Oklahoma Dirt

The mix of tarragon and chile is an acrid taste. It’s a bitter pinch on the back of my tongue. It’s a rare culinary theme, but it’s not unusual for me to be out and find it on my plate every three months or so. Such are the triggers of my life. Songs of conversion: notes kneading my staid irritability into longing and regret. It’s the petulantly flirtatious  scent of an old cologne on a well-coifed, overweight man mobiously twisting the contours of my thoughts, returning me to pubescent desire.

Tarragon and chile. Tastes like Oklahoma dirt. And all the miles and days between me and that American Center of Mass collapse. Nothing else does it. Not a photo of the plains. Not an email from an old friend. Not driving across I-40. Tarragon, chile, and the biting clench of Ogallalan clay, and I’m twenty years old again, hitchhiking away from my Miami troubles.

There’s nothing so inconvenient as to need a ride out of a place you have no desire to be by a man with a camper trailer. A man, traveling alone with a camper trailer, is a man bound by nothing. He is less predictable than the unkempt thumb-out on the side of the road. And that was me. I couldn’t have cared whether I ended up in Maine or Tijuana. But a man with a trailer, well shit, that’s a man who’ll make a plan right when he realizes he doesn’t have one.