Sublime, Unending Hobo Knife Fights

So my friend and I are debating the possibilities of going hitchhiking this summer. I have always been interested in the idea and have wanted to have some sort of adventure while the days of my youth remain halcyon. Hell, I have one more semester left in school: Soon I will need a job. Like, an actual real style job where there are no bagels or irate customers. Something related to what I've been wasting my time on these past four years. Yikes. The prospect alone is pretty unnerving, and I want to have some sort of youth-defining experience before I turn 25 and am hence old, withered and useless. Hitchhiking seems like a pretty classic way of having some good old-fashioned American youth-driven adventurism. Lots of the older set that I know have hitchhiked at some point and got some interesting stories out of it. The moral of all these stories, however, always seems to be: "NEVER HITCHHIKE." They'll go on an on about how fun a trip they had and all their interesting experiences, but the main thing they want to stress is to NEVER EVER DO IT. It's apparently way too dangerous to even fathom doing, and that to stick one's thumb out near a road is liable to attract hordes of murderous psychos and bears with swords. There's this impression now that if you hitchhike, the only people who will be willing to pick you up are those who intend to chop you up into little pieces and keep you in the glove compartment. At the same time though, people who see a hitchhiker on the road will refuse to pick them up because the hitchhiker might also intend to do his share of disemboweling and the like. To me, this implies that there is a quantifiable section of the general population who are axe murderers, whose sole purpose in life is to kill random people for the joy and satisfaction it must bring. I don't really buy this claim that there are so many axe murderers just roaming around the roads waiting for their next victim. How can there possibly be so many of them out there? I feel like we would have seen some shifts in the policies of this country as axe murderers come out to vote if there were really so many of them. If they were to band together and organize, all the axe murderers that must be out there could really get some change done, such as making murder with an axe a misdemeanor or making it legal to conceal and carry axes into department stores and hair salons. I highly doubt there are that many people out there with such insatiable and random bloodlust, and I feel like the depiction of hitchhikers in movies and other media has really soured their image. Every hitchhiker in a movie is a bad dude. Its such a movie standard to have a sick psychopath want to get picked up to lop of some noggins in a rest area somewhere. But what about those of us who are actually trying to go someplace? And on the other end, people are so scared off by picking up hitchhikers that the only people who would be willing must also be axe murderers. This whole axe murder thing seems a bit ridiculous, and believe it or not I have a little better faith in humanity than that.

Regardless of whether the world is truly flooded with sadistic sickos, hitchhiking is still a dead art. No one does it because, well, no one does it. It seems that no one really can hitchhike anymore due to the lack of people willing to pick people up. Less people are willing to pick up hitchhikers because it has become less of a thing, ie there are less hitchhikers around to make it seem like a legitimate form of transportation. Chicken eats the egg or whatever: There's nobody to pick them up because there's nobody to pick up because there's nobody to pick them up. It seems like a difficult prospect even without the whole "mercilessly flung in a Hefty bag" thing. Without people to pick you up, the whole prospect is futile. You'd just be a dude with a sign, and dudes with signs get little to no respect in society. Plus, I don't know how long such a thing would take. I've heard different stories where someone was able to get halfway across the country in a short period of time, but with so few potential rides out there it seems like it might take upwards of a month to get anywhere. In order to do this I'd have to take time off from work, and since I don't know how much time I'd need this could be a clincher.

It seems like my friend is set to do it with or without me. I would like to go at some point in my life, but I don't know if this summer is the right time. But then again, if not now, when? Has anybody done this that can weigh in on the subject? I'd like to hear some perspectives on whether this is something I should do, if its worthwhile, or if its even possible anymore.