The Fucking Cage

We rode up to La Junta today.

No. “Rode” isn’t the right word.

We drove.

We fucking drove.

For only the third time in 2026, I rode in a fucking car to a destination.

And fuck, I love my fiancée. I do. I love her to the edges of the fucking earth and back. But man, I do not like riding in a fucking vehicle.

At all.

Cars are hot. They're stuffy. They're these climate-controlled little fucking boxes designed to separate you from everything you're traveling through.

You can't smell and taste the air as you cross the land. You can't feel whether it's moist or dry, hot or cold. You can't feel those little pockets of cold air that settle gently across the land as night creeps in and the air does whatever the fuck air does when the sun disappears behind the mountains.

You can't smell the land.

And that's something I don't think people who spend their lives inside cars understand.

The scent of harvest. The scent of production. The scent of industry. The scent of peace. Prairies and mountains and rain. Rivers and flower-filled meadows. Fresh-cut fields. Wet pavement. Hot asphalt. The smell of someplace you've never been before announcing itself before you've even figured out what the fuck you're smelling.

On a motorcycle, you don't pass through a place.

You enter it.

All of it.

The temperature changes. The smells change. The wind changes. The fucking bugs change. Everything around you tells you where you are.

In a car, you roll up the windows and set the temperature to 72.

Then there's the traffic.

On a bike, I move through it. I find my space. I adjust my speed. I navigate around the lumbering fucking herd and find the open pavement on the other side. There's a rhythm to it. A path. I'm not merely traveling down the highway. I'm actively participating in the fucking journey.

In a car?

You do either side of 75 with everybody else.

Some folks walk five over. Some walk ten over. But you're all basically doing the same fucking thing on the interstate, trapped inside these bulky metal boxes, moving together in one enormous procession of humanity.

There's no slicing through traffic. No finding your line. No extending the occasional bird as you mark your fucking path through mankind.

You're just sitting there.

In a moving cage.

Hot. Stuffy. Smelling nothing but each other's gas-station-burrito gas.

There's a reason everybody in cars has that dull fucking look in their eyes.

Conversely, there's a reason people on motorcycles look like they're at peace with the world.

Look, I'm always happy to spend time with my love. I am. I'm not bitching about that at fucking all.

And we needed the car today.

We're getting the rest of her things out of storage and moving everything down to Santa Fe. It makes perfect sense logistically. More than that, every box we load into that fucking vehicle is another piece of her life coming home with us.

Another little piece of Colorado disappearing from the equation.

Another piece of her becoming permanently intertwined with me.

I fucking love that.

There is something deeply satisfying about watching the last pieces of the life she had before us make their way toward the life we're building together. Her things aren't in storage anymore. They're going home.

Our home.

So yes, the car makes sense.

The trip makes sense.

The reason we're doing it makes me incredibly fucking happy.

But somewhere between Santa Fe and La Junta, sitting inside that sealed fucking box while an entire world passed by on the other side of the glass, I kept thinking about Nyx.

About the wind.

About the smells.

About those little pockets of cold air settling across the land.

About actually being in the fucking world instead of watching it through a windshield.

I love my fiancée to the edges of the fucking earth and back.

I'd drive all the way to Maine in that fucking cage for her if I had to.

But fuck do I hate riding in a fucking car.

Just saying.