When I wrote this blog’s last entry, I thought I might pause posting for
the weeks of travel that lay ahead of me. Those four weeks have turned into four months, and still the latest post is dated August 2, 2014. I’ve felt bad, lazy, and cowardly at least once a week ever since, but still didn’t
find the proper motivation (a.k.a. the balls) to start an attempt at tackling what I had promised more people than just myself: to write about my road trip through the western United States.
The most plausible excuse I found for myself is that the change of scenery
after leaving Cedar Falls has for some reason clogged the enthusiasm glands I’d developed for maintaining this blog since I’d arrived in the U.S. almost a year ago. Also, it is something very different to write about a
weekend in Manhattan or my life in Athens and Cedar Falls than to convey something that is worth reading about the absurd surreality of Devil’s Tower, the boundless view onto the sun-baked Bighorn Basin, the incomprehensible
infinity they insufficiently call Grand Canyon (this video features the Flitstones!) , or the awe and humility that take over as you--sitting
in your tiny tent--witness a thunderstorm hitting the vast open desert. Writing about New England and, later, the Badlands and Black Hills, might have been comparable in genre, but not in breadth.
And now, back in Leipzig since early September, maybe what keeps me awake
tonight is the feeling that these excuses are actually nothing but pretexts. If this impression persists, I might have no choice but to write.
