I wake at 6am, make a cup of tea to go, and drive west. It’s my second time taking part in Paper Plains Zine Fest in Lawrence, Kansas. Two years ago, I mostly went to hang out at Adam and Elizabeth’s farm and to meet a bunch of their friends. This time feels like a long-delayed return. I skipped last year because I was over-extended with concurrent art shows, a new book that was being printed badly by a disturbed person, and events piling on top of events. I regretted missing it anyway. This year feels a bit calmer, pace-wise, so I’m happy to spend time with my friends out in the endless plains.

The big complication this time is a nagging head cold I can’t shake. It begins the day before I leave and lets up just enough for me to handle a day of tabling and a night reading the last day of my trip. My head feels like an aquarium filled three-quarters-full of tepid guck. I’m never incapacitated to the point of being bedridden but never well enough to enjoy much of anything.

I listen to Ananda Lima’s Craft—Stories I Wrote for the Devil on the way out and Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth on the way back. Neither are books I would have necessarily picked up to read but both surprise me in how they get away with magical/speculative elements that normally take me out of a story. The Lima book—with The Master and Margarita hanging over it like an approving ghost—nimbly incorporates myth into up-to-the-moment reality in a completely seamless way.

I get to the farm late afternoon. Adam is running around the house, finishing last-minute chores before a bunch of other out-of-towners arrive. They’re hosting five or six here. Andrew arrived from England already. He and Adam maintain a continual shit-talking banter throughout the weekend. It is borne of prior book/music tours. The reading I’m part of Sunday is the launch of their upcoming jaunt west.

After a time, Elizabeth arrives with Trace. They’ve been running around buying bedding for the guests. I’m wiped out from the drive and the nagging congestion, so I drive with Trace to Jessie’s in Lawrence. It’s where we’re both staying. At her house, everyone else soon goes out to drink; I lie on a thin mattress, tucked into an office/pantry nook, trying to sleep or breathe. Only intermittent success at either.

Day two is a bunch of events I mostly skip. I sit at the house finishing American Skin, blowing my nose, drinking tea, napping. This is not how I meant to spend this visit. I can read a book and be sick much better in Chicago.

I rally enough to go see Jon Nix’s Justin Pearson doc at ECM. There are drinks after in the patio of bar where a woman is doing her best Sheryl Crow/Tracy Chapman impression to the cheerful annoyance of all in our group of snobs. Jessie’s exhausted from running around, so I offer to drive to KC to pick up Rich from the airport at midnight.

Rich is a bread baker in San Francisco. He’s coming just to reconnect with his old San Diego friends Adam and Jessie. He has nothing to promote or sell. I mention the only restaurant people I know in his city and of course he knows them. That Steven Wright line obtains, as always.

I rise before anyone else the next morning. I will myself into the shower with the false belief my head is clearing. The day before I toyed with the idea of just going home, but today I’m determined to power through. I leave the house and get breakfast at a happening spot on the main drag. My server has the ironic mustache and cool band shirt of a thousand recent college grads. Probably in a band, still dreaming rockstar dreams, though too cool to say it.

I’m greeted at the zine fest venue by Elizabeth and immediately put to work cutting out P A P E R P L A I N S Z I N E F E S T from multi-colored printer paper.

Andy sits next to me. He’s here from Plymouth. We talk shit about Boston and he tells me about his podcast. Jessie is publishing his forthcoming book.

The day trudges along the way every day tabling does. My face hurts from false smiling and my voice starts going from repeating variations on an identical spiel. The only positive is a bunch of book sales. It’s almost always the only positive. Afterwards, I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck.

At ECM, I put out the books I’d packed up an hour before. There’s a buffet dinner of vegan hot dogs, sloppy joes, and rice. A group photo on the lawn for which Jessie asks to sit on my shoulders for reasons only she knows. Then a reading upstairs in a large hall of the deconsecrated church that now houses this community center. The rest of the readers will go on to do it again in Topeka and points west but my duties to literature, art, and promotion are done for a few days.

In an odd confluence, Deborah is about to move to Manhattan, Kansas, a couple hours down the road from Lawrence. This means I’ll likely be out this way in the future. She says they call her new town “The Little Apple.” I don’t know whether to find that funny, sad, or both.

I drop Andy off at the KC airport, then drive east, back to Chicago. My head is now clear, mostly rid of phlegm, just in time to resume my regular routine. It makes me think of the time I hid a serious ear infection when I was ten so the family trip to Disney World wouldn’t be canceled. The moral is always to stay home.

I’m glad I went to Kansas anyway.

Mallory and I tackle The Bride and The Bride of Frankenstein.