7/24- Revelations; My Reclaimation of Here

So this'll be hilarious. Not just to the folks I've met along the way, or haphazardly stumbled across this site through Google search or something, but to those at home who know me well. I've come to a recent realization that I fell directly back into a very old pit of my old ways that I often do when I'm taken up by something I think is interesting.

In the beginning, I get really excited, haven't really thought it through, but really start running with the idea in what ever way seems right. As I keep going I fall into a pattern, I start ferreting out ruts and routines to keep up on so I can keep hold and properly do what it is that I was so excited about doing. Eventually I get so sidetracked into keeping up with all of these new little rules and regulations I've propped up for myself I become consumed by them and not the excitement. Its been happening on here for probably over a month or two now.

My guess is that right now Todd in particular is reading this laughing his little ass off as he knows this more than ever to be true. Its been much of the source of our tension, although I also wouldn't say I stand alone in the guilt over those moments, and I reckon he'd concur with the mutuality of our occasionally opposing modes of behavior and thinking. Nevertheless, I'm sure there are more of these patterned behaviors that I've been sucking myself into and haven't spotted yet, but at the moment this blog is the one I'm clearly recognizing.

To revisit the history here I'll point out the formats of my past here and in my previous Walking site of 6 years ago. Looking to the latter, formerly dontforgetus.net, you'll notice that every day is chronicled. Not only are they recorded by the 24 hour period, but they are dated and numbered. Seeing as though for many of those days that site would die for a bit, or I'd be lost in some wilds for a while, or I just didn't find a library for a day or two one would have to conclude that I wasn't updating it daily. Instead, I would go back and update days past. A dramatic example is when I was lost out of contact in the desert for 10 days and wrote up from June 5 until June 16 in a five hour sitting breaking each day down into its own post by memory. I did my hands harm that day.

What chuckles me here is that I began this trip thinking quite consciously to myself that I did not want to get wrapped up in that again. I love sharing these adventures, its fun for me to write up my thoughts as they come and the events as they unfold. It quickly becomes tiresome, though, when I sit and try to strain out of my brain exactly what I was doing, much less thinking or feeling, three weeks ago at a truck stop in Iowa. The idea is to provide myself with a place to accurately review events as well as to share them with everyone I meet along the way and my family at home. Riding on my memory of it at this point would give a hindsight assisted write up, with vast chasms of missing details, which would end up mis-leading any memory that would resurface later on.

Can you hear the internal argument still going on in my head about breaking this established ritual I've come up with in the past months? I look at it now and see it as a de-weeding of my mind. As Yoda had advised me 29 years ago when I was 4 and should have listened from the get go, I am unlearning now what I have learned. You laugh, but my Dad has been quoting Yoda in every Christmas gift I've gotten since Empire came out, and I still have the Christmas cards filed away, chronicled by year, to prove it. I mention it here not only to remind myself why I'm not bothering with filling in events of the past two weeks, but in hopes to spread a lesson out for one and all who get caught up in their ruts and routines. Habit and mental comfortability (redundant) have a nasty way of taking over entire lives.

I will, however, summarize these omitted events. I haven't healed that much yet. I foresee a very long process ahead of me (note the still lingering, ever famous budget book). I'm going to try to sum up the main points and ideas, rather than catch myself up in the events that I see more as fun details if I were going day by day rather than points to think on.

Todd and I had one more day out at Iowa 80, but tension was rearing its head again. There were a few incidents that helped stoke those along, like me wandering off to explore the Trucker's Museum for 40 minutes. While I was away, and out of contact, a hippie-type guy driving a moving van to Boulder, CO saw Todd and our Denver sign and caved himself in on agreeing to drive us the whole way. This would have saved us the money we ended up giving to Photo Guy, who was a treat in himself, and the respective bus and train tickets we paid out of Omaha. For me that totaled to about $109 which is significant since this morning I woke up at $0 outside of my "tucked away" landing money. Either way, the guy went into eat, came back out and saw Todd still on his own and left. Frustration ensued.

There was another melt down of frustrations to the likes of our last days in Michigan that broke out on returning from the on ramp after not knowing where we really want to hitch too. That was when Todd confided in me his dream of punching me in the teeth and I think was bordering on actually wanting to live it out. After hashing that one out and acknowledging we weren't really pissed so much at each other, but more our situations, we returned to normal friendship levels the rest of the day, and on to the next, but there was something subtly different. We both knew our split had come, and we were also thinking it had likely come a few weeks ago but had failed to acknowledge and act on it.

That night was restless as Photo Guy kept pushing his arrival time back while we sat in The Kitchen yet again, this time indulging in the all you can eat buffet, all you can drink coffee, and all you can talk to waitress Sanja. Sanja was among the host of smokin' hot waitresses working 2nd shift, and through talking with her we discovered her to be a war refuge from the Baltic area. I don't want to say which country because I can't remember and naming the wrong one would be like saying a WWII refuge from Germany when it was actually France. A bit of a faux pas. Long story short, we chatted her and a funny older waitress there, Colleen, up over copious amounts of coffee anticipating Photo Guy at midnight.

Photo Guy called around maybe 10pm saying he was just leaving Toledo and would likely retrieve us by 7am Saturday morning. Holy crap, that's a shift in plans. Now wired, we decided to see if we could hitch our way out sitting out front bouncing our knees, but to no avail. Not to help matters any, we had also been woken early that morning around 7am to heavy thunderstorms that flooded the area until they cleared up around noon. This meant we were tired from being up so long, but, again, too wired on coffee to sleep, and our little grove by the off ramp was likely a little mud pool so even just lying down in our bivies was not an option.

We stayed up until 5am then decided we could roll up in our tarps and crash down a small strip of grass that had gone unflooded by the on ramp for two hours. I set my alarm for 7am, and by 8am Photo Guy finally arrived. We got in his car and it stalled out immediately. In all our frazzledness Todd was not having it and nearly ditched the guy to hop another Greyhound while the guy went to Davenport to get his car worked on. To be fair, he did seem completely disorganized and likely asking to have this all come down on him now, but I was in no rush at this point and his tomfoolery didn't faze me too much. Todd ended up switching mindsets to laughing at him and sleeping until we got to Omaha that evening.

Once in town, our split was palpable. Todd got his bus ticket and we went for a last stroll together for a while through downtown Omaha to discover it actually seems like a pretty cool town. We sat in a coffee shop for about an hour then snapped our pictures together and went our separate ways. Here is where my mindset got in the way again, though this time I knew it.

Todd had a two hour layover in Denver between 7am and 9am before continuing on to Santa Fe. My train got in at 7am, so we figured we'd meet up one more time in Denver for a quick hello before going our own ways for at least the month. After he left, I had a really nice walk to the station. The whole while a debate in my head was going on of whether or not to catch the train, or to bunk out here and explore a little. Try to hitch and walk a bit through Nebraska, catching rides off the side of the road and save myself some train money along the way.

I passed funky bars through interesting neighborhoods that reminded me of Denver and Seattle's funky hoods that come out of cheap rents for artists and soon get over run by yuppies trying to be hip. These were in the early stage, the good stage, the SoHos of the '80s rather than the '90s, and East Villages of the mid '90s rather than the '00s. I found the train station, and I found it closed. When it opened at 9pm I found out my ticket would not be $2 from my vast series of credits I had, but $99 because my $50 credit was unavailable and the $84 ticket had risen to $131. On top of it, my train was over an hour late screwing up the idea of a Denver meeting the next day.

Now, for a moment, lets look at everything that Todd and I have been writing about over the past three months about listening to signs, following our gut, yada, yada, yada. Now look at that last paragraph. One would think I would've seen something brewing there. Fact of the matter is that I did. It was in no way lost on me that everything was saying stay in Omaha, walk the roads a bit, take your time. Ang's birthday was my main date to get home to and that was in about a week. I had called her and arranged to have breakfast with her the next morning at 11am, but I could easily have just called her again and canceled saying I'd be longer than I thought. In the end, it was the breaking point of my mental exhaustion.

Having been here in Denver for two weeks now I find that incredibly ironic. It wouldn't by any stretch say that I got here too early at all. I've been realizing that this stop is a continuation of what was started back at Trent's in Maryland; the visiting and regathering of old friends. The difference here is that these friends haven't been long lost, but are tuned in already to my current state of mind and are able to give me good insights and reflections on how I work now in regards to what it is I'm following and doing. Every day I've been getting great visits in with different friends who, I have no doubts, will be quite wrapped up in my future as well. The irony is that this stop is not a break for my mental exhaustion to recoop.

Rather than seeing it as getting here too early, I would say that I left "the road" too soon. Sitting on that Omaha platform weighing out whether to buy the ticket with everything saying no, or duck into a patch of woods nearby and explore the city the next day I opted for the ticket home with notions of lightening my pack and trading out my bivy in my head. It was like sugar plums dancing and I couldn't shake them, regardless of how much I knew I was making the wrong call. What I believe would have come of hitching the road, or just staying out there a bit longer in whatever capacity, was that I would've got the mental reprieve. I knew I was in no hurry, I felt no hurry then to get home, I just felt like getting home to relax and didn't see laying out on the side of the road on my own as that relaxation. I can see now that I think it would've been, and would've given me a fresher mind for my return here and the work that needed to be done.

Nevertheless, I came home. I briefly met up with Todd for ten minutes before he jumped on his bus, which was enough time to get introductions to a girl, Erica, he met on the way down. She'd been roaming around hitching as well and was also heading home for a bit. Being from Oregon, and planning to head out again at some point soon, I guess it sparked her and Todd talking about her traveling around with us. I spent an hour or so wandering around with her and was not keen on the idea. She just didn't strike me as someone who would gel with the things we were focusing on. Either way, it was a moot point since Todd and I both came to the idea, as that first week apart manifested itself, that it didn't seem likely we'd be doing much traveling together until the end of the year. Probably a few meet ups here and there, but he seemed like he had little interest in going to Seattle, and had more focuses on being in Montana and the Dakotas before heading west.

If I were to guess right now, I'd say there's a 50/50 chance we meet up in Boise, but quite likely we meet up in Portland. From there we'll likely go down the coast together until about San Fran, but then I'm looking to head east again, and I think he's thinking more south. Either way, the most important thing was that the "tethered together" dynamic was broken, and we were both happy with that. There was no desire on either end to return to that strange vibe that came of our returns home in May and June.

Anyway, that's the summary of how I got to Denver and our split. When I met up with Ang at Dozens for breakfast it was really like coming home. I spent the week at her house for the most part catching up with all the events that have been going on in her life, and the drama of the store, of course. Daily drop ins at Dazbog, my old shop on 9th & Downing, gave me plenty of re-acquaintance time with all my old regulars, many of whom have been following along since the get go. Of these, I mostly got reacquainted with Kia, who you can find occasionally in the Guestbook giving blessings from the Pagan Gods of olde. She's our resident crazy lady, but God bless her she's got a heart of gold along with knowing she's crazy.

I also made a point of getting to see Loreli, along with Izzy and Brandon. Loreli and Izzy, as I've mentioned in some of my first posts here, are a bit of family with me in a very different way than Ang is. Where Ang and I feel and act like close siblings, I feel more like the abstract wandering Uncle Chris to Izzy and some kind of an untitled "family" with Loreli. I've also noticed I have a developing in-law feeling to Brandon which I find kind of hilarious, but quite fitting. Now having also just been directly in contact with her past as well, I feel exponentially closer to being apart of her family than I ever had before. Perhaps I am really getting that family and community I talked about wanting in the beginning of all of this.

Other than these many visits and conversations that took place throughout the week I was able to keep on my pursuits as well. Before even that first breakfast with Ang I went directly to REI and got rid of that damn wire rimmed bivy, reuniting myself with my beloved Aurora at long last. The next day I went down to the library and took out Many Lives, Many Masters, which Stacey had recommended to me on the ride to Ohio in time for me to get it for my sister for her birthday. She had read it, loved it, and read two more of the authors books since, raving to me about how good it was. I read it in two days which, as anyone who knows me knows, that's astonishing. I'm quite likely the slowest reader in existence. I will say, it did make quite a mark on my up and coming plans.

Tuesday brought the three packages that Mom mailed out to me, and Wednesday I bused them out to my storage unit. At last everything was in one place. While there, I unloaded about half of the weight of my pack, and picked up a few things to make moving around the town easier like sandals and a smaller pack. I also wanted to experiment with the small pack to see if I could switch to that. It was that night, sleeping in Loreli's abandoned chicken coop, that I finished Many Lives and became inspired to get more proactive on getting first hand experiences with the more mystically aspects of life.

I put a post up on Craigslist the next day to hear the stories of anyone claiming to have had a near death experience that wanted to talk about it. I honestly had no idea where I was going with this, but it seemed like a decent first step to take toward at least talking with people who have had some clear cut, socially acceptable experience with something inexplicable. I didn't really expect any responses from it, and if I did get any, I was anticipating that they'd be crazies, attention seekers, or pranksters. I got none of those.

After Ang's birthday Friday, and a good gathering with the old crew, and another get together with Loreli on Saturday, I met up with Greg. Greg was an electrician about 20 or 25 years ago until one day something happened with the breakers while he was working on a 480 volt wire and was quite literally fried. He woke up two or three days later pissed off, but not because of being electrocuted to death, albeit temporary death. He described being encompassed by a peaceful, accepting light until he was dragged back by modern science to excruciating pain to find out he'd been in a coma those days off, and that was why he was pissed.

What I initially liked about him over the emails, figuring out what his story was and such things, was that he kept discrediting himself so as not to waste my time. He continually wrote me, and once again told me when we sat down together, that his near death experience was just a generic one from everything he'd read. "Yeah, I saw a white light and felt peaceful, not sure what else you want to hear." That's paraphrasing of course. I told him I didn't really care if it was a generic experience, I told him in return I didn't really know why I wanted to hear it, so there. I've already heard first hand near death experiences from family. My grandfather talked about the time he died for a minute or two back in 1972 and he saw a white light and a tunnel... with his uncle at the end of it. On my walk, back in Wyoming, I'd even met a guy who'd died just a few weeks before for about four minutes total, on and off of course.

Regardless, we sat down and told each other our stories and it completely energized both of us. I'd talked with Todd just the day before sounding lost and muddled because I still hadn't given myself that mental break yet, but I left the coffee shop charged and focused. I've told the story a bunch since, but watching Greg both tell his story and listen to my explorations he seemed to be literally healing (for lack of a better word) right in front of me. He had told me that it had only been a year earlier that he'd started to really come out of his funk about being brought back. He went on to tell me, that the emergence from it came from a sense that it was quite possible he was maybe supposed to use that experience as a way to help others.

I was quite intrigued that it was last year. It seems in the past year everyone has been undergoing a major shift in life in someway or another. On the whole, though, it seems to be in how people are seeing their lives and reevaluating the way they're living it. Hence the emphasis in the beginning of this post about giving a fair shot to the idea of unlearning what you've learned to really see if you're living the life you want to be living, and if you're not, or if you're only living a fringe of it, to really give an honest look at whether a few hard shifts might get you there. Almost everyone I know right now is going through something like that and, scary as shit or not, they seem to be going for the hard shifts.

When we left Pablo's, the coffee shop, Greg told me that he'd been on the fence about a decision he was wrestling with in his life now and that I'd given him the hard nudge he needed to do the one that felt better but seemed riskier. He never told me what that decision was, but I did feel like a million bucks for nudging him to do what ever it was. From there he drove me to the library so that I could check Many Lives back in and hand it over to him to check out again. There you go Stacey, you've directly gotten that book into the hands of at least four people, because I got a copy for my Mom as well.

That meeting shot me off in a new direction for the week. Meeting with him not only reenergized me, but refocused me completely giving me a new insight as to what it was I was going to do with myself in the years to come. Back in Michigan it had already come to me that I think I can, and would love to, live this way for a few years as a lifestyle. It gives me the mobility to be in the places I need to be, see the people I feel compelled to see, while also feeling rooted by my friends in their various cities so that I don't feel detached. Now I was seeing more of a reason why I needed to be all over the place like this. I'm not going to explain it now, because it isn't quite as sharp an idea as I want it to be yet, but it is certainly a strong one.

On that note, this week was much more uprooted than the last. I was at Ang's my first week here, and was fine with leaving all of my stuff there while I roamed about the city. Starting that Sunday, my home base got a bit muddled again with the onset of work that was coming my way. By this time Loreli had set me up with her boss to give me random work like building a dog run for her. I had stayed in Loreli's abandoned chicken coop the week before and loved it, so I figured I'd just stay there some more while I worked for Julie, Loreli's boss. The problem was, one, that Loreli lives in an anarchist cooperative house which is prone to occasional parties and is a magnet to other random people staying in said chicken coop. The other problem in the week was that Julie is not the most organized, or reliable, as far as when the work is to be done so it kept getting pushed last minute.

Sunday night the problem was that the coop was already occupied, so I wandered down to the highway and found a nice little field with the perfect sized sage brush to slide under and sleep. Monday I was back at Ang's, but Tuesday I thought I'd stay at Loreli's to catch a ride in with her for the dog run job with Julie only to find out Julie didn't need me the next day, and I was getting the impression she wasn't going to need me for it at all in the end. I debated between Ang's and Loreli's after that, swinging toward Loreli's because I figured it'd be nice to give Ang her house back for a bit. I've hosted many loved ones who are traveling around, but when they have flighty schedules like mine it does become tiresome regardless of how much they're loved so I thought I'd give her the break before she realized she'd need one. The coop, however, was once again occupied when I got there.

I had been trying to get together with my friends, Penney and Robert, since I'd been back and had only gotten together for a bit the week before. They'd given me an open invite to stay whenever, so I called them up. These were the last pair of my three major draws back to Denver to see; Ang and Loreli being the others. I kind of saw them as the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. In visiting with Ang, we mainly talked a lot about what was going on in our lives now, catching ourselves up on what had happened. With Loreli, since she was moving out of her anarchist house into one of her own, and moving in the direction of buying a house on her own, I offered to help out. She offered to keep the stuff I'm paying to stick in storage in her basement, which would then rid me of my last and final bill to pay. Penney and Robert were also moving, but only moving out. Our futures were looking more and more entwined.

Staying there over the next few days we'd sit down each night before bed, drink some of Robert's home brewed beer, and talk about each of our plans to head to the north west. They've gotten themselves a giant pickup that they've converted to run off veggie oil like the famed Veggie Bus that took us to DC in April. They're also planning on moving out of their house at the end of July and taking a class in New Mexico before driving up toward the northwest area. I've been hankering to go see my sister like I never have before. She is doing some really amazing things up there that I'd like to be apart of, and between her and her fiance, Daniel's, interests and Penney and Robert's interests I think they'd have a lot to learn from each other. Once again, everything has lined up and pointed out a direction, and this time I'm very astute to listen and follow.

Robert is a blacksmith who has come up with a completely non-electric workshop that he will store in the back of his truck to earn whatever money they will need, and provide the tools as well. Both of them have been Wwoofing, farming around Europe and North Africa, with an enthusiasm for biodynamic farming, something my sister's career and interests have focused around since she returned from Nicaragua five years ago. Daniel, her fiance, is one of those guys who does everything from scratch, much like Robert. Where Daniel makes his own wine, Robert makes his own beer. Daniel also dabbles in making boats, in fact he made the one he proposed to my sister in. Penney and Robert both have a great interest in buying a boat, and I've been weighing in on that interest as well as we spend our nights talking. Either way, there's the connections I'm thinking of.

I have weird feelings about the world and where its going. I have for sometime, and, along with Todd, I'm finding out that I'm no where near alone on these thoughts. I'm pretty sure I've talked about it before, but now its feeling imminent. So much so that I'm feeling I need to really start cranking up my preparations for these impressions a bit more. I'm feeling more and more convinced that something brutal is going to happen in September. Watching all those commercials back in Shelly's living room throughout June about every company, and their mother, encouraging cash for gold sales by July 4th and insurance ads telling senior citizens to sell their life insurance for cash didn't help ease my concern. From what I understand, hoarded gold by banks means the onset of inflation.

So that's been the past two weeks. Full, lively, and inspiring. My premonition came true as well, as far as my money goes. I'd had the feeling since Michigan, when I started seeing my savings fall into dregs, that, outside of my locked up money, when I hit $0 only then would money start coming back in again. I almost hit zero last week, but held on to my $6.96 in my wallet as my credit card charges soaked up the remains of my bank account holdings. At long last, the question would be answered of what would I do when I ran out of money. The work with Julie started surfacing, but I held on to my $6.96, and she kept flaking out on needing me. Finally, yesterday I deposited $4 in my account to cover the rest of my credit card balance, and I met up with my friend Nikki for coffee at St. Mark's and gave the barista the rest of my $2.96. Today, I baby sat for Loreli and she paid me.

Weirdly, I never worried about it too much. I did a little at times, but not too much. When I got my $25 today, plus some crackers and cheese, I felt my conviction solidify and am now convinced that as the money is needed it'll show up, but I'm not worried about it. Life is working out perfectly just as it should.