, and the wide open blue skied praries on which I cut my existential teeth. I went from the mountains where I spent the last two years to my current home, where I spent a night and looked ponderously on lightning bugs. I don't mean to insinuate that I am Nature Boy Ric Flair, b/c thirteen of the last forty eight hours I've spent locked and loaded in the front seat of a fairly dangerous vehicle, the Ford Explorer Sport, with which I've murdered a grouse, a moose, and innumerable prarie dogs. Murder not being predicated on intent, though perhaps I should say homicide or animalslaughter instead.
Road food is fast food, which indiscriminately assails parts of my GI tract in ways I'm not sure I can adequately describe. There is no vomiting or diarrhea, just this dullened sense of things not right, chemical imbalance or what have you.
Traveling, I love, even though it continually reminds me of having started something new and left something behind. The starting usually means solitude - leaving a girl or a place or a routine that for whatever reason slanted to the particular pitch of my perspective, which having left it, takes on a glossy nostalgic sheen.
I may not know what I'm talking about - I left the camera again - one of my dear friend's husband, (and i do not use "dear" with lower-case or upper-case irony) gave me his old digital camera almost a year ago, only requiring me to get a new battery. I have yet to do that. The husband I also count as a dear friend, and it is strange how we accumulate people we care about haphazardly, almost without trying. By we I mean me. I always mean me by we, unless otherwise stated.
i am here in the house alone. the parents are off in VA, a state I have visited twice but have not yet fathomed. it is late. i am traveling again on Sunday. Incidentally, i bought an audio disc of On the Road, read by Matt Dillon. I am undecided - Kerouac doesn't always hold up against further inquiry, but it's hard (for me) not to be swayed by his depictions of acquaintances and unbidden collisions with all types of people. Anyway. Sleep well.