Recently I have been getting daily emails from Dropbox telling me I have run out of space. I completely forgot I even had one. I LOGGED IN and discovered I haven’t touched it in almost five years. Well there sure is a bunch of trash in there. Most of it is just stuff from my phone, maybe 75% of which are pictures from back in 2013 when I was driving across the desert from Texas to California to get to Oakland. Whoa. I’d need to sift through it all to get to the good stuff . . . not because there’s so much good stuff to choose from, but because there are only three or four good pictures hidden within what I believe are thousands of bad and meaningless ones.

In SOARING THROUGH THE PAST, one thing is abundantly clear to me, which is that I used to be even more of a honkey turd than I am now. I’m much worse in other ways now, but I don’t know . . . who is this guy? is a thing I keep asking myself. What did he want? Or think would happen? It sickens me to ask those questions of myself, the living Ryan, who is me, and who is in some sense responsible for that dead Ryan, but maybe not.

Like, man, this is from atop some huge hill in the wastes of Arizona about a hundred miles from Phoenix:

Gross! I mean, to be fair, I was just recreating that picture of A YOUNG HUNTER S. THOMPSON, seen here:

. . . but still, I don’t know, what a fucking dork, man. Those stupid sunglasses. God. Maybe I’m the exact same person. That’s horrifying.

That trip was so good though. I had to pay like $100 extra to get a U-haul with three seats so that my friend Jason could come along . . . and we were crammed in there with a cooler and a bunch of SNACKS and we were just ripping through the darkness at 90 mph smoking spliffs (lol) and god knows what else!! And we knew that when we finally got to where we were going, we could stay there, and it would be in California, which was where we wanted to be, and on and on. Man, I was so excited. I think that’s the last time I was ever excited about something. Whoops!

OK, well, anyway: I’ll go through these. I don’t think anyone has ever seen them. I don’t think I ever even saw them. Like I said, I didn’t even know they existed anymore. Whoa. Well, hey.