Montana has people in it.

It's good to get out of your comfort zone every now and then. Here in Montana I was supposed to relax and read and enjoy the quiet, but everybody's helping our hosts renovate their house so I feel bad just sitting around. Plus I obviously cannot stay away from my computer. In the 28 hours I went without Internet I broke into a cold sweat and developed the shakes.

I don't really want to apply primer, so I opted to help by fixing the hosts' computer. It's six years old and it has NEVER been defragged. I know, right? You should have seen that before and after picture. It was a thing of beauty. And since nobody else in the house knows how to do this, I feel proud that I have contributed without having to get paint on my shirt.

But that's not what I meant about getting out of your comfort zone. You see, here in Montana there ain't a whole lot going on. There are about five neighbors within as many miles. There are no trees. There is a strip club a few miles away and a small casino and you have to drive ten miles to get the mail. It's over an hour to the nearest real grocery store. As a result, I think Montana people tend to have some strange hobbies.

At a gas station in Butte, a man had parked his gigantic pickup truck right in front of the door, left his keys, and apparently wandered off to run some errands, leaving a fat man to watch his beautifully washed megatruck. Fat Man stood in front of this truck and talked about it with a dude in a red shirt for ten minutes. Then he talked about it with an old lady for ten minutes. Then he went inside, talked about it with some people in there, came back outside with a cashier and they looked at it. Then he went back inside and came back out with the same cashier and they looked at it some more. He was still at it when we left.

"What are you doing today, Buck?"
"I'm going to the AM/PM to stare at Jim Bob's truck."

Later that evening I met a man with a strange hobby. This hobby is so foreign to me I am completely fucking baffled by it. He's a nice man and I liked him very much, but he could have easily said to me, "Hey, you know what's fun? Standing on one leg and reciting the Lord's Prayer in Portuguese! Do you recite the Lord's Prayer one-legged in any languages?"

To which I of course said no, and created an awkward hole in the conversation. I think it was as foreign to him that I wouldn't enjoy his hobby as it was to me that anyone would enjoy it. He spends massive amounts of money on it each year and I am just completely flummoxed as to why.

There's only so many times I can write about high school students. It's good to go visiting and meet people I would otherwise never encounter. Someday I will throw this man in a script. Perhaps I will make him the driver of a giant truck.