I'm about to go to bed. It's 4:23am. I've been up late playing a video game (Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King). It's been an addictive diversion since we bought it a couple of days ago.

I dread going to sleep. When I wake up, it'll be to leave. I don't want to hit the road again. I don't want to drive a truck. I want to stay home in Kings Mountain and have a life. Whenever we come home I always feel like we're visiting someone else's life; like we don't live here. It doesn't help that we've done nothing to the house since Loretta died. We're just wasting time, a week at a time. Six weeks at a time. Our lives are slipping away from us, and the only thing that we have to prove that we were here are our fucking drivers logs. I've often joked with Mara that when I die she'll have to finish my driver log and carry the line over to “off duty, not driving.”

I'm feeling old. A lot of time has gotten by me. I'm all too aware of how easily another 10 or 20 years could get by me, and I could still be sitting there in that seat, staring out of that windshield, and scheming about how one day I'll finish writing that book, and one day I'll actually draw again.

I'm not looking forward to waking up. It'll mean returning to the nightmare. At least when I'm home and when I'm sleeping, I can pretend that there's more to my life than the next 600 miles.