It's summertime. You have two weeks off from working in the small state farm outlet where your Dad is an agent and pays you 7 measly dollars an hour to type and to rub his temples when he gets a migraine. Your husband has been laid off from the Callahan Brake Pad Factory. Your son Jack got kicked out of day care for stealing cigarettes from the yard attendant and you're afraid if you leave your daughter alone at the house for more than an hour she will without a doubt lose her virginity.
Time to get your snot-nosed brat kids into the back seat and your husband in the front and hit the fucking road.
“WHY ARE YOU DRIVING SO FAST? IT’S THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT! WHERE ARE WE GOING!” your kids and husband will shout. Tell them to shut their goddamn mouths or you’ll drive through a guardrail into a gulch and kill them all.
“Road trips are supposed to be spontaneous,” you explain once they’re all silent and shaking with fear. “We’re going to drive and have dangerous adventures until something about us CHANGES.”
First stop is downtown Cleveland, where you'll pull into bars and pick fights.
Later in New Orleans you'll visit the grave of a voodoo queen. Legend has it if you draw three red x's in chalk on her tomb she will grant you a wish. Your wish is that you were dead. Your husband stoops down, draws three x's and stands up, loudly proclaiming "I wish that the Packers would make the playoffs" with his eyes closed.
You erase your old set of x's, draw three new ones. You'll wish your husband was dead.
Your daughter sexts her boyfriend the entire time, while your son urinates on a gravestone that reads "Beloved Aunt."
From then on you stop reading street signs and point the car in random directions. Somewhere on the eastern seaboard you transport crystal meth and pick up hitchhikers who remember seeing the ghost of Freddie Mercury and you come to the aid of a crashed crop duster, managing to rescue the pilot before his plane bursts into flames.
You drive for four more months, and when you pause to celebrate your daughter’s fifteenth birthday and your son’s ninth by the lip of the grand canyon, you all finally agree that you've each discovered something about yourselves that has changed you forever.
“I hate the road,” your daughter says.
“I hate America,” your son says.
“I hate anyone who isn't caucasian,” your husband says.
“I want to spend the rest of my life in a tree,” you say.
Your husband hoists you up into a tree then he and your two kids wave goodbye as you climb higher and higher. Your husband says he’ll come back in a few months with divorce papers, but that he’s glad you’ve discovered yourself, and that you won’t be in his life to drag him on another awful trip like this one ever again.
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