Home to Amarillo

Home. The one place Mark never belonged, yet the one place he seemed to always be headed.

Mark was a young human, but an old animal, in general terms. He had already outlived many of the cats and dogs he had known when he was doing most of his growing. And Mark didn't like that place, the place where he did most of his growing. It was Happy and it was Colorful and to Mark, it was Fake and it was Hell. It was a place in Texas called Amarillo.

On one of many treks home to that place in Texas called Amarillo, Mark was walking a stretch of the 40, not even bothering to stick out his thumb. See, Mark was used to hitchhiking. One could even venture to call him a Pro.

Hitchhiking is when a person who has no means of transportation, mooches off of others means of transportation, in hopes of getting from point A to point B without having to actually pay for anything.

But this day, this hour, this minute, this second, Mark just wasn't feeling it. Stuffed full of sand and water and sun, he felt like he needed to walk it off. Whatever it was. His thoughts of his home, whatever that was. His thoughts of his family, whoever they were. His thoughts of himself, whoever he was. The same questions always haunted him on his way towards home. His mind got clouded, his emotions got emotional. Home was one fucked up concept that he never seemed to grasp.

A lot of human Americans think of a home as a place where they live with something they call a family. A family is supposed to be a group of people who are genetically connected to one another, and who, by default, love one another. However, many human Americans never find exactly what they want, so they end up angry with those in their family for not being what they are supposed to be. People tend to think they are supposed to be Happy.

The hot Arizona sun shone against Mark's bare back, leaving him red and restless. His bag, if you could call it that, was dissolving from so many miles of being dragged across the cracked eggshell of the desert. Out loud, mark posed a question to a cactus about ten feet away: "Who ever could have seen this land and thought 'hey, we should all move out here'? What the hell were they thinking"? Mark asked himself that question a lot. "what the hell were they thinking", or "what the hell was I thinking", or sometimes "what the hell is thinking anyway"?

That's why I like Mark, because he thinks about thinking. But I made Mark be from Texas, and being from Texas, people who aren't from Texas expect that Mark knows a lot less than them. But really, Mark is a lot smarter than many of those people who aren't from Texas because he is able to think about thinking.

Mark walked like that for a while, thinking and talking to cacti and to himself. Just walking along the barren highway, that was neither high nor a way to anywhere that Mark felt was worth being. He came upon a rest stop, so he stopped and he rested.

A rest stop is a place where people who have means of transportation, and use those means of transportation to travel long distances, can stop and use a toilet, or sit on a bench that is not moving, or breathe some air that is not blowing.

At the rest stop, Mark saw a woman and her children who were enjoying the benches that were not moving and the air that was not blowing, and Mark was jealous. He wanted to be one of those children enjoying things that were and were not moving and shining and blowing and being. Mark found that he didn't enjoy much of anything anymore.

When he was doing his growing he had a cat. But the cat did all of it's growing and dying much faster than Mark, and now the cat is in Kitty Heaven, a place where it can play with balls of string and eat catnip all day and chase as many dogs as it pleases. The cat enjoys Kitty Heaven.

But Mark forgot about his cat and thought about the children. He found that he wanted to be a child again, and he didn't want to be a young human man anymore.

Mark believed in Reincarnation. Reincarnation is the belief that when a human person dies, he or she or it will be reborn into the world as another human person or another animal.

Mark left his rest stop, and the children, and the female human, and the benches that weren’t moving, and the air that wasn't blowing and he walked and walked and walked. He kept asking the cacti where all the trucks were. "Where are the trucks"?

Trucks are big ugly metal boxes that are filled and filled with everything that human people think they need. These big metal boxes are on wheels and they travel long distances. The people who drive them often stop at rest stops.

Suddenly, Mark heard a truck. Mark jumped in front of the truck. Mark was killed.

But he was instantly reborn into a family that lived in a place in Texas called Amarillo. His mother was a Beauty Queen, his father owned a Hotel. Mark was renamed James. James was a happy child. He grew to be a happy young human. He believed that his family was what most human Americans want their families to be.

James never learned how to Hitchhike, and he never left his Home of Amarillo.