Before I acknowledge the tinyness of myself, my travel companions, and the park, we walk the cholla cactus trail. The cholla are the first locals we encounter on our trip through Joshua Tree.

I have to mention the holiness of these plants as well. When walking through a forest, you brush up against plants all the time. But this is not the forest, and these plants demand respect.

Look but don’t touch.

Walk slowly.

We drive on, leaving behind the cholla, and getting closer to my discovery of tinyness. After more space, we come upon fields of rocks. We can walk among them.

And climb among them.

We can stand and sit on them.

It’s the rocks that make me re-remember how tiny I am.

Not only am I tiny. Everyone is tiny.

Dan is in the next one too, look close.

Dan is hypothetically in the next 2 images. (This one from the Orange County Register)

(next image from NASA’s Visible Earth)

The rocks offer me anamnesis of scale, and allow us to play on top of them. But in exchange they demand a respect very different from the cholla cactus. A respect not so different from a wet city sidewalk. We must be careful with where we place ourselves, or else our selves get stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Or between two rocks, in this case.

But we’re careful, and today no one gets stuck between any rocks or hard places.

Here is Dan at the breakfast table:

Sara, pondering her soon-to-be-cut hair.

And Kevin reaching for his soon-to-be-shoed foot.

I have returned from tour with Cheese On Bread, which held in store anything and everything one could possibly imagine. There is a small store of pictures which show off mostly our days off, they were taken by Matt.

Once getting back to New York, I felt pretty good to be home. The next day, I got pretty depressed though. I’ve never spent so much time with one set of people, and I immediately began to miss them all. It was quite depressing. One day Dan and I ran into each other, and we pretended to run important errands (went to KMart and bought razor blades). Afterwards, we sat on a park bench and wondered how we would ever go back to our normal lives. We wrote a comic book about the first week of tour. I guess that was a good way to handle it.

Since then, I’ve recovered, but I still miss everyone terribly. I think I’ll be going to Philadelphia next week to visit the Philly Cheese On Bread crew, and Friday I’m going to stop by Emandee studios, where the Bloodsugars are recording.

In less than two weeks, I’m going to be back at work, being bored and looking for things to read onlin. Yikes!