I wanted to go on a road trip. It all started on Friday night a few weeks ago. At first it was nothing more than your typical weekend evening. I finished a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle in twelve minutes! It was a new personal record. But after I won my sixth straight solitaire game, I realized that this was no ordinary Friday. My mom had forgotten to set up any play dates for me! No big deal, I thought to myself. I may not be able to find real friendship, but cyber-interaction is a darn good second. Facebook revealed a sordid twenty-three friends online. Twenty-one of them were members of the class of oh-twelve, and the other two were Tom Plunkett and Ms. Stermer. Needless to say, I didn’t start any Chat conversations.

This was bad news. I was physically and virtually isolated. Doomed to spend a Friday night doing nothing. Total social suicide. I felt my pulse speeding up, and I started choking on phlegm. I get really congested in stressful situations. I could feel brain cells dying for lack of oxygen when the answer came to me: Snacks and a movie! A perfectly acceptable answer to the dreaded Monday interrogation: “So I went to three parties, and I only remember like twenty minutes. What did YOU do?”

I cooked up some popcorn and popped Eurotrip into the TV. It’s a marvelous specimen of cinema. Basically this high school loser Scotty goes to the Vatican to make love to a stunning German lass named Mike. In the part where Scott dresses up as the pope and explores Mike’s lederhosen with his steeple, I got really flustered and dripped melted I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! all down my front. It left a really awkward stain.

The film inspired me. It struck a match to my internal oil, lighting a fire within me — no doubt, the same fire which inspired Columbus to discover America, Caesar to conquer the world, and Armstrong to walk on the moon. One time I tried to light a similar fire up under Garfield to inspire the school to greatness, but I ended up getting in trouble for setting off the bathroom smoke alarms.

I knew what I had to do. Like Scotty, I would roam the earth, wooing gorgeous women with my chiseled features, mysterious demeanor and witty yet suave remarks. And where to start, but a place renowned for its beauty; the home of the most attractive (besides the students and staff of Garfield High School) ladies west of the Mississippi: Cle Elum.

Cle Elum, translated in an ancient Indian tongue as, “The swan gently caresses the smooth water,” has a population of 1,755. It’s 95.16% White, 1.03% Native American, 47% male, and 100% totally awesome. Moreover, Clifford has a cabin there.

Since Clifford and I are carbon-aware and ecologically responsible, we decided to take his Buick, which gets several more miles to the gallon than my Volvo. In addition, we could get 79 cents off per gallon using Mrs. Rostomily’s Safeway card.

My father, always the voice of reason, tried to change my mind about Cle Elum. “Why don’t you just go to Issaquah? Or Ballard?” But my mind was set. A few hours and several gallons of discounted gas later, we rolled into the rural oasis, expecting a warm welcome consisting of friendly country girls and maybe a rodeo or two. We were mistaken.

After an hour in Cle Elum, the only friend I had made was the Large Snicker’s Blizzard from Dairy Queen. I never knew meeting other people was so difficult. My mom generally secures me spots at birthday parties and other important social events, so I’ve never been forced to take it upon myself to take the initiative. I’m pretty sure she pays the hosts like ten dollars per hour too.

The kid working at the Dairy Queen reminded me of a young grizzly bear. He had the physique of a millworker who had been milking cows, bailing hay, and strangling live deer since age three. But all you had to do was look into his slightly glazed eyes to see that he was a few animals shy of a full barn upstairs. I walked up to him at the counter and said, “My friend and I are here for one night. What should we do?”

He immediately invited me to a party. This was clearly an exercise of poor judgment on his behalf. We could have been hardened urban criminals coming from the city to kick butt and take names. Heck, we practically were! If only the class of ’12 was so open and friendly about THEIR parties (yeah, we know you have them!).

Unfortunately, the party was too far away for us to attend. Clifford and I, discouraged and bloated from Dairy Queen, began the sad, slow trek back to his car. One of us must have had a good horoscope or something, because luck struck us, or seemingly so. A dirty white Cadillac squealed by. A girl leaned out of the window. “Ay, can I get some keeeeel?”

At first I thought she meant kil, as in kilograms. I didn’t understand why she would want more of those, because she already had a reasonable excess. Then it hit me. Perhaps keel is a slang term for a drug such as marijuana!

“Ma’am,” I asked, “When you say ‘keel,’ are you referring to a drug such as marijuana?”

“Yeah,” she replied in a slow drawl. “Got any?”

Clifford and I left. Them Cle Eluminians made us feel pretty uncomfortable. Cle Elum didn’t fulfill my cinematic fantasies, but we are currently accepting donations for our trip to Europe. I figure that story will be WAY more epic, because Cle Elum was just kind of depressing and lame. Of course, as a writer for the esteemed Messenger, I am morally committed by journalistic integrity to provide the readers with a fair and balanced view of every issue, and I do not wish to exclusively portray a one-sided perspective of the town. I hear they have some pretty cool museums over there.