Three Days of My Life I Will Never Get Back

By Steve Larder
www.stevelarder.co.uk

The zine world is incredibly tiny. I met Steve earlier this year at a zine festival in Brighton, and this past summer he went to the USA to travel and go on a zine tour with Alex Wrekk, who I met at a zine symposium in Portland last year.

This zine deals with Steve’s three day bus trip across 2763 miles of America, from Louisiana to Alex Wrekk's house in Oregon. He writes about the weird people he sees, the people he sits next to on the bus, and the people he talks to in the bus stations. Steve seems to come away with the idea that only crazy people seem to use the bus in America. At the very least the people he meets seem a bit weird, though generally travel seems to bring out the worst in people.

Thankfully Steve didn’t have to deal with anything like this, though maybe just because the security guard using a metal detector on people before they could get on the bus confiscated someone's giant knife. Things like that really depress me about the society we live in.

I was a little disappointed that the zine was mostly text and didn’t feature much of Steve’s art, as I’ve really enjoyed it in the issues of Rum Lad that I’ve read. But the art that is included is good, and Steve’s writing manages to replicate many of the horrors of long distance bus travel without you actually having to deal with any of the awfulness of actually doing so. I'd have liked a bit more detail (what did he eat?), but overall I enjoyed a zine about the part of travel most people don't talk about.