At 11:59pm on December 31st, one minute away from the big midnight New Year countdown my friend and I sat dejected in his apartment reeling about how uneventful the night turned out. After spending most of the night bopping around town looking for a place to 'pop my coochie' on the dance floor, we eventually gave up the search and went back to his place to order Domino’s and complain about how lame our New Year’s night was unfolding.

By the grace of god I had a $20 gift certificate which was perfect because that’s just enough to take advantage of their two medium two topping pizzas deal for $16.74 while also allowing $3.26 for the tip.

At least there was that consolation. I panned my head to the sky, musing about how heaven may just be real after all! How special my friend and I must have been to have an omniscient God turn a blind eye to worldwide suffering to make sure the two of us could ring in the new year by being gluttonous fucks. This God’s love felt so good you could taste it, and it tasted curiously like Domino’s pizza.*end sarcasm* We each ate a medium pizza apiece and used the brief intervals in between stuffing our stupid faces to joke about taking a road trip to start 2017.

But where? Where would this hypothetical road trip be to? What would we do? Would we go shake dice in Vegas, have a Texas sized time in Texas, or have Johnny Law come after us for running amok in the Mormon state of Utah? When we loaded up in my friend’s car a few days after the 1st of January, having not hadn’t decided on where to go or what to do, we figured we would just start driving and see where we ended up. Our only parameter was that we had to be back within a week. And with that, we hit the road.

For the first leg of our trip we headed down to Los Angeles, an eleven-ish hour drive that I drove the entire way, a theme that would persist for the whole trip I’d soon find out. The whole trip ended up being about 30+ hours of driving time when totaled, so I’m actually pretty proud that I didn’t doze off at any point. Cher’s timeless early 2000s pop-techno banger that ushered in the new millennium, “Believe”, pulsated through the speakers as we barreled down I-5. By the time we got to LA my butt was numb and deadened from the drive but a walk around a Malibu beach at around 11pm rejuvenated my lifeless lower half.

To be clear, a short drive through Malibu revealed to me the level of wealth and money that exists in that little community. Those people are wealthy- like disgustingly wealthy. A new sports car there was like a 1999 Honda Civic for you and I. I don’t know if I was just jealous or if my anger at the excess in Malibu was valid, or both, but holy hell did I want a tidal wave to come and do some very minor damage to some beachside properties. I wanna get rich just so I can buy a boat, call it the SS Fuck Off and drive around shooting the sides of their boats with my golden harpoon gun as smoke billows from a cigar between my teeth.

Thankfully I was immediately relieved of my rage when my friend and I looked to the left while on a Malibu beach to see the Santa Monica pier within driving distance. We promptly loaded up the car to head to the pier but before I put the car in park I made sure Cher’s “Believe” was blasting from the speakers.

Little did I know, there was much more in store for this road trip, we had really just begun...