After an all-American breakfast served to us by Loretta
we went back to the RV site to ask Jolene the owner how the fucking thing works, but it was her husband’s day off, so instead of solving how to fill water tanks and suchlike we swung on swings and I made like a chimp across the monkey bars. Showing Natalie how to do pull-ups I cracked the back of my head on the metal bar behind me. My knee-jerk reaction was to lurch forward. Something in my nose crunched on the bar in front. Not good.
Two hours into my birthday I felt sick from eating too much chocolate and cream cake and had a broken nose. There was no blood, just the sensation of knitting needles being slowly forced into my brain via my sinuses. With no frozen peas, I spent a good half hour or forty-five minutes of my birthday driving round Arizona with slices of honey roast ham held firmly against my nose. Happy Birthday me. The mechanically separated, reformed pork may have helped alleviate any black eyes but the pain got progressively worse over the next few hours so I grinned and bared it through the Palm Springs Windmills - the thousands of white wind turbines that punctuate the highway (They appear in the film Alpha Dog with Justin Timberlake, if you haven’t seen it check it out, he’s really rather good, as is an unrecognizable Sharon Stone)
As we made our way up to the giant white structures, which seem like a cross between a bizarrely symmetrical invasion by John Wyndham’s Tripods and a thousand scissor-kicking Peter Crouch’s another helicopter buzzed overhead. 
We were clearly not meant to be where we were; trespassing enemies of the state once again. There was no encircling this time, no sirens, no dash for safety yet the chill wind was hurting my nose like it never had before… I spent the next forty eight hours secretly necking ibuprofen behind Natalie’s back as she doesn’t even take paracetemol; what am I doing with this girl again?
One hour long stop for food and our first official argument later (naturally about her selfish lack of thought or planning to do anything whatsoever for my birthday) we arrived at The Joshua Tree National Park. We pulled in at dusk and set up camp,… well we parked the RV, I built my first fire for a girl and we drank Nat’s new fave tipple, Corona beers then stopped sharking a minute to eat chips and dips. We listened to the first album I ever bought - U2’s Joshua Tree. I reckon we must be the first people in history to have ever done that there.
After four beers we went to bed, only I couldn’t sleep and went out for a pee and a cigarette on my own in the wilderness. I prepared to be scared witless, like Somerset or Indonesia there are all sorts of wildlife out here; coyotes, mountain lions, pumas and peckerwood axe-wielding mutant in-breds, so the dash to the kasi had to be quick, like when you’re a kid frightened of the dark, hand already on the flush before you shake your pecker dry.
Outside, there was an eerie stillness. I felt completely at ease peeing under the silver light of the moon and about a billion stars. Coyote’s howled in the distance as I shivered, silently smoked and gazed up into space; above and beyond. I saw constellations I’ve never ever seen or heard of before, even one shaped like a cartoon heart. A shooting star blazed horizontally across the heavens, then ten seconds later another fell vertically to the earth. I waited for a third to make another wish, but it did not come.
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