6 July 2008: Lincoln, Nebraska

Well, just like my second night in Tempe, I got woken up by a cop.

The difference, though, is that unlike the situation with that cop, when I had no conception of time or place, this time I knew exactly where I was and exactly what I was doing. So when the cop asked me a few questions, I had answers. He told me to go somewhere else; not because I was doing anything illegal, though, but because he said it wasn't safe to be sleeping where I was. The grass outside the campus chapel seemed like a perfectly safe, not to mention holy, place to spend a night, I thought, but at least the cop wasn't being a dick about it.

So I walked towards the main part of campus and slept for a couple more hours outside the library, a bit of a ways from where another pathetic-looking man was spending the night. When I woke up I got a cup of coffee and paroozed through a newspaper. This was pretty much the first contact I had had with the outside world during my entire time on the road, as I hadn't once read or seen any sort of news.

This also, I'm sad to say, was the most exciting thing I did that afternoon.

That's because, after I left the coffee shop, I spent the day walking around town. Now, maybe because of my Trenton-inspired preconception of Lincoln, I had been expecting a dirty town with a bunch of nothingness. I was wrong about the dirty part-- Lincoln is actually pretty nice. But I was absolutely correct about the nothingness.

Lincoln, as far as I can tell, is two blocks of main street and a college campus. I know there's a capital building there somewhere, but I didn't really have the energy to find it. To be honest, I almost feel as though I were blacked-out the entire afternoon. I'm not really sure what I did. All I know is that I spent nearly the entire time walking around and found nothing substantial. At all.

So let's fast-forward to that evening, because even if I wanted to write about what I did in Lincoln-- and I do-- I couldn't for the life of me tell you what it was.

As it got towards evening I decided it was time to find a place to crash. Going back to the area where the party had been, if not to the house itself, would have been the obvious answer except for that I had no idea where it was. And when I asked people "where would student house parties be around here" no one could tell me.

In fact, no one could tell me where any sort of student housing was at all until someone finally said that a lot of students live "on the other side of the train tracks."

Uh... I didn't know much about Lincoln at that point, and still don't to this day, but I'm pretty sure that "the other side of the train tracks" is typically not where you want to begin your search for anything. Unless you're searching for drugs.

Since this was the first answer I had managed to get, though, I crossed the tracks and began to look around. As I had expected, the houses were pretty run-down and decrepid and, to be quite honest, rather trashy. I mean, some of them even had above-ground pools. Above-ground pools, I tell you!

But I found out that, among this group of houses, there actually were a few student houses. And, if I went a few streets further, there were even more. So I went a bit further since I figured it couldn't get any bleaker than where I was, and this new group of houses did certainly look a bit more studenty. But the problem was that no one was outside. And I do mean no one.

(One thing I should probably mention here is that, even though I'll talk to anyone on the street or on a porch, the one thing you can never do is knock on a door or ring a doorbell. Absolutely never. Obviously.)

Anyway, since the houses weren't working out I walked one more block to an apartment building, and almost immediately I saw a kid with a backpack get out of a car. I walked up to him and asked if I could grab a quick shower, since this was what I needed most on account of having not showered since my last night in Laramie. He said "Sure!" With the exclamation point.

We went up and I cleaned up a bit, and when I came out of the bathroom this dude Jason was watching "Old School." I gave him $3 for three beers-- including a Blue Moon, so I made out in the deal-- and watched the movie for a while, but when I asked him if he wanted to come out he said he couldn't.

He said I could leave my pack in his apartment for the night but that he was leaving at 5:00 to do his paper route-- awesome-- and wouldn't be back until 7:30, so I had to pick it up sometime else. I told him I'd be by at around 7:30, and I headed out.

The first bar I went to had a band but also a $5 cover charge. The band sounded alright, and it was a Sunday so I figured the options would probably be limited, but paying a cover charge to get into a bar was an absolute no-no for me. So I talked to the guy for a little bit, and eventually I got him to let me in for free. Not too much trouble, really, but if I had had my pack with me it would have taken half the time.

Once inside I started talking to this dude about how I was traveling around, and pretty quickly he bought me a beer. Now, up until this point I hadn't paid a penny for hospitality and hadn't paid a penny for transportation since getting to Tempe the first time. I was doing OK with food, what with kind drivers and trips to Whole Foods, but paying for alcohol was the one thing keeping my trip from being stupid cheap. And by stupid cheap I mean less than $25 for the month.

So on that front, let's just consider this beer the first of the second half of my adventures.

When I left this bar I walked across the street to another and sat down at a table across from a couple girls. The one on the outside kept looking over my shoulders towards the bathroom, and I assumed she was looking for her boyfriend. Which would have been a disaster.

But that would have been delightful compared to what I got. What happened instead was two girls came out and one of them glared at me and said "Who is HE?" Because even worse than intruding on a girlfriend is intruding on a girls' night out.

This main bitch then led the other three girls to another bar which was having an '80s dance night. That did sound fun, and even though the main bitch was obviously taking them away I figured I'd head that way too. So I finished my drink and bolted.

And it WAS pretty fun, but that was because I didn't see any of the girls from the first bar. Eventually I did see the first girl, the one who had been looking over my shoulder, and she said hi but was looking pretty miserable. Almost immediately after that I saw the main bitch, who literally and bluntly told me "you can't be here."

I didn't really care at this point, not to mention the fact that this was an almost perfect way to cap off the night in utterly underwhelming Lincoln. So I walked back to Jason's place.

Oh, but first I walked about a mile in the wrong direction. That was fun.

Also fun was re-crossing the train tracks at 2:00 in the morning. Maybe not the best of ideas under different circumstances.

Finally I got back to Jason's apartment building and, figuring he'd be awake soon enough, I crashed in the doorway. As I had expected, he woke me up when he left for his paper route at 5:00, and I went into his apartment and slept on his couch until I came back.

I'll tell you, that Jason was a good dude. Let me in to take a shower with no questions asked, then sold me three beers for three bucks even though one of them was delicious, and then was more than happy to oblige me with a couch even though I was totally unexpected. Good dude.