Nowhere special. I always wanted to go there.

I wanted to write this post a few weeks ago after the passing of Gene Wilder but I couldn’t quite get it done – hopefully I can now since I have been to alot of Nowhere Specials since then. You might recall the line ‘Nowhere special, I always wanted to go there’ at the end of Blazing Saddles just before Sheriff Bart and the Waco Kid rode off into the sunset (and then a limousine). It was one of those throw away lines that were all through one of the greatest movies ever and was the perfect way for it to end.

Webster (the kid from the show not the wordy book thing) defines Nowhere Special as not anywhere distinguished, which really doesn’t help at all as there are a tonne (metric) of places that are not anywhere distinguished, possibly more than there are places anywhere distinguished, actually most definitely more. So essentially wanting to go nowhere special means you want to go anywhere apart from New Zealand, some parts of Europe, The Valley of the Gods in Utah, Machu Piccu and my bedroom.

More often than not we drive past a lot of nowhere special places to our nowhere special destinations (or fly over them if you are a bird – and if you are a bird and are reading this then that is pretty cool), which will then become someplace special when we get there. And that is really the key to the whole wanting to go nowhere special; you know that when you get there it becomes something more. It may revert back to being nowhere special after you leave but while you are there that place is special to you and the people (or birds, still amazed that birds are reading this blog, I didn’t know they had access to the world wide interweb let alone the ability to scroll) who you are there with.

In the last few weeks I have driven a little over 4,000 miles which is pretty close to  driving across the US and back, and parts of that drive were incredibly boring. If I had a choice of whether to drive Interstate 10 again or read some of my older blog posts I would seriously have to consider reading the older posts. However, parts of the trip were someplace special. I didn’t have a clue how awesome Pensacola was until I got there, admittedly the people I was staying with made it even better. If someone had told me that New Braunfels in Texas had the biggest water park in the world and that there were rivers that people went down in tubes towing coolers of beer I would firstly have had to Bing wherever New Braunfels was and then act surprised that Texas is not just full of Longhorns, Oil Rigs and Stetsons. I already knew that there was a ranch in Lebanon TN that was a little slice of heaven. The crowd that would be there were good people who had definitely lowered their membership requirements by allowing me to attend, but I didn’t know that the 8 hour drive would be one of the prettiest I had done in a long time. Driving through the North Carolina mountains, past Asheville and down towards Knoxville heading to Nashville is a really awesome part of the nowhere special tour.

This high speed rotating beach ball upon which we live is covered in nowhere specials and if you get the chance you need to pop out and see a few of them. It is easy to convert them to someplace special just by being there because they are the places where memories, both good and sometimes bad, are created. I am fortunate that I have convinced some people that I am not a complete ass and they have opened their doors to me. Truth be known they understand that there is full reciprocity (for you Shellie) if they ever get to my side of the railroad line.  However, in the majority of cases the Ying doesn’t balance with the Yang as nicely as it did on the tattoo that girl had on her left boob years ago – but I digress. Y’all should want to go nowhere special as much as the Cisco Kid did, especially as it meant going with a friend, because that is really what that final line was about. Nowhere special will become someplace special as soon as you arrive (as special as the trip itself with the right companion).

Based on the exceptionally high standard of writing that you expect every week or so that I write this post there has been absolutely no fact checking of any type in this blog and the only really important piece of information that you can possibly glean from this post is that I have just written an exceptionally long sentence without any punctuation at all and if you are reading this out loud to a person from the prison colony off the west coast of Godzone you probably have just fallen over from lack of oxygen. Also please note that we don’t want the Irish.

So work hard, play hard and earn your inspiration

Happy Poets Day