Chapter 7 Travels with Broom: In Search of Somewhere Sometimes I wonder how it is that I talked myself into these kinds of things. Or maybe I should say I wonder how it is that I let myself get talked into these kinds of things…and I don't mean shaving. At the moment I found myself in my car headed to Kentucky with Broom because he wanted to check out some random city. And I didn’t want to check out some random city. I didn’t want to go to Kentucky. And I certainly didn’t want to be going places Broom wanted to go in my car. He had his own damn car. And yet here we were, in my car, on our way to Kentucky to check out this city Broom wanted to see. I guess when you’re open to the possibility of anything these are the sort of things that happen. It all started innocently enough. Broom had called me up and told me I needed to come down and see him. From the initial sound of it all he wanted to do was hang out and I figured I might as well. I hadn’t spoken to him in awhile and it would be good to catch up. Plus it
would give me a reason to get out of Cleveland and force me to figure out what I was going to do with myself. So I headed down to see him. I thought Broom might be a bit calmer or more accepting of his own life by now but he was as irritable as ever. He quickly started going off about his job and even gave me crap about my facial hair. But I expected as much. I think it’s just some sort of male ritual to immediately rip on a guy for no reason other than because you can. I should know because I did it too. I told him he looked fat. Although he did say he liked my hat. Naturally we found ourselves at a bar where he got into the real reason he wanted me to come down here. He told me about his job and girlfriend situation, both of which were not going well. He also told me he had some vacation time and was taking it. And finally he told me that he wanted me to come with him as he checked out some cities that he might want to move to. Moving to a different city on
a whim? That didn’t sound like him at all. Even traveling to different cities to look into finding a new home didn’t sound like him. He was so much more the solid, safe choice kind of guy. Evidently I had been a bad influence on him since my decision to just get up and leave made him question why he shouldn’t do the same thing when he was feeling his own dissatisfaction with what was going on. His life was nothing more than choosing what tie to wear in the morning and he didn’t want to deal with it anymore. Plus he and his girlfriend seemed like they had the same kind of relationship I had with Michelle only worse…somehow.
He tried to get my sympathy by showing me his biggest decision of the day when he had to choose what tie to wear but the thought of driving around with no particular destination didn’t appeal to me. I had done that in a haphazard fashion out west and it nearly drove me crazy. I did it in the Midwest with a little more thought put into it but