Kanab, Utah

Leo and I are at a Super 8 in Kanab, Utah. God, this is truly the middle of nowhere. Someone mentioned to me today that perhaps I shouldn’t give away my exact location every night, lest some crazy stalker try to come after me. But you know what? If you’re willing to drive all the way to Kanab, Utah just to rape me, you’ve earned it, buddy.

I woke up this morning with seventeen bug bites of indeterminate origin. This is not typical Beet hyperbole. There are actually seventeen bites. I counted twice. And they are all on the left side of my body, except for two which are on my right ass-cheek. I do not wish to discuss my bug bites further.

The drive from Twin Falls to Salt Lake was uneventful, except for the consumption of a Whopper, which was exciting. I got off the freeway and drove around Salt Lake City for awhile. I think I was expecting everyone to look like they just walked off the set of Big Love. This is not the case. There are actual bad neighborhoods in Salt Lake, populated by actual poor people who look like poor people. And there are liquor stores and porn shops and all the normal things you find in normal cities. There are, however, lots of billboards advertising DVDs I’ve never heard of and which I assume are related to Mormonism.

Once you drive south of Salt Lake and into Provo, the home of Brigham Young University, the scenery changes a little, and I got the Mormon inundation I expected. It didn’t take long, though, before I was back in the middle of nowhere. Seriously, south of Provo, there is basically nothing at all in the rest of Utah. The occasional farm, but even that’s rare. During the next four hours, I came to a stunning (and not at all based on facts) conclusion: we are only using about 10% of Utah. In fact, this journey so far has helped me really internalize the fact that the overwhelming majority of this enormous country is just vast stretches of perfectly good natural resources going totally untapped. So someone is going to have to explain to me, using small words, why we are so concerned with preserving our natural resources, as though they’re going to run out any second. Like, why do I have to recycle again? We still have all of Utah. Don’t get your hopes up, schoolchildren of America: this country is not running out of paper any time soon. I’m sure there’s something huge and important that I’m missing here, but to me it just seems like we have plenty of trees right now.

I did stop in Beaver, Utah. I even took a picture of the sign for you guys. Unfortunately, I got a better shot of the dead bugs on my windshield than of the sign, but whatever. Still funny.

But something wonderful happened in Beaver. (Heh.) I finally surrendered. I ordered satellite radio. I just could not go on listening to the eight CDs I still own. It’s not that Lindsay Lohan’s A Little More Personal isn’t a brilliant musical anatomy of a break-up, it’s just that you can only listen to it so many times before you want to call her agent and leave a message like “Did she realize she was talking about Wilmer Valderrama?” Oh, and I discovered Jewel’s Pieces of You deep inside my CD case. Oh my God! That album is awful. I mean, embarrassingly horrid. Cringeworthy. I remember adoring it when I was 12, thinking it was all so deep. But I listened to it today for the first time in many, many years, and I was like “Man, if I were Jewel today, I’d be really, really embarrassed about this.” It’s like if someone were to release a book of the poetry I wrote in eighth grade. I’d move to a different country. Jewel should do that. Seriously. I’m embarrassed for her.

Anyway, back to satellite radio. I broke down and ordered it in Beaver. I got Sirius in Beaver. Heh heh heh. I just called them up from a rest stop and ordered it sent straight to my car radio. I don’t know why I held out so long. I’m fully a convert. A True Believer. Even in the parts of this country where you can’t get a cell phone signal, you can still listen to the ’80s Hits station crystal clear. And they played songs I hadn’t heard in ages. And no commercials. It was amazing. I highly recommend you all get satellite radio. I’m never going back.

At Beaver I had the choice of getting on I-15 and taking the route to Phoenix through Las Vegas, or taking US-89, a little one-lane highway, down to northern Arizona. They’re about equidistant, but I opted with the latter, because I didn’t want to pay Vegas hotel rates on a Saturday night, and I didn’t want to deal with Sunday afternoon traffic back from Vegas tomorrow. US-89 is basically deserted, but occasionally dotted with little towns that look like the fictional Hull, Idaho that Lindsay Lohan inhabited in Georgia Rule. I realized that was what I had been looking for this whole trip: a little town that looks like Hull, Idaho. I found like five of them on US-89. Adorableness.

So Leo and I have settled in Kanab, where we’re going to watch some TV and pray that we don’t get any more bug bites.