A full tank and nothing to do

“A full tank and nothing to do.”

I’m rewriting a poem from 1994 called “mesa,” originally about young love, the desert southwest, and the intense feelings of spirituality and connectedness those things inspired in me.

It’s melodramatic but it has really solid bones. And I’m proud of that particular line. I find it quite poignant and bittersweet, thirty years later. It evokes big blue West Texas skies, open landscapes, mesas in the distance, the tank of the truck is full, and … anything is possible.

I don’t know if it hits as hard for you, out of context with the rest of the poem, but right now it’s squeezing my heart because I can barely remember being so free of worry and responsibility like that.

I wrote it when I was 22, had a shitty low paying job, and an interesting long distance relationship. So many choices were available; it was all open right in front of me and of course I couldn’t see it.

No kids, no mortgage, no real job, no worrying about our parents, no 401K — all the boring shit that adults have to do that we somehow thought would never touch us. We weren’t going to become shallow and complacent, we weren’t going to lose our edge, we weren’t going to fade into white picket fence suburbia.

And not all of us did. But we DID all become adults, and there’s no way to escape becoming someone that your idealistic/unrealistic 22 year old self is slightly disappointed in.

I hope that on the balance, 22 year old Katy would be proud of me.

Anyway, 53 year old Katy is gonna revise the hell out of this poem and make it amazing.