June 15--10:32 pm
Well, after roughly five hours of high speed travel through the grasslands of Nebraska, we've finally found another human being-several in fact. This first town we've hit all afternoon is called Van Tassel, Wyoming, and sports a population of 18.
Given the amount of industry and progress we witnessed in Van Tassel, Varun and Dave believed we ought to move to Van Tassel, where we would represent an immediately significant increase in the voter base, and petition the city council, a.k.a. Jim the dude with the most free time, to officially change the town's name to, "Fuck It, Wyoming."
While I have to agree with the sentiment, I think the history of Van Tassel merits appreciation. You see, Van Tassel is a reference to an early oil tycoon named Renfield van Tassel who went crazy somewhere around the turn of the 20th and moved his entire family and their eighteen servants to a mansion way out in the craggy grasslands. After a few years of near total isolation, the household got bored and decided to play a game of Mafia- for reez. Now old man van Tassel was kind of a d-bag, ruling the household with his insane whims, and he was the first to get axed. Afterwards everyone else just kind of lost interest in the game and his battered wife and children took off for the nearest city, which by the way is Lusk-pop. 1447, to set-up the very Best Western where we now stay. The 18 servants decided to stick around and slowly broke down the mansion for firewood over the subsequent years. Today anyone brave enough to venture out at night can still hear strange groaning and hissing echoing off the surrounding rocks of Van Tassel. While the 18 old servants, tough as gnarled wood and twice as skeptical, will tell you it's only a pack of wild dogs, those with an eye for such things may yet witness the frazzle-haired specter of Renfield van Tassel reeling through the misty nights, lamenting the madness that drove him to an untimely and grizzled mortality.