The Friary

Shadow Living

2011-03-27T03:09:00.000-07:00

I've hit a wall. An interesting wall, but a wall none-the-less. For those in the wonder, I migrated to Mexico on the beginnings of a quest to voyage overland, feeling informed by the messages of internal council, but with the intent that a return home would be not only a sense of quitting, but quitting on a mission devised by the greater unconscious. By the definitions of society this would be considered a holy mission, which gives it a far greater connotation that I feel it should have, but it is that to me in many ways.

A few weeks ago my Peruvian drive was given a 180° reverse and I find myself driven North with the full belief that this will still send me South. During this time I've seen signs upon signs that I'm not to be spending my time documenting the details of this quest, but more to absorb it, take it in, and allow it to simply just be.

I've been told on several occasions that I should be writing and sharing more of my findings on this odyssey by both close friends and comrades in this journey as well as arm chair onlookers and home bound practitioners of what it is I hint at seeking. I'm even chastised every so often when I swing from the predicted moves that would seem to come from pursuing these aspirations. I recognize that these come from concern that I'm faltering in my set task, and that these people are trying to help in keeping me on this path. The fact of the matter lies in that these people are not on this path. I am on my own path, no one elses, and no else can be on mine, everyone has their own. An outside view is both valuable to the traveler and disorienting.

In turning north I decided to go dark. This is more than just what it seems. For a long time I've lived a life of dualities that make sense together whether social archetypes recognize this or not. In previous posts I've mentioned that I've been an escort, that I've held secret lives while living completely normal ones next to it as I go. Something I've realized recently is that this has been an unhealthy manifestation of something quite necessary for being alive. Everyone has a side life they tell no one, or a very limited few, about. Shame holds us all back whether its the act or the secret that makes it shameful.

I've begun to call this aspect my shadow life, borrowed from my interaction with the Mankind Project last year. I've come to realize this secret living is a necessity that I've been ashamed to hide from loved ones and therefore have felt the need to eventually confess it at times. In the past this shadow life has been a relatively unhealthy existence that I come and go on, mostly out of shame, not out of want or will to continue it. By societies definitions I am a complete degenerate. By societies general reception of me I am an exceptional man and one who holds some sort of healing presence for those around me. I never really understood this compliment until recently I've begun to see that this "healing presence" is just an acceptance and willingness to listen. The healing aspect, I think, is that people seem to feel free to unload on me, and share a bit more of their truer, and often darker, nature without feeling threatened by criticism or judgement. I've only recently started really understand, and therefore, accept this compliment.

This past week I've disappeared from communication to anyone. Few know where I am, and no one knows where I've been or where I'll be. This is my shadow life now. I need a cloak now in my actions because I need to live. Everyone needs this, I believe, but so few of us are ever given the chance to truly get it so we turn to deception more often than not. How can we escape with the abundance of responsibilities and obligations that we've honored ourselves to? My turn is to say that I simply told everyone that I would simply be unreachable and that I was taking a drastic turn. Their own curiosities are their own.

Over the course of my journeys I've been told several times by those I have a great connection and trust in as well, as well as those who simply hero-fy me from afar, that I have a duty to report my findings of what I'm pursuing, finding, and experiencing. In the first three days of being in Mexico my camera died. Todd replaced it a month later and a few weeks after that (two days into a ten day highly influential road trip) that camera was broken. A month after concluding my daily reports of my every activity my first camera was wrecked. On top of this, while in Mexico, whenever I sought to write, whether I'd been alone for hours or not, when I sat to write someone would show up and get me chatting. I never ended up writing. I'm not to document, in my belief, but I'm simply to absorb.

I wonder, if my findings are so valuable, why don't the people who admire and Santa Clausify me go on their own journeys. It seems, admiring a hero for something one would like to really do just procrastinates one from not pursuing it themselves, in their own way. I like sharing this journey, and just my life in general with people. I like to tell stories, sometimes too often, but I often times over burden myself with self made obligations to share every aspect of myself with people. As I said above, my journey is mine, and though it maybe to useful to hear about my successes and failures to help someone else with their own path they still have their own path to take. Using mine, or Todds, or anyone elses, including celebrities and historical or fictitious figures, to substitute for taking that quest will take you no where.

My quest seems to have me traveling everywhere right now, but this isn't the entirety of my path. A lot of it, and most of what I feel like will be in the near future, will be very stationary; and that will be one of the largest challenges for me. I've been really inspired by my mom lately as I watch her clearly taking her own steps from a very physically stationary position. Her journey is just as exotic, thrilling, frightening, and challenging as my mobile one now, and serves to be equally as inspiring to me as she tells me mine is to her. Many of my friends are undergoing this sort of adventure as well. Exploring the wilds of stability. I'm excited now to see how well I can navigate this challenge as it comes to me.

Perspective: Both Foreign and Domestic

2011-01-23T15:58:00.000-08:00

As I have said, and re-realized, many times before the first step is to step out the door. The second step, I am now realizing, continues to be taking that first step again. I was at a function the other day I could have been at in Denver, New York, Portland, where ever, and I'm with the same people.

I see more hardened faces on travelers I see here, almost judgmental, like they have taken that first step to enter the world first hand and are quite proud of that move. How many will lean on that first move as a life accomplishment to be content with and how many of them will take that next first step? I wonder about this for myself now.

On New Years Eve I finally landed myself south via plane in Cancún, Mexico. It was under another series of circumstances that just went quite well together, the details of which I'll spare you these days. For a long while I'd been planning to head into Latin America, and up until about three days before I arrived I still wasn't sure when I would actually get there. Oddly, a blizzard in the Northeast of America would be the deciding factor to get me there the morning of New Years Eve.

When I did arrive I was thoroughly unprepared in my standard fashion. I had no pesos on hand, I had one spot booked for that night to sleep at, and I was in the process of finalizing my attendance at a school in San Cristóbal de Las Casas on the 10th of January. Other than that, I really had no idea what to do with myself. Stepping of the plane in a winter jacket and long heavy pants into 90° degree weather every reason as to why I was going to Central and South America seemed completely distant from me.

This has been a reality for me over the past three weeks now that I've been here. I came here based on a vision, granted multiple visions from more people than just myself, but this seems a bit ridiculous. It seems ridiculous when you wander, dazed, out into a resort designed airport with no local currency or understanding of the language, no friends, no one to welcome me, and a host of new and old friends behind me far in the north.

I would soon discover I wasn't to be lonely here. Within an hour or so of being in the hostel I booked that night, I found myself heading to Playa Del Carmen with an Australian student, Jess, and a Dutch meteorologist, Ghed, and we got along famously that night. A few days later, I was leaving Cancún with another new friend, Bo, a British student studying in Guadalajara.

Bo and I did a week long blitz tour of Caye Caulker, Belize, Flores, Guatemala, and finally had a few days together in San Cristóbal back in Mexico before she went home. This was huge for me to have a companion on first arrival, and essentially to escort me to my school, because as it was I was still in a bit of a daze about actually being here.

Later in the week, after classes started and I secured a room for the week in the school I would have several talks with Todd via Skype about this strange feeling. I actually don't know if I can call it strange. It feels strange, but it also feels right and expected, if that can make sense.

Touring with Bo, I slipped easily into "tourist mode". I loved meeting everyone in hostels, going out for drinks or random excursions with them. I don't think it was bad for me to allow myself my backpacking time, but it also left me feeling unsettled. This brief period has been followed by my weeks studying Spanish at school. Stability time in Mexico. Between the two of these periods my logistical mind seems bothered by the whole trip seeing the reality of it as a playful vacation away from life. Procrastination time to party just a little bit more before having to return home. Worse, the suggestion now internally that I could stay here, I don't have to return home.

In and out of the hostels, on and off chicken and first class buses, I'm meeting a lot of other travelers. Some on holiday from University, others just off and going like I am. Everyone of them have stories of extravagant places they've been to, they all collect stories as I do, all of them seem also to have some sort of philosophical bent that justifies all this traveling. Under it all, everyone seems to have a hole in one way or another that they are trying to figure out through traveling. At least that's how it seems from my observations.

I'm clearly no exception from this. I've talked quite a bit about the holes in myself that I'm trying to fill. So why am I here? Is this all a gigantic waste of time? Or is this a necessary step in my own particular path toward having what I want, which clearly seems to be in a home, family, and community? What does my gut say when I listen?

What resurfaces in my thoughts when I run this question around is my sister's advice from over two years ago now. It was when I was trying to figure out if I wanted to stay in Denver and really give it a go in community, with the coffee shop, with my friends there, or if I should take to the road again and follow this intuition. She said, neither is a right or wrong decision, you just need to commit to which ever one you decide on and follow it all the way through.

Half way into November, I was on a road trip with my friend Oscar on our way to Santa Fe, where he'd drop me off at Todds. In Flagstaff, AZ I got an email from yet another friend who had disappeared quite thoroughly into my past, Melanie. Apparently the night before she sent it she had a dream that changed completely right at the end. It became one of those lucid dreams in which I walked straight up to her and said, "Hi, do you remember me? I'm Chris Dyson, we used to hang out in New York years ago. You should contact me." Then she woke up.

I had just left San Francisco two days before she sent it and she was in Oakland. A month later I returned to San Francisco to spend Christmas with her for a week. She had just returned earlier in the year from living in Beijing for a year or so. She also had been almost as nomadic as I have been over the years, and now she was contemplating staying in Oakland. It was an interestingly timed reunion given how similar both our lives were, and the opposite ends of which we were taking them.

Here I was setting off on a long year or two abroad for the first time, yet very interested in just staying put, while she is coming back from such an excursion and seeing that daunting prospect of building a home in front of her. To both of us, we had a frightening step ahead of us, that at every point along the way we could back down and go back to our old ways.

I passed my sister's advice along to her. Just commit to what ever decision you make. So here I am now, in a kitchen in Mexico typing up a blog on my doubts of why I'm here, but yet, I honestly can't say they truly are doubts either. In my bones, I feel like I'm doing exactly the right thing for myself right now. I'm in school learning the language, I'm living in a home where everyone wants to speak Spanish all the time to practice and get better. In my bones, this feels like my preparatory phase, and that this down time to explore San Cristobal is exactly right. In my brain, however, is where I begin to push again, saying I need to start, I need to get out there, hit the road, get immersed in the countryside like I did in America.

I don't feel tuned in right now, but I don't think I need to feel that way either at the moment. This is a time for logical consumption. You can't intuitively ingest a language, I need this time to study and prepare. I do feel like next month is when relaxation time will be over, but I don't know what that means. My worry, as I told Todd, is in how easy it is to just slip into the party here and live that way. It would be completely unrewarding, but it would be fun.

Here in San Cris, after only two weeks, I find myself walking down the streets and running into different groups of friends. This hasn't happened for me since the early days of New York City living. The city itself is completely my speed. Its small, but incredibly diverse in the locals who live here and the visitors that pass through frequently. The music scene and culture is as intense as NYC, but the population is only 86,000. To top it all off, to live here is dirt cheap.

In the end, however, I know I need to keep moving at some point, and I can feel that time getting closer. To go back to my original point, this is what I see in the faces of other foreigners I see down here. This hardened look I was talking about, its that face of pride in that you had the courage to do something most other don't. Its judgmental without consciously being so, because no one knows what actions take courage in someone elses life or not.

On that first step out, when you take that deep breath and just do it, you feel a pride in having done so, and should. This first step, though, is continuously made because we always need to move forward to feel alive. In elementary school, when you first dare yourself to go out on stage in a ridiculous cow costume for the first time, when its over you are proud of the fact you did it. To go out again in another school play validates that pride as being for a real accomplishment. Once that becomes routine, though, you need another first step into something new, or something expansive.

For me, leaving on The Walk was a big first step. I consider it one of my first public steps into doing something I didn't think would be well received but felt I needed to do anyway. Since then I've grown accustomed to traveling around the US cheaply and adventurously. It became not necessarily easy, but habitual. I had my challenging days, and I had my days where everything went the way I expected. The next first step was to go somewhere completely foreign, and more than that, truly put some serious faith into this intuition concept.

From what I observed over the past year plus hitching in the US I've noticed that these intuitive pulls seem to come in waves of two or three months. I have a strong draw which leads to an intense month or two. Following that it seems to disappear completely for a period I think of as the application time. I learn something new about faith, patience, greed, which ever, through that intense period, then over the next month or two I have no guidance whatsoever. I've always interpreted that the time to practice what I've been taught without any nudgings or signs. Sort of like teaching a child about math and business, then leaving them on their own to run a lemonade stand for a bit.

After these test periods I've noticed new subtle pulls tend to come up again. This is where I think I am now. I can feel it lurking somewhere, I'm not being challenged or tested at the moment, but I'm being given little signs on what preparation needs to be done for the next lesson. Something like that, anyway.

Succinctly, I would say the feeling I have right now is one of limbo. I'm enjoying myself, I'm learning and meeting new friends, I'm coming to understand a little of how moving around and living will be here as opposed to the US, but I'm looking anxiously at next month when I think the intensity will ramp up again.

Back in '09 I remember having a distinct feeling in the fall that 2010 would be even more intense than 2009 had been. I thought, how can that be, this year was pretty intense with all the old friends I reconnected with. Sure enough, 2010 was several times more intense between things within myself, my relationship with my Dad, and my relationship with Allie. Around September again, when I was preparing to leave Port Townsend and the reality of leaving my sister and Allie was mounting I started getting that same feeling that 2011 was again going to dwarf 2010.

I still feel that way, and I think that's the nervousness I'm feeling now. Its, in some ways, another lesson for me in patience. I'm in no rush, there is no schedule, I just need to allow myself the pace that I feel is right, rather than want to go back to rushing through all my experiences.

I visited a Zapatista village in the mountains yesterday and learned their iconic animal is the snail. It is such a beautiful symbol for such a revolutionary movement. They chose it because a snail is small, weak, and slow, but most importantly, despite its slow crawl, it continues to move forward regardless. This is something I need to take to heart for myself. I tend to need to move swiftly or I run the danger of stalling out. This needs to change as it is an indicator of something very wrong in me.

Courage comes in many forms, as is always said. In World War I, there was the courage it took to go over the top of the trenches and run into fields of barbed wire, machine guns, and strafing planes, but the push to go over the top was one you could do in a hearty breath. The prolonged courage came in returning and facing home, which far fewer have the stomach for.

Something I recognize here is that my initial sense that getting here would be that initial push, and being here would just fall into a flow is too easy a hope to hope for. I need to learn from my past travels, and others examples, that my courage that I'll be needing to call on is to fall this thing, whatever it is, all the way through until I feel completed with it. One of the hardest things about that is that I'm the only one who is able to see what that is, and if it happened tomorrow I would have to face the criticisms of everyone else who is expecting a grand adventure out of me.

When leaving Port Townsend my sister gave me one of the best going away presents I could ask for. It was nothing. She and I made breakfast that morning and ate it on the beach in front of the sunrise. During breakfast she told me she'd been trying to find the perfect going away present for me and nothing was showing up. Finally it came down to the last few days and it dawned on her that that was exactly what she should give me.

Knowing how much weight and expectation I was putting on this trip, and knowing all the reasons for that expectation, she reminded me that absolutely nothing could happen. She said I should go down there, do everything I feel I should, enjoy myself, and not look for the next sign around the corner, but be there and that that may be the whole point. It was a reminder that despite observing and trying to follow and understand this inner and Universal guidance that life just simply needs to be lived regardless.

The point of the guidance is to live it well. To shift everything around and dedicate and absurd amount of energy to it, trying to explain to everyone else what it is I think I've found is a bit extraneous. If the purpose to live is to live then no guidance should be needed. I think the only reason its helpful now is to get away from the craziness we've ingrained in ourselves as necessary. Who knows?

Success in Failure

2010-08-21T14:39:00.000-07:00

My recent days I've been spending in Port Townsend regathering everything of myself again. Since that April Fools of '09, when I literally wandered out into the snow with a backpack, my external and internal understanding of the world has undergone some cataclysmic swings. Some of them have been horribly misguided, many others have been quite positively influential even if those new recognitions meant working on shifting key identities of myself, or weeding them out at long last. Its 16 months and 20 days later and now here I am finally sitting down for a few months to shuffle through these things, whether consciously or not.

On the face of it I've hit an all time low in finances since I allowed myself to go into debt for the first time since I left Denver last April. After the strange extremes of how money seems to ebb and flow around me I'm not so much worried as I am alert to new dramatic shifts coming. Because of these account lows I've taken this time to pick up some work again, back at Tyler St. once more as well as some new farm work at a place called Red Dog Farm. This farm work is where my thought process for today begins.

Failure is something of an intrigue to me lately. It has always been something that I have a hard time conceding to internally. That admission alone has been the past week's work, perhaps longer. I have far less hesitation admitting publicly I'm wrong, or have not done as I intended, or, in fact, let someone down by my inability or negligence, than I do accepting it in myself. Actually, I haven't been able to pick out a time in my memory in which I did honestly admit that to myself. My standard subconscious standby has always taken up crutches on being a little odd or eccentric, and therefore not being completely understood.

This side route to success, in my head, bypassing the crash of failure has allowed me long detoured scenic routes around genuine problems and cycles I struggle with in life. They may be long time patterns like the ones I illustrated in my last post with romantic relationships, or they could simply be fucking up at work for the day. I certainly don't think this is a problem unique to me either. On the contrary, I think everyone suffers from it to some degree or another. In the end, I definitely believe I've made headway on such issues in my life, but I definitely don't think I addressed them as quickly and efficiently as I could have had I the ability to admit my inability when reaching my borders.

This thought has struck me today because I was working for the farm at the market in town. I've always hated starting new jobs because I have always hated being "the new guy". I was quite pleased when I graduated into middle school and the fifth grade moved out of my elementary school to the middle school with me. In this way I didn't have to be in the bottom class of my new level of schooling, and this meant quite a bit to me then. Being that new guy equates to me as being that guy who doesn't know shit and is therefore useless.

When I first started working in coffee, ten years ago, I was notoriously awful at my job. I couldn't grasp any of the basics on how to steam milk, pull a shot, I couldn't remember prices, and I took forever to ring people through. For the first two months I jumped at opportunities to clean things, anything, because it meant not having to do anything I couldn't do, and there was little pressure to get it done. The only way I retained my position through those first two months was mainly due to having a manager who had a son who was a bit of a screw up and she thought if she kept giving me a chance it was like continuing to give her son a chance. Fortunately right around the time she was fired I suddenly became quite competent literally over night. That's another story though.

During those two months I hated going to work because it was a daily reminder that I could not do something, and not just something, but something that paid minimum wage and could be done by a 14 year old. I excused myself internally with reasons like not being a coffee drinker, not belonging to the snobbish latte culture, not caring to spend the effort to learn a minimum wage trade when I had just come from doing quite well in the harder to break into film world. Absolutely none of these excuses had anything to do with my actual ability.

I am a slow learner, I know this about myself. I also want to be able to do everything, and want that knowledge in my head now rather than after practicing it a bit. Once I have acquired a new skill I, of course, take great pride in how much effort I put into learning it, but until then I simply want it done and to be the great hidden master of it through sheer intuitive talent. I'm speaking, of course, about the grand world in my head, not my actual external behavior, though it does seep out from time to time.

Today I was learning something new again. I've never done much in the way of farming, and I, of course, don't know much about how Red Dog does things when at the market in town. Things are rushed and teaching someone how to stack beets and carrots is not priority to simply getting the stand up and going. What I recognized this time around in being put in a position I didn't know much about I felt my usual excuses of why I was doing things slowly rise, but this time I saw myself bat them down as stupid excuses.

All of this happened internally, but I watched my ego grumble in the early morning of not being properly trained, not having done this sort of thing much, being used to my freedom of not working on the road rather than slaving day to day for a penny. Then I saw something new come up where I said to myself for the first time probably "I just don't know how to do this, but I'm learning". Its such a simple, stupid concept, but for some reason before I'd always had trouble seeing myself as a student of anything.

Lately I've been reading somethings about maturity and maturing. What it is to be a child in comparison to an adult. What I'm getting out of it is that the separation is mainly that a child knows no boundaries or limits to themselves, an adult does. A child believes they can do absolutely everything and anything, an adult knows they need to work within the limits of their capabilities. This isn't to say one can't do anything, the difference seems to be that the adult knows one has to do the little things along the way to achieve it. Getting to the moon isn't impossible, it just takes understanding all the complexities of reality in the way.

My first real lesson toward understanding this came back in 2003 when I started my walk across the US. I had been talking about doing that since I was 11, but it took Ingrid being interested in joining me before I started even considering the necessary steps to be taken. What seemed like such an out of proportion behemoth project for those 15 years in between dreaming it up and doing it now seems like something obviously possible and achievable, just as its obvious we as a people can get to the moon where as it was a joke before the 1950s. What the hardest part of the journey was just taking that first step. This was taken in the summer of '02, not the spring of '03, with the assessing of what small steps needed to be taken.

None of this is a new concept to the world, but I also feel like it doesn't hurt to paraphrase it once again in yet another forum. I believe finding ones limitations is essential in finding out the extremes of ones abilities. To know ones borders is to know where to push. Think of how absurd it seems to expand ones territory within boundaries of what's already there. The old instruction from the art world seems to apply. Master the known before pushing into the unknown. Most of us simply like the sensation that we're breaking new ground when we push against ethereal walls, but in reality we're just going in circles.

These days, this is my experiment. As can be seen in my last few posts, discovering my limitations is my current fascination. People have been asking me if I'm okay these days I think because its not hard to see I'm in a bit of a dark space right now. The truth of it, however, is that I feel incredibly good as I go through this process. Its going to take me a very long time before I can admit to all of my limitations. Identifying my failures on the spot as they come is key to that. That identification separates the identities my ego relates to from what I really am and where my real boundaries are. Through that I can then learn how to expand beyond them.

I've always been one not only to want to rebuild the world, but rebuild it from ashes. I'm beginning to see that I will never be able to even be close to doing that unless I give up the impossibility of that dream and start to see what I'm really capable and not capable of.

Aggression

2010-08-19T13:18:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I wandered out to the beach close to midnight in search of a good chat with the ocean. I have been feeling a bit down about things and I thought I'd experiment with seeing if I could get my tear ducts working at all. I've been trying to do this every now and again since some folks have told me how unhealthy it is that I cry as little as I do. Never-the-less I sat on a log and tried to break through those old guards I bypassed in the beginning of April at the Wailing Ritual but got nothing.

I felt a stone in my heart sitting there and knew I was going about releasing whatever need releasing the wrong way. As was my experience in the Mankind Project weekend I didn't need "a good cry" at all, I needed to fucking scream my lungs out. Take note that this recognition was a secondary realization to a passive expulsion method.

The log I was sitting on was in front of a row of homes. Surely I couldn't go yelling at midnight in front of these sleeping houses, so I moved on down the beach closer to the bluffs that would block the sound. This stone in me was pushing its way up now and anxious to get out now that it had been realized. It took a few minutes for me to get to a spot in which I felt I wouldn't disturb anyone with my beastial shouts and screams before I felt I could appropriately conduct such behavior. My first scream was pathetic.

I was self conscious, concerned by the reactions of others, concerned about disturbing anyone in their slumber. This isn't nice time, this is fucking yelling time. This is the time to say who gives a fuck if I wake everyone and their mother in the middle of the night with cries of bloody murder... and soon I was screaming with gusto. I shouted gutturally, I growled, jumped flailing my arms and legs, swung at the air and beat the beach with my fist. I screamed until I was hoarse in my throat and kept on as I felt layers of my esophagus strip away.

After a good ten or fifteen minutes of this I climbed the towering roots of a fallen tree by the bluffs and sat on a prong over looking the sea. I felt immensely better as I sat there still literally growling in my throat. I realized what I need most in my life at this moment is to make noise, to make my presence known, heard, and felt. This is not at all my normal state of being.

Over the years it has often been noted and questioned how little I show anger. Todd in particular often questioned it, and I think was part of a great frustration with me when we finally stopped traveling together last summer. On a road trip back from Eugene last week Allie also grew frustrated with my lack of angry reaction to her advances to start a fight with me. These are just recent examples of how my lack of showing anger have been harmful rather than helpful.

While I sat on my tree root I started really addressing this. I had never seen it as a problem before. I had always felt a great pride at my sense of tolerance and patience with others. I thought that maybe I excelled at being patient in the face of aggression towards me, and that tolerance would help bring about more understanding between those I relate to. Looking at my most recent interaction with Allie and how my lack of reaction worsened things deeply rather than allowing her to vent frustrations without repercussion had me giving this life long view another visit.

Growing up, I've said on here before, my bedroom was directly above a very active night time kitchen. The kitchen was generally active with my parents yelling at one another, mostly my Dad yelling at my Mom. My Dad showed a lot of tantrum-like, unfocused anger when his frustrations popped. My Mom in response was generally intolerantly silent in response. Seething with frustrated anger that went unchanneled. She and I have always been quite alike in personality.

My Mom and I have generally been the diplomatists among people. We both have a genuine patience and tolerance for acting out behavior, even when its against us. We tend to let it pass over us, then later revisit that issue when everything has calmed down and hash out whatever that issue was. Contrary to most accusations against my lack of anger, I don't let things go unheeded. I do address them, I simply don't address them in the heat of an argument because its always been my feeling that nothing can be resolved while basking in anger because neither side seems to really listen to what's said at that point.

My Dad, for all his tantrums, never seemed to get anything resolved. All I saw was that with every yelling match the fabric of our family just tore and tore a little more until it ripped itself to pieces. Eventually everyone ended up scattered to their corner of the country with no one talking to the other for years on end, and only now, 20 years after the initial split, are we starting to regroup.

Sitting on my elevated root thinking about all this I remembered something my Mom had said to me during one of her frustrating bouts with men on a whole. She told me she wanted to get fat. She wanted to take up space, be a presence that couldn't be ignored. She said she didn't want to be the skinny little thing men want that is tiny and unobstructing. I thought that was an interesting way to look at why thin women are appealing to men.

I find myself these days feeling similarly. I have always been an amicable personality with most everyone I meet. I wouldn't go so far as to call myself a push over. I've definitely stood up for myself when directly attacked, but I have always stood up for myself in my own way. My aggression for holding on to my space has always been through action rather than speaking up. Pissy behavior that says don't fuck with me, rather than simply saying, don't fuck with me.

When Allie was yelling at me the other day she was literally telling me she wanted to see me angry, she wanted to start a fight with me. I noticed my reaction was that I wanted to get angry with her back because that was what she wanted, but I couldn't find any genuine anger with her to give. I was frustrated with her, and I told her that directly, but I felt like I could see what was going on with her and felt no anger about it. My problem in fights and arguments is usually that; I empathize too quickly to the other side as well as my own. I'm left with no solution for the disagreement but no will do to anything other than defend my own space while under attack.

Todd is convinced there is a deep well of anger inside me that has yet to be tapped. He has told me straight out that he is waiting for the day for my top to blow, a scene in which he expects to see an explosion rivaling the eruption of Krakatoa. A few others along the way have said similar things, but as I've searched in myself at length I genuinely don't find an unexpressed repressed anger that's just gathering steam before a blow. I have tried to find this lost anger, but I just don't think its there.

There is, however, a need in me for aggression which these bouts with screaming into the air are attached to. I'm only now starting to see these strings and follow where they are connected to me. I have a bad habit of allowing people more space than I should. As Todd notes, I have a bit of a martyrdom complex. Cede my own territory in whatever form to allow others the space for them to breathe and heal. This seems to be most visible in my romantic relationships which generally last a few months.

Allie and I have been dating about three months now, and that seems to be the thresh hold of when the heavy metals of my self imposed resentments need to be dumped. Outside of Ingrid and Stu my relationships tend to last anywhere between two and a half to four months. My relationship with Ingrid survived a year from my sabotage because I was daring myself to be in a long term committed relationship, and we were open which allowed a pressure valve to my need to martyr. Stu, on the other hand, found a psychological hold on me that had me attacking myself for seven months daring me to continue on as a challenge.

Looking at my relationship behavior I can easily see that within a month or so of being involved with someone I tend to cede most of my priorities, without recognizing it, to their needs, not only without them asking, but without them wanting me to. One more month or two seems to go by before I recognize anything of this, then the last month is spent forming an argument to myself that the relationship will not work in the end so I should just let them go now. All of this remains internal, with only little conversations here and there to provide hints.

I say all this because it illustrates how internal I am and speaks loudly to the need for me to finally be external. Not only to be fair to others, but to be fair to myself at long last. This, I think, is that boxed anger that's being referred to. It only blows in relationships, and quietly at that, because that's when its most concentrated. With friendships things are generally not confined to such close quarters. Allie and I have talked at length about how we each love and value our own space, but for whatever reason I've gone ahead and ignored that anyway.

After an hour or so of sitting up on my seaside root throne thinking about these things, still gurgling in my throat and breathing loudly, I felt much more solid as I did after that last weekend in April. Todd had asked me, after hearing about my experience at the Mankind Project, if I could access what I'd tapped there. I said I could, but it was only this night that I realized how and had done so.

Its become clear to me that I need to, as my Mom says, take up and own more of my own space. Aggression is something I am weakest on, and I need to focus my energies on strengthening that now. Healthy aggression to establish my space illustrates I know what the hell it is I'm pursuing and have a clear understanding of who I am. The more I work on establishing my boundaries I realize the more I'll know where those boundaries are.

I Find Myself In August

2010-08-13T03:37:00.000-07:00

I'm not even sure I care what's going on right now, but I'm also obsessed with it. I've fallen back into being lonely again, and I'm hoping its simply a temporary stumble back into it, but there I am.

Jane helped fix so much in me and now in my very next relationship, as it struggles, or at least I struggle with it, I fall right back to where I was. I did it tonight while consciously thinking "don't go on the internet", "don't look at Casual Encounters", "don't look at porn", "don't go look for kink on Instant Messenger". Successively I did it every step of the way like a crackhead.

I've suddenly slipped so far from being a content man, as my friend Jeff in Denver noted in May, back to a flailing sad little boy anxious for affection, or the flip side; that sordid confirmation of self indulgence through slutting it up.

This is exactly what Iron John is talking about, and MkP. The Sacred King and the Poisoned King. Both are very much a part of me, now what do I do about it? How do I eat that? How do I hold that by the throat when it so easily controls me?

I need to recognize it is not an "it" controlling me, that "it" is as much a part of me as my big toe, spleen, or face. I can't get rid of it, I need to find a way to honor it, and as Mikael says, show it love because it exists too. I have knowingly be fighting this seemingly small battle for at least 15 years and have been losing consistently.

Its what had me tied to stranger's headboards covered in cum, piss, and drool, and nearly gotten me raped several times. Its what finds me wasting entire days on my extreme lows beating off to internet porn. Its what has me circling over and over in the same relationship patterns. Fronting the best of my personalities for which ever girl I'm dating then cutting them off abruptly when I don't want to let them see me be disappointing. Its in this way I try to remain that great ex-boyfriend who never worked out in their future reminiscences. Its a way to keep them in Love with me.

What "it" is is loneliness. Loneliness is a lack of self worth, a massive blow to pride. I failed a test today, and tomorrow I'll be tested again. I'll be tested Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday too. Throughout the month, and months later another surprise quiz just to see.

So what is needing Love is my sense of self. This past year I've acquired the highest sense of myself I can remember, particularly after April's grueling trials and self probing. I was at the height of that high meeting Allie in the beginning of May. She lifted me beyond where I was and my own pillars fell because I never grounded them. When those affections dropped then they sank back to the very bottom to where I was before Jane routed all my relationship self defenses as they came at her. This explains my recent sudden desire to just get a grunt back room job at Safeway or McDonalds; to rebuild my cash for what I now see as the grand escape.

Only a few weeks ago, maybe even one week ago, heading to Peru was still a spiritual pilgrimage yearning to be completed. In fact, I was anxious to just go and see what that calling is, and complete my journey, so I could get back quickly to Allie again. Now it stands as a hollow exit from another broken home.

I noticed today in my thoughts none of my plans to return seemed satisfactory anymore. Massachusetts returned to looking like a broken wastelandscape. Living here seemed like a pathetic attempt to simply exist around Allie in the hopes to go back to being fuck buddies at least, or maybe friendly exes at best. Denver seemed equally unacceptable, just in the same way returning to New York has always felt. Like trying to reclaim glory days, but inevitably end up living there as a ghost of my former self three or four times over.

Writing this out now, however, I can feel myself finally grounding those pillars I stack my self evaluation on. Sitting here, in the Pacific northwest I've mulled around several options on how to make cash. It seems to be the Universe's favorite educational tool for me.

I've already dabbled back in my old standby for easy quick cash in the sex industry but was smacked in the face with a fitting, but shocking, roadblock. Rather than an easy bout of anonymous sexy time, I found myself suddenly in somewhat of a second relationship with a man, Doug. Money wasn't flowing in through this endeavor, instead he and I connected on a very spiritual level in which he shared several secrets of astonishing spiritual and alternatively hoodoo experiences he has only told four other close friends. We experimented with amateur energy work, breath work, and hypnosis resulting in him experiencing a vivid vision of me possibly on a high altitude lake with a man he named showing me something at sunset. I won't name him now to prevent the possibility of getting scammed when I do head abroad soon.

Sexy time for cash felt all wrong from the moment I started off doing it. In fact, sex in general has felt increasingly out of place since returning to the northwest in July. This, of course, also affects my relationship with Allie. I think in general this time up here is about finally truly battling that side of me and taking control of it.

My other work options I've been looking at have been, as I said before, the Safeway/McDonald's low thought, grunt work to just blow through approach. I looked at extreme hard labor, like delivering 100 pound crates of fish for 18 hour days, 9 days straight, in Alaska for high pay and to be able to claim a Hemingway/Bukowski experience. I've also looked into selling my photos and writing again on the high self worth end of the spectrum.

I go dollar to dollar now with a spartan number of days ahead at the coffee shop in Port Townsend. I look at these options I consider and see extreme waves of genuinely high self thought and low, very low, self appreciation. In the past 24 hours I've essentially cut off my interactions with everyone and taken refuge back in Port Townsend, having my sister's house alone to myself for the weekend to process where I am, where I'm going now.

I left Denver last April excited to explore but sad to leave. I want to leave here the same way. If $2,000 dropped in my lap tomorrow, however, I'd be turning tail and ducking out through a broken picket rather than marching off proudly once again. I've spent those first 15 and a half months filled with more life than I've ever had. Now challenged again by The Universe I have to fully address what it is I'm truly after; genuine strong connection with people again. Everyone say it together: Family.

Tonight I've found myself back to having cut everyone off from me. Every one from those I'm involved with now to those I haven't talked to in several months. Tomorrow, however, I get the chance to take up the gauntlet again and actually deal with the reality of human relations, with all its ups and downs.

Appropriately Naked In April - Part V

2010-05-19T11:32:00.000-07:00

With Stacey on the train heading home I jumped on a bus to West Seattle where I'd meet my ride, Abhishek, down to this Mankind Project thing. At this point I still had no real idea of what it was I was getting myself into. It turned out Sage was not actually going to this thing, he had wanted to but there was no availability. The weekend itself was called the New Warrior Training and from what I could tell it was designed out of initiations into manhood from various cultures with the intention of honing the modern man into actually becoming a person of accountability and integrity, rather than continuing to slump through life hoping to avoid real conflict.

There would be 36 men training that weekend and the rest would be staff men to facilitate it. Sage was hoping to be one of those staff men, but that was where the availability fell short for him. The organization encourages the trainees to carpool from where ever they are so that they can get to know each other a bit on the way down. There were supposed to be three of us, but the third, it turned out, was going to be down in that area already, so it was left to just Abhishek and I.

I arrived in West Seattle a good three hours before I was supposed to meet him. I picked up some food I was supposed to bring with me, then plopped myself down in a coffee shop to read for a while. I'd been reading Out on a Limb by Shirley MacLaine, a nostalgic book for me since I grew up with the TV movie in the '80s that my Mom loved. Reading the book now, in particular, was incredibly interesting drawing the parallels of her experiences to my own. Around 1pm, I moseyed over to meet my ride.

Abhishek is some where around 6'7" as far as I can tell, and skinny as all get out. We grabbed some pastries for the ride then set off, hitting it off immediately for the entire ride. Given that this weekend was to be what I was calling an emotional boot camp he and I went straight to talking about all of our issues, things we wanted to explore in ourselves, and family dilemmas we wanted to heal. It was among one of the best rides I'd had. Three hours later, arriving at the camp, Abhishek knew more details about my upbringing than some friends I've had for years, and I suspect the same maybe true vice versa.

Over that weekend I found myself in a position where I was to access everything. To fully dig deep inside myself and pull it all out for everyone to see. What I wanted to do when that time came was reach in and continue to explore what had happened at the Wailing. I wanted badly to cry again, to pull that dark essence out once more and really get a good look at what its root is, what that feeling is, and what its done to me in my life. When I tried to do this my face literally went dry.

Not only could I not produce tears, but I couldn't even spit. I tried burrowing into that wall again and could find nothing there to explore. I had emptied what was there two weeks earlier, and though its still there it didn't need to be explored anymore then. Fear flooded me that while all these other men were baring their souls for everyone in screams, tears, and convulsions I would have to resort to my old standby of faking vulnerability to get through.

I tried switching to my sexuality, which is an easy dark pool to draw from. I have a long history of purging out bad sexual mojo from myself; that had been the basis of everything I spewed out in the Sweat. I had never considered myself abused as a child, but I pulled up what I could for them like being humiliated incessantly by a cousin of mine that had given me scars I've long since recognized. That felt like old and well tread territory. I had been a male escort back in NYC for a time, and had a long history of manipulating gay men for sexual power because I was incredibly insecure with women at the time. None of this was new to confess.

In the end I did not have to fake it. What came out wasn't tears but a deep well of frustrated anger. Anger doesn't even feel like the right word, more like aggression and it came in the form of screaming. When Todd later asked me how the weekend was, what happened, was it worth it, I was reluctant to give specifics. I did give him the right impression though when I told him they got me to yell, to really, truly, and genuinely get up in to someone's face and yell from my very depths for a good five or ten minutes. I honestly don't know how long I yelled at this poor guy, but there was a deep root tying it down far inside me that came howling out until I was hoarse, and even then it came out some more.

The thing that was interesting to me was that with every long winded yell I pictured this friendly beast with a giant mane in my head, as if it were my face itself, roaring horrendously with the small curls of a smile on the edge of its mouth. It was as if to show this was good and okay to do, and that it needed to be done. Not that I should yell more often, or something like that, but that this side of me was also a good side and needs to stop being suppressed. To further that thought, it was saying that all sides of me are good and need to stop being suppressed. I have many dark sides, much like everyone else, and this entire past month of April has all been about tapping into them, pulling them out into the light, and publicly accepting all of it. It sounds a bit silly to me that simply yelling for a few minutes did all that for me, but I can say that since then I've become much more comfortable with asking, even demanding, what I feel is right for me to have, yet have still retained my more comfortable sense of generosity.

Sex, as I've mentioned before, has also been quite a complicated bag for me. This also came up over the weekend. I grew up in a home that didn't talk much about it, but it was around, and what was around was dark. It was an unspoken entity that was left to teenage imagination to discover, and it was ultimately what forged and then split my family in two. I was a late bloomer in this regard, though. I didn't become interested in girls until I was about 15 or 16, and I didn't lose my virginity until a few hours before my high school graduation. That story alone is a dosey, and I think I'm going to do another post on sex altogether.

Just after the divorce, when I was 13, my sister went through a particularly hard time. She ended up in and out of a psychiatric retreat while I was off busying myself with creating a new family of friends for myself. It wouldn't be until later that I began to recognize how much she lost in the division of our home, and longer still until I could process its affects to all four of us. There was an anger she had against my Dad that was deep and fierce, and I had no idea why. My assumption was that it was general teenage angst against parents, which as an early teen I was just starting to feel, and that she had chosen my Mom to like and my Dad to not.

My Mom and I have always had similar personalities of being the diplomatists, where as my Dad and sister have always been the fighters. Both roles have positives and negatives to them, but my assumption was that Wendie naturally was drawn to be close with my Mom because she's more passive. I was very wrong about the source of this bond, but I wouldn't find that out until my mid-20s when I found most everything else out about what had happened in the house I grew up in.

Wendie had a vehemence against my Dad when the separation happened, and she naturally assumed I did too. My view, however, was that with two kids and two parents one should go with each. Wendie and I have always been extremely close, but she was completely blindsided by my decision to live with my Dad when we were given the choice. In fact, I believe I blindsided everyone with that decision. Later on I found out that even among my parents the biggest thing they could agree on in the divorce was not to split up the kids. Since then, 20 plus years later, she and I have never gotten that particular level back again. The funny thing is that this decision of mine was rooted in a Mr. Belvedere episode. The dad, played by Bob Uecker, is kicked out of the house and ends up alone in some crappy apartment drinking cans of Bud playing poker. I didn't want that isolation to fall on my Dad. Ever the caretaker.

Back to my main point, while Wendie was in the psychiatric retreat it was deduced by the experts that she had been sexually abused by my father. I had been living with him for about a year on our own by that time and I was told they wanted me out of that house. I refused, and from then on set the tone of my disdain for psychologists I'm still just getting over. After years passed these allegations drifted away into a strange obscurity of our family history's past. Not necessarily as something we didn't talk about, but something that seemed more as a surreal crag everyone had to navigate that turned out to be universally accepted as false. Wendie, Mom, Dad, me, probably even the psychologists after a while all deemed this a misdiagnosis that caused a lot of random confusion but was now in our past.

Since then, Wendie has done a ton of work on herself on her role in that, my Dad too seems to have processed what happened, though I've talked the least with him about it. I had never felt affected too much by the whole thing, since my big deal was always feeling as if I wasn't involved with the chaos of my family's discord. I had always been heavily protected from every member of the family, from my sister on up to my grandmother. This had the affect of leaving me feeling like the one guy in the platoon who wasn't in the trenches with everyone else. Sure I was safe, but I wasn't apart of anything either. Since then I've found myself continually submerging myself into the muck, perhaps to make up for lost comradery.

Because I never felt affected, I never did much work on how this period in time took its place in my life. The possibility of being scarred from it at all never even occurred to me, yet at the same time many who have known me sexually have asked if I was abused as a child. My thoughts have scoured over my youth and found nothing, no lapses in memory, no times of trauma other than harassment by my cousin but I certainly wouldn't have called that sexual. What finally came to light, the following Monday night as I tried to go to sleep, was that it seems I absorbed both sides of these floating allegations.

With an inability to see any guilt in my father or be able to fathom my sister making these accusations without sincerity I think what happened was that I internalized a sense that perhaps I had been the abuser. My mind ran to memories of us bathing together as kids, or running around naked together as toddlers. I was able to reconcile these memories with the accusations into the possibility that she translated those same memories into trauma. This all also happened around the time I was hitting puberty. I believe as my sense of sexuality developed I took on the role of a victim. Years later, when I got into New York, with that shelter of anonymity to run around under, I found myself exploring many scenarios as the abused.

I mention all this, because I had no idea how that affected me until I got home from this weekend. By that Monday everything had been addressed in the past two weeks between the Wailing, the Sweat, and this weekend. I'd felt huge ancestral ties which addressed my disconnect with my family. I had pulled up my childhood memories of fighting and yelling between everyone in my home along with my isolation from it all. Now my sexual explorations were beginning to see much clearer roots. These things are, from what I can see, the base palette of where the root of all my various darker deeds stem from. The need for chaos, the need for isolation, independence, the inability to stay put anywhere, the lack of attachments all stem from these base things. I spent the entire day writing. Some writing was emails to the huge base of male friends I'd just found, other writing was the writing you see up here, and more still was done in my private journals.

By Monday night I was exhausted, needed to work at 8am the next morning, but when I went to lie down at midnight something about those accusations against my Dad when I was a teenager knocked loose in my head finally. I didn't sleep the entire night. I lay staring at the ceiling for a good two hours excited at this new realization, and terrified of the talks I knew I suddenly needed to have. One with my sister, another with my Dad which I've yet to have, and another still with my friend Loreli just to tell her my appreciation about how her and her daughter, Izzy, being in my life has helped heal this rift I didn't quite know I had.

After those two hours trying to sleep I gave up and went back to writing until 7am when I had to leave for work. When I got there Teresa was surprised to see me and let me know I wasn't scheduled that day, so I could go home and sleep. I went home, but I still didn't sleep. From the weekend I was able to pick out a mentor, basically someone to keep in weekly contact with to help keep myself in touch with everything I accessed then. Essentially an exterior touchstone reminder. I called him and left a message then waited to hear back.

A different staff man from the weekend called to tell me about a Welcome Home ceremony that Friday and then asked how I was doing being home again. I hesitated, sputtered, told him I was fine, then told him I'd called my mentor and was simply waiting to hear back from him. He asked again if I wanted to talk about anything, and again I stalled. I found myself clamming up again until finally I told him about being unable to sleep the night before and what was going through my head. It was an immense help.

Later in the day my mentor called back and we too had a very helpful talk continuing on what the previous staff man and I had worked out. All the while, I was also receiving emails back from many of the men I'd trained with over the weekend who also were telling me their stories of coming home, and asking honestly how I was as well. Every one of them wrote me back. By the end of that Tuesday I felt much better but I was discovering yet another wall I was floundering under.

On Wednesday I did work, and was feeling much better after getting some sleep. When I got home, however, I found more emails to respond to from these men. Sitting down to write back good solid honest replies of how I was and what had happened I found myself shutting down again. I thought, these guys don't honestly want to know how I am. I get it, the weekend was intense and powerful, but its also over. Everyone's at work again and everyone is trying to hold on to those last threads of what had happened then. I nearly shot back a bunch of emails saying things like "that's cool, I'm good." and other such trite responses. I didn't. I literally had to dare myself instead to write back how I actually was doing, what that battle was I'd just gone through. Over and over I found myself thinking the next guy I was writing was just asking out of politeness or to hold on to the weekend, but then I was getting huge in depth emails back expanding on what I'd just written to them.

What I was finding was that I had no trust in this idea that a man, especially a new male friend, wanted to hear anything about how I was doing. It was a stereotypical male problem that a really didn't think I had an issue with. I spoke with another staff man that day about it when he called about a group I was hoping to join of his on Thursday night. There are follow up groups for the weekend for support for those in different regions, but generally those people are in one place. With all my wandering, my question for him was if I would be able to drop in and out of different groups around the country. Later that night I got an email from him that felt like a calling out to the villagers for aid.

It nearly made me cry I was so touched when I got the email going to every community group leader around the nation. It was to let all of them know that one of their own was wandering and needed safe havens where ever I went. I pictured the blowing of a battle horn with vikings sailing in.

That night I had that talk with Wendie about those days of the accusations and how I realized they had affected me. She has done loads of work on this for her end, so she was well prepared and very solid in her perception of it now, and for that she was a huge help to me again. by Thursday I woke up feeling energetic and very much alive and healthy. Wend had to move that day, so we packed all her things up and spent the day relocating her to her final nest. It was my turn to help her again.

Appropriately Naked In April - Part IV

2010-05-19T10:56:00.000-07:00

The Workshop in Portland was not all that I was hoping it would be, but I still got some things out of it. The night before Wendie went off to a party with Abby and Will while Stace and I wandered off on our own for the night to catch up. The three of us, Wendie, Stacey, and I, all rose with some sluggishness in the morning, but found our way to the Convention Center in time with ease to do our volunteering.

The volunteering was a bit ridiculous. We were charged with simply making sure we got a wrist band on everyone with a ticket. Once that was done we were participating audience members right along with everyone else. Wendie was hilarious to watch as she grew a sense of amused frustration at the lack of efficiency and effectiveness of our job. It was easy to see how to scam the system that was set up and there was no way on our part to prevent it. I could have cared less, Stacey was pretty much the same, Wendie learned to let it go but had a hard time accepting that the job she was doing was completely irrelevant in the long run. She's always been the academic and career oriented one in the family.

Once the workshop started it was interesting to me to hear what Dr. Weiss had to say. Most of it was what I'd read in his books, although I hadn't expected him to be as funny as he is. After an hour or so, though, he lead us through the first regression of the workshop.

It was much like listening to the CD. I was getting vague impressions and seeing images here and there that would barely focus before flitting away. Again, though, I saw myself in my mother's womb, but this time I could feel the excitement I had about being born. I had a sensation that I was the last to come and that everyone was waiting for me. I was about three weeks overdue and the youngest in my immediate and expanded family. In fact, I told an old girlfriend once that I felt like the world's younger brother at one point. The sensation I got about what I was excited about was that I really liked getting back into a body again, getting back into the adventure of living a life on earth. There was a nervousness in me as well, but I couldn't quite pick out what it was until later in the regression.

As he guided us through previous life times I saw myself as a young woman either in the Highlands of Scotland or out in the American frontiers by the Rockies, in a little cabin with snow on the roof. She was looking away, off to the mountains as if alone and waiting for someone to return. I had the impression that she was strong physically, but weak emotionally, somewhat dependent. This seemed to be sometime in the mid to late 1800s; maybe 1876.

I then saw myself as an old grandmother lying in my deathbed. There was family all around, among them was my Dad's mother who was my son that time around, and my Dad who was a grandchild of mine. I could feel Wendie there too, but only in spirit. I got the impression she was my husband in that life, but had been drunk and abusive, and had died before me. We were guided through to after our death and I found myself, in spirit, with Wendie after that life arranging how we'd correct the wrongs we'd committed against each other the next time around. That was the hesitation I felt when I revisited the womb before. I was nervous about coming back into a life with her again, afraid that she would be as abusive as she apparently was in the one before. So far, I think we've worked it all out pretty well.

Anyway, that was the big thing that I uncovered through the workshop. Later in the day there was a second regression that was a bit murkier. I could see images of being an Asian farmer somewhere, silhouetted walking by a rice paddy with some oxen, and a few other things here and there, but nothing that really stuck with me. We were also guided through some sort of imaginary building that took us life to life, and we had someone to guide us through. My image was of running all throughout this building with my friend Ang, which surprised me a bit.

The workshop ended around 5pm and we returned to Will and Abby's for dinner before heading home. Wendie fell asleep on the ride back, so Stacey and I had a good visit over the four hour drive back to Port Townsend. On Monday, Stace and I ran around town together exploring, while Wend looked into all her various house options that had arisen over the weekend. By the end of the day she'd found a great house by the north beach in town she could move into next Thursday and a place to house sit until then.

Tuesday I went to work again, then afterward we had a small picnic for my 34th birthday. Wednesday Stacey and I took the ferry out of Port Angeles and spent the day out in Victoria, BC wandering around. Thursday, as planned, we returned to Seattle where we set up shop at my old coffee shop haunt, Bau Haus, and visited her friend Molly before staying the night back at Chieu and Scott's. After a really great week with her, Stacey was already heading back the next day. We had a quick coffee and a bagel Friday morning then I dropped her off at the train station.

Appropriately Naked In April - Part III

2010-04-27T09:38:00.000-07:00

The weekend following the Wailing and Sweat Lodge was something Wendie and I had been anticipating for a month or so. In previous posts I've written about how Stacey had recommended these books on hypnotherapy and past life regression by Brian Weiss last May. I ended up giving the first one, Many Lives, Many Masters, to Wendie for her birthday last June, then she liked it so much she highly recommended I read it. When I returned to Denver last July I picked it up out of the library, loved it, then read two more of his books within a few weeks.

The concepts and insights from those books formed much of the framework for what I got out of the second half of last year. Through Wendie and I, we then recommended those books on to my Mom, both her sisters, various friends of ours and of the family, and so it spread. These books were directly related to me seeing Ari while I was in Port Townsend, since he had studied how to do hypnotherapy and regression under Dr. Weiss as one of his first students. Through that experience I had visions of my life as a pirate captain among others, and started looking seriously at issues of control that I hadn't previously seen.

All of that is back story to the fact that Wend and I found out Brian Weiss was coming to Portland, OR to do a workshop two days before my birthday. Back in December, when I was staying with Stacey, she and I had decided to meet up in Central America somewhere for my birthday, since that was where I thought I'd be at the time. It worked out quite well that I wasn't for her situation, since she was able to take two weeks off to take the train from Springfield to Portland and spend my birthday week with me as well as attend the workshop.

In preparation for this weekend, Wendie and I decided that we'd listen to a CD she had of Dr. Weiss that guides you through a regression at home. He recommends it as a way to get used to his voice so that one is able to dive deeper with each session and gain greater access to the subconscious and, theoretically, deeper memories. So we played the CD Monday night while we sprawled on the living room floor in relaxation and allowed ourselves to be taken back.

Just as I had done it last fall, I was able to see visions of things, but they were murky. Last fall when I did the CD on my own I saw visions of choppy water, felt the sensation that I'd been bound up and tossed in the sea, and I could see clearly the city of Venice on the coast and the hull of the ship I was being tossed from. I also saw the year 1606 come up. Other than that I didn't know what was going on there. When I saw Ari, and had an actual person guide me through the regression asking questions in response to my replies, everything became much clearer.

It was then that I had extremely vivid images, as if from out of the eyes of the man himself, of walking around the captain's quarters, looking at his hands and feet as if they were my own, and theoretically, they were. His name was Alastair and his crew was mutinous because I believe the Spanish armada had cornered them so they blamed him as a scapegoat but couldn't muster up the courage to over take him. This pissed him off and made him extremely sad, to the point where tears welled up in my eyes, because he thought they had more strength than that and it disappointed him. I never learned who threw him overboard, the Spanish or the crew, or if in fact that was him I saw before. It certainly seemed to be.

Anyway, Monday night I revisited a few childhood days and got a vision of the clock in the hospital I was born in at the exact time I was born. 3:59am, I watched it tick over from 3:58. There is no time on my birth certificate, but my Mom tells me I was born some time around 4am. Along with that I also saw silhouetted images in the ancient middle east chilling under a joshua tree sipping on wine and talking in depth about philosophy. I got the impression it was me in a previous life then and Christ, but I also think that could be an image conjured up out of ego.

The next night we did it again and I had some much more crazy images. I saw red out buildings of a 1600's American Colonial farm. It was all in drawings though, like heavy crayon, and the images were of things like the corner of a building, or half a bench. I also saw what felt like Atlantis going to shit. With Ari I had seen myself as a worn, old, wise man that was spent after the chaos of Atlantis had torn the continent apart and was in the last throes of sinking. This time I just saw mayhem and madness.

The last image that I got was the clearest. It was of a man of some sort walking through the heavy iron gates into the arena of a grand Roman Colosseum. I don't know if it was the Colosseum in Rome, or just another huge one, and I'm not sure if the man I saw was a gladiator or a peasant thrown in there, but he was definitely there to die and not pleased about it.

We only ended up doing that for those two nights. I worked later that week, and we visited with friends in town, played board games, and I watched Clash of the Titans which was horribly disappointing, though still fun. On Friday evening, about an hour before we were going to get in the car and drive down to Portland Wendie got a call that drastically altered our plans. Before I go into that, I should return to the beginning of the week for a moment.

Sunday, I mulled around the idea a bit more of going to the men's group the weekend after the Portland workshop. It seemed to fit. Stacey would be getting on the train that Friday in Seattle, so then I'd be well positioned in the city already for Sage to pick me up and bring me where ever it is with him. The one obstacle was that Teresa wanted me for Tuesdays and Saturdays, but when I thought about that a second time I realized how ridiculous a reason that was not to go. Here I was, I year on the road now having quit my full time job, gone through pains to make sure I had no bills, made all kinds of observations during that year of money showing up when it was needed, all to pursue a greater understanding of myself, and now I was thinking of not going because I could miss a four hour shift at work that could easily be covered.

I sent Sage an email to ask him a bit more about it. Sacred Groves had been on suggested donation, so I sort of had the impression this would be too. Wend and I both gave a decent donation to the Groves and I figured if this thing was decent I'd do the same there. On Monday he wrote back letting me know it'd be $600, but assured me it was well worth it. I immediately wrote back telling him there was no way and started putting it out of my mind.

That afternoon I got a call from Ang. I answered because I thought it might be an emergency call to talk, but she was surprised to hear me pick up. Her Dad is moving from Toledo to Vegas and specifically asked if I could help him drive. He'd fly me to Toledo from where ever I was and pay me for my time, and I was free the week he was asking for. I told her that sounded perfect, and since I know what sort of life change this means for him, and indirectly for Ang, I got really excited that he'd asked me to help.

About two hours later I was checking email and got one from my friend Maddy in NYC. She too was writing to see if I'd be up for a job she'd heard about from one of her friends. He needed someone to drive a 24 foot truck from Connecticut to Utah, was willing to pay one way airfare home, all travel expenses paid, and $150/day expecting it to take about a week. All of this, and asking for around the end of June, just after my friend Josh's wedding which is my last commitment in America. I was stunned at the extreme similarities of the two job offers, and the perfect timing of them both. If the second one panned out that would give me the perfect amount of funds to live off of for several months in Latin America and the one way airfare to get me straight there without having to spend any of it in expensive America. I told her to sign me up.

I sat with those two offers on the table now and reassessed my situation. Sage tells me its $600 for this weekend, two totally random, well paying, perfectly timed job offers show up the same day; not to mention they are trucking oriented jobs which is a career I'm eyeballing seriously for when this odyssey is over. Since my phone was on already from talking to Ang I called Sage up and told him I'd changed my mind and was extremely interested in this weekend now, despite still knowing nothing about it. When the Universe points these days, I follow if I see it. Sage then said to me "well, if money is an issue we can see if you'd be eligible for a scholarship toward that tuition". Sweet.

I called the scholarship guy, Scott, that night. It was with a group called The Mankind Project, apparently an international group with branches all over the US, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, even South Africa. The weekend was dubbed the New Warrior Weekend, and was designed as a modernized adaptation of ancient initiation rites into manhood. He asked me what I thought I'd get out of the weekend and I told him I was hoping to get internal tools I would need when in Latin America. I gave him my full story about roaming the States trying to tune in to my intuition fully, and the spiritual growth I've been working on.

It turned out the tuition was actually $650, the Universe upped its ante, and before calling I got impulsive and signed up already paying the $150 deposit since time seemed of the essence. In talking with Scott it sounded like this was exactly what I was after, and he warned me that it would be physically, emotionally, and psychologically challenging. That egged me on further. I gave him full disclosure on my financial situation telling him I had a temporary job but a total of probably 30 hours for the entirety of my employment. I did have the full $650, with that income and my tax return, but that would be the entirety of my funds. I also told him, if it seemed fair to him I'd be completely willing to pay the full amount given my philosophy on being provided for, but that it didn't work with reliance on it so the tuition would certainly be helpful. I left it in his hands.

He replied simply by saying, you've paid $150 already so your balance is $500, how much of that do you think you can cover. The number $200 popped into my head so I said it to him without hesitation. He said okay, and it was a done deal, I was in. I don't know what would have happened if I said I couldn't pay anymore at all, or that I really needed my $150 back on top of not being able to pay anymore. I didn't even think about it, but it did seem like the most fair financial negotiations that I ever had been involved with, and after the weekend was over I wished I did have the funds to cover the rest it was so worth it.

So that brings me back to Wendie's phone call Friday evening. An hour before leaving for Portland the lady she was subletting from called to tell her she'd broken her leg down in California. Their arrangement was that Wendie got a reduced rent for the flexibility of being able to clear out of the apartment within a week or two's notice should an emergency arise and the lady needed her home back. The broken leg was her emergency and she asked if Wend could be moved out by Wednesday. She said yes, of course, in accordance to their agreement, hung up the phone and had a panic attack.

I was impressed with how well composed she actually was with the whole thing. Sure she was in hysterics, freaking out about the fact that here we were with plans to go to Portland for the weekend, someone to meet there and pick up, a workshop we'd signed up to volunteer at for free admission, and even with coming home early Sunday night she'd still only have three days before she needed to have a place to go. In her sudden rush of homelessness she maintained an amazingly cool head between heavy breathing and some tears.

Within two hours we scoured all the main public notice boards in town, she'd sent out something like 200 emails to every possible connection she knew in the Port Townsend area asking if anyone had a place for rent, or knew of one, and we even had time for a slice of pizza before the shop closed. I have to admit when I figured out the news through the reaction on her face on the phone I felt like this was really good news for her coming in a really inconvenient package. I kept reassuring her of my faith in that, and she was steadily trying to believe it and appreciated me saying it.

She was worried about what to do with me if she couldn't find a place by Wednesday and I reassured her again that that should be the last of her worries. I'm the guy who regularly sleeps outside and am well prepared for it. On top of that, with Stacey coming into town we had plans to stay the night in Victoria, BC Wednesday night anyway, and Seattle Thursday night so she could catch her train. Friday and Saturday nights I'd be gone at this crazy Mankind Project weekend thing, and if she still had nothing by Sunday I could either stay in Seattle with friends, camp out around Port Townsend to be able to go to my last two days of work Tuesday and Wednesday that week, and after that I could head off. That would free her up to just be her on a friend's couch in town, without the baggage of some backpacking brother in town as well.

By the time we did end up heading down to Portland she'd found three places she liked the sound of and had a slue of offers from friends all over town that, if in a pinch, she could crash with them until she got on her feet. She was being given the chance to refresh her life after this break up and get new surroundings, while also being shown how large a support network of friends she really had in town. On top of all that, she got some really great support from Daniel himself who called offering his help in anyway he could give it; including letting her stay back at their old place if she needed despite the awkwardness that might create. It was the good news that came in the annoying package.

That night we met up with Stacey in Portland and stayed with Wendie's friends Will and Abby, whom I've always liked as well, from when I knew them living in Seattle many years ago. The next day would be the workshop, then the hard work would begin of actually securing an apartment within three days.

I told Wendie that between the two of us it seemed like the Universe had busted open over us, and through that gash came a river of life. Our job was just needed to lean into it and float the rapids with all their intensity.

Appropriately Naked In April - Part II

2010-04-27T02:31:00.000-07:00

The Sweat Lodge would be the second of these little exercises that would come along in April to conjure up some deep demons. I woke up paranoid about my hydration level since everyone had so heavily emphasized it the night before and I had drunk no water. While my sister zenned out, threw my things in the car, then emptied about a gallon of water down my throat. That filled about half an hour of the morning.

There was a community breakfast with others who had stayed the night on the compound from the Wailing. About half of them had stayed, the other half had gone home. One girl came back, a young cute girl who'd just gotten back from traveling around Europe, and the rest were just new folks arriving for the Sweat. Of the two other guys the previous night one had stayed. Another also showed up with the new group. Sage was the name of the man who attended both with me and later in the day he proved to play a very influential role in the rest of my month.

After breakfast we made our way to the Meadow through some winding forest paths. The entire compound was gorgeous. A perfect setting for such a spiritual retreat. Forested everywhere, little cabins and yurts strewn about here and there, hidden in groves and deep down out of sight paths. Of course, it was decorated as well with Tibetan flags, Buddha statues, and a variety of dream catchers, gates made of unprepared branches, you get the idea. I felt quite at home there.

In the Meadow was a fire pit stacked with rocks. We had an opening ceremony building the fire and lighting it, then did a round of introductions like the night before stating our names and reasons for being there. It was less of a collection of awe inspiring confessions this time, as much as it was a gathering of people out of curiosity to what a Sweat was for the most part. Again, I was among that group, but the authenticity of the ceremony still held for me.

Following introductions there was an element to the ritual I hadn't anticipated. We all sat down on a blanket with cloth and string among a host of ingredients and made ourselves some prayer bag talismans. It was a neat process, kind of like arts and crafts infused with the symbolism of ceremony. The ingredients were things like cedar, sage, cornmeal, tobacco, dried flowers, things like that. Each had a meaning such as home or family in cornmeal, purification in sage, or masculinity in tobacco. The meaning of the bags were to represent either what you were trying to attain or let go of. Externalizing the meaning to make it present for you as your body is challenged in the heat of the Sweat.

We then went through a gathering of blankets and putting them on the willow branch framed hut. It was a brand new hut replacing a nine year old one the residents there had been used to, so there was an emphasis on this particular Sweat even for the old dogs because of that. Once it was complete the ritual of entrance began. The hut was clothing optional, so most of us opted out of them. Wearing our talismans we went to each direction; east, south, west, and north, then placed lavender, tobacco, and sticks from the old hut into the fire that cooked our stones before crawling into the Sweat Lodge.

I found myself, while crawling in and finding my seat on the dirt floor, loving getting the dirt on my hands and knees. When I did sit, I grabbed a scoop of it off the floor and rubbed it into my skin. More people crawled into the hut so we had to scoot down occasionally to make room. Every time we did, I found myself taking up another scoop from in front of the few inches I'd scooted into and rubbing more on my face, chest, or shoulders so that I always had a piece of the dirt directly in front of me rubbed into my skin.

When we were all in, the stones came in glowing a deep red from within, and sat in the pit in the center. Then the front flap dropped down and we were all plunged into complete darkness. The level of darkness where even after ten minutes of sitting in it I still couldn't see my hand in front of my face. Just the glow of the rocks. The woman leading it poured scoops of water over the rocks to create the steam and heat the interior. It was an interesting first round.

There were to be four rounds total. In the first the heat intensified, my body coated itself in sweat dripping off me, I spit out phlegm that came up, and moaned, wailed, and whispered out summonings along with everyone else as we conjured up spirits to help guide us through our journey. It was an eerie scene. Something that easily could have felt staged for a creep show if it didn't feel so genuine amid the heat, sweat, and steam. Sitting naked among nine other naked strangers in the dark sweating together. I found myself rubbing more dirt on me, and whispering into the heat for Alastair, the pirate captain of the 16th century I had seen facing mutiny back in my hypnotherapy session. This all went on for some time.

It eventually died down. The flap opened again and the first round was over. Someone had to pee, and someone else needed more water, and soon all of us were filing out into the cold air again. I had to pee bad as well. My thought in guzzling all that water in the morning was that it would come out through sweat, but apparently that wasn't to be the case. It was kind of hilarious to me, though, to see all these naked people spilling out to every edge of the Meadow pissing in the bushes, whether squatting or standing, while others sprawled themselves in the grass to cool off.

When I was done, I turned to go back into the Lodge but when I took a few steps away from the dirt in the forest I couldn't help but drop down into it full body and completely cover myself. It was as if I just couldn't get enough dirt on me. I rubbed in in my hair, on my face, in my beard. I ground it into my arms and legs, my chest. Once I felt sufficiently covered, I crawled back into the Lodge. Ten more stones were brought in, and the flap was dropped back down again.

In this second round was the time to voice our prayers. Essentially this meant we went around, in order of our circle, and voiced exactly what it was we were purging from ourselves in this Sweat. This was the round that held the intensity.

For one, the heat was the most intense this round by far. It was so thick and palpable that often I had to lay out on the ground fully to take advantage of what I'm normally fighting when I camp out at nights on the road sides. The earth has a habit of sucking the heat out of your body which is why a bedroll is necessary, or at least a thicket of branches under you to give you some loft like what I usually do these days. Instead, I laid out on the earth this time to let it have some of the overwhelming heat my body was absorbing. When I felt I could take some more, I'd sit back up and could feel my head enter what seemed like an upper atmosphere of heat in the Lodge.

More than the heat, though, the intensity came from the prayers. They were composed of the dislodging of pent up guilt long buried in each person. Whether deserved or undeserved guilt. Voicing of things that had happened to them that previously had been too traumatic to speak of until the heat and the darkness both blankets you and smothers it out of you. I was one of the last people in the circle, so I sat and listened, sometimes on the verge of tears, as each person spoke or screamed it to the Lodge.

When it was finally my turn I, of course, had planned out what I was going to say. I opened my mouth, though, and found myself saying things far beyond my comprehension of understanding as I said them. I had to think back at what I'd said afterward to make sense of it.

I had intended to speak to my bad sexual habits. The bad sexual mojo I was calling it. But as I talked about it I found myself tapping a root that dove into a deep ancestral connection to this upheaval. Scouring over fucked up internet porn, toying with men using their attraction to a straight man as manipulation to gain sexual power, charging them to simply look or touch my body, bringing that false power into my relationships with women and exploring it through handcuffs and blindfolds. I've written more in depth about that history to put up later, but at this time it was the sudden connection that hit me to where all of that was funneling into me from.

I began talking about my father and his fucked up sexual behavior, and my mother's father with his many known infidelities with women as he traveled around the world. And his father before that claiming that "every red blooded American male has a right take a mistress", and down the line. In the darkness, in this vision of messed up male sexual ancestry, I fell all the way down the family tree, I so meticulously researched over the past decade, to the kings of antiquity that I am descended from. King Henry I of England and his brutal conquests, King Alfred of Wessex, Charlemagne and his conquest of France and Germany, and down to the Romans. I saw this connection of them raping scores of women with armies of men, raping lands of whole nations and cultures, and seeking conquest after conquest through out generations to best their fathers by killing thousands.

This vision went all the way down that line then all the way back up it again, through the ages, through my great grandfather, through my grandfather, through my father and landing in me. The message as it landed in me seemed to hit me square that now it was my turn. Would I perpetuate it, or would I finally work it out healthily and heal it at long last? I was hoarse in saying all of this, and tears were welling up in my eyes. It hit me as a reason as to why my life has been so easy so far. It seemed it was to add no extra burdens to this already titanic weight of culminated male ancestral history to clean up.

I felt spent when I was done spewing. The heat had fully engulfed me and I had to lie back down immediately once I was finished to cool off. Thankfully I was close to the end of the circle, and after three more women spoke the flap opened again and we could step back outside. I stumbled out and lay in the grass for a few minutes.

The third round was much tamer. It was a round of calm. Once the rocks were in and the flap was down there was a little bit of talk and then silence. I laid on the ground and just meditated in the dark. The heat wasn't nearly as intense either. We all just lay there in silence for a good long while.

The fourth round was light hearted. It was the round to go around again and tell what we were filling the space we'd just emptied with. With all that purging you need something positive to fill that hole with or it will simply come back or cave you in. I didn't connect as well with this round, but spoke of having a family and children and my coffee shop in a community. We then all sang for a little while and eventually opened the flap again.

There was a potluck dinner in which I got a chance to talk with the cute girl about her travels. I talked with some other interesting people as well, one of which was Sage. He was very excited about having another guy in this group of women doing spiritual work and told me about a men's group he'd been to that was meeting up two weekends from now. It sounded neat and we swapped info. I told him I wasn't sure how it would pan out since my temporary coffee shop job wanted me on Tuesdays and Saturdays, but I'd keep it in mind.

On the ride home Wendie and I were both silent. She had had a very intense day in the Sweat Lodge, and I was still mulling over both the Sweat and the Wailing. When we got home she went to bed and I took a long bath thinking again about that strange draw to Peru in the Wailing. It became very clear to me that ditching everything now to fly straight there was not the way to go. That part of the reason for being there was getting there. With that thought, I dried off and went to bed.

Appropriately Naked In April - Part I

2010-04-26T20:39:00.000-07:00

I want to share some things about this past month. I'm talking about it as if its over and I still have one more weekend to go. These weekends, it seems, is when the Universe cranks the knob a little bit higher in the flowing river of intensity. Thankfully I'm given these weekdays to sit with it, go to work with it, and lend my support to my sister while the Universe cranks the knob for her during those days.

While back in Texas with Katy, she and I took to doing rune readings most mornings and tarot readings every few days or so. We just liked it, we were having fun. We both took it seriously as well, but mostly we liked playing with those "tools of fate reading" as they may be called. With those tarot readings we generally did full spreads and asked things like "what I needed to know about the path I'm on", "what did I need to know about the next week or month". Things like that.

I asked once what I needed to know with my visit to Port Townsend. I asked it because I was going strictly by request from my sister. She had broken up with Daniel, her fiance, and requested my support through the process; she even flew me up from San Antonio so she had a date she could rely on me being there. I wanted to gain any insights I could on how to support her best. Do I smother her with support? Do I just go to be there, but not be too invasive?

Again, I don't look to these tarot things as the end all be all of advice, I take them with a grain of salt. I do, however, generally find the cards giving good advice and I often will reference what they've said when I'm working out how to do things. For the skeptics, I grant you that this could be using the interpretation process of card reading as a tool to access my subconscious, much like the hand in the puppet methods of psychotherapy. Whatever it is, I find it helpful and it works.

Anyway, the reading clearly spelled out that I would be heavily challenged. That I would be facing a prolonged time when I would either make immense progress in my growth, or falter back into a terrible stagnance that would reverse all that I've done so far. As the cards lay out they give an inner self and an outer, or projected, self. Neither of them said very good things about me. The projected self called me a false strength if I remember correctly, and the inner self claimed I was an internal liar. Now lets get back into what happened this month.

The weekend of the first full week in April Wendie wanted me to go to these two spiritual growth functions at a place called Sacred Groves that she loves. I believe I've mentioned before my great disdain I've struggled to over come about psychologists, therapists, counselors, etc. That disdain doesn't necessarily carry over to these spiritual, self help, hippy things, but there's definitely still a wariness to them. I view them with the same adjusted view I've taken with the psychology field. They can be quite powerful and healing, or they can be utter shams, pathetically amusing, and a waste of time if you have no interest in the sociological aspects of how far escapists are really trying to go.

I have, however, been to things with my sister before like this (she is an avid pursuer of these venues) and have often been impressed with the authenticity behind the ceremonies and their affects. The times I have walked away from them feeling nothing but pity for the people who believed in it, my sister had felt the same disappointment, and usually more emphatically than I did. Still, though, whenever she invites me to these things I'm always curious to go, but wary of investing myself into it.

Sacred Groves is an hour and a half south of Port Townsend and has little cabins and yurts to stay in while there, so when we arrived we piled our stuff into the cabin and headed to the main building. I'll spare you the nitty gritty details as I feel myself starting to draw myself into giving them. The event we were attending that night was going to be a Wailing.

A Wailing, to the best of my descriptive powers, is a ceremony where I bunch of people assemble in a circle around a candle, or small symbolic altar of sorts, and create a space to really just grieve. I mean really dig in and get your shit out of you. This is something I'm often accused of repressing, yet claim as a large part of what this journey of mine is all about. So far my "spiritual sojourn" has consisted of tapping my intuition to the best of my ability and recollecting my past into something recognizable and tangible. This would be the first real step into digging around in the dark with vigor.

The room was large and circular with a domed ceiling crowned by a large circular skylight at the peak. There were about ten or twelve of us attending, three of us were guys, which was apparently an abnormally large percentage. We sat in a circle and introduced ourselves by saying our names and why we'd come. From that quick round I knew I could take this ceremony seriously and invest myself into it as people checked in with serious issues one normally doesn't disclose to strangers among others who checked in like me as "I'm here to support my sister and see what this is". A few guidelines were given for the process which essentially were don't try to comfort someone in the process. All of us are here to dig into deep dark places and comfort will only pull us out of it keeping it inaccessible. From there some music came on and it was suggested that we simply start by stretching to relax.

It took me a good half an hour or so of really trying to feel and then leaning into that feeling of tingling in my chest and face to actually get myself to conjure up tears. By the time I did I didn't know it until I felt my leg getting wet because they were streaming off my nose and chin. I found my lead in to getting there very interesting because it was focused around massaging, stretching, and basically tending to my legs and back, but primarily my feet. All of these parts of my body are the work horses in keeping me mobile and nomadic, or to put it in other words, they allow me to be on my own or keep me isolated; disconnected or free.

What came up in my mind when the tears started was an image of the front steps of my first apartment in Denver the night I got jumped in there. That that came up first as the gateway was fascinating to me as well. I was drunk, and two drunk guys followed me into my building. One got ahead of and behind me as I spun to see the other come in the door and caught me at the top of the steps putting me in a full nelson. The other came straight at me to work me over. This was my bad ass Mel Gibson, Lethal Weapon moment. I kicked off the top step, as the guy behind me held me, just as the other guy was rushing me about a foot away. I kicked him in the chest with both feet sending him flying back down the flight of stairs into the wall, and with that kick I pushed off him into the guy holding me sending him into the wall behind us. I slammed the back of my head into his face and he let go of me. They both then ran out of the building and I stood at the top of my steps in all my new found Brutal Man Glory, drunk and adrenalized, yelling at them that they were cowards and who were they to fuck with me. I then went to my apartment and just sobbed for half an hour for a reason I still have no idea of. Pride of bad assishness to weak sobbing in a moment's shift.

None of that actual confrontation actually came up when I started crying at the wailing. I just saw the empty image of the stairs and front doorway in the night and had that dream knowledge that it was that particular night I was seeing. Once I saw that I was also hearing the other people in the room yelling, crying, shouting and stomping. I could single out my sister's shouts in particular which helped transfer me to the stairs of the house I grew up in. The light from the kitchen reflecting off the hallway wall and my parents loudly yelling at each other from there. Then I could see my sister as a little girl leaning over the railing from the second floor yelling down at them to shut up and stop fighting. That vision then pulled back to my bedroom door barricaded with stickers covering it, the top of the stairs just on the other side. A thickness of dense, dimly protective air between the shut door and my bed where I could feel myself sitting as a little white haired boy that muffled the screams just enough to be in my head.

My brain then took me on a wild, rapid fire tour of all the places in my life that I ever had a serious melt down. Really, just any place I cried and unloaded from my teens until now. I saw the living room in Brooklyn where I saw Happy Together that reminded me of a disintegrated friendship I'd lost my virginity too in high school, the Denver apartment scene again, storming out the door at 15 kicking the door in (which my Mom still talks about as that one day I got mad), and so on. It was intense. Overwhelmingly intense to the point where I was able to unload several years worth of a tears reservoir. I just leaned into it and sobbed, drooled and let snot run down my nose and face on to my leg until the well was out and I felt emptied of it. During all of this my body was curled into itself in a protective posture; head hanging over my right leg bent under me. My left leg up with my arm around it to hang on and my back curled over me as a shield from anything behind me.

When I was dried up I impulsively, yet slowly, opened that defense up. It felt a release of everything I'd just unloaded, I could feel it leaving me out into the domed skylight above. Then a subtle shift occurred. I felt suddenly like a receiving satellite dish. My body was laid out flat, half on pillows, half on hard wood floor; arms wide, legs parted, and I began to convulse from my stomach. It was like a tightening of the muscles spasmodically in spurts. As my body raised with each convulsion and dropped again, the back of my head would drop on the hard wood floor beneath it. It was controllable, but uncontrollable. By that I mean that I could have stopped it if I wanted too at the expense of losing it altogether, but by letting it just work its mojo. I was just left to slamming my head against the ground and convulsing for probably 20 minutes.

The weird thing to me, was that in these convulsions I was getting incredibly strong powerful visions of Peru, seeing the word over the country in my mind, with visions mostly of Lima along with occasional Machu Picchu draws. I say that that was the weird part, after all this other strange phenomenon, because it seemed so unrelated. The impression was so strong, though, that I wondered if I should drop all the other things I have lined up to do in the next few months and just get a plane ticket to Lima first thing in the morning, or maybe even that night.

When I came out of that a sort of circle had reformed a bit around the candles that were going and I squatted into that. The women were singing a song now that people were slowly chiming in on about ancestry. With lyrics calling our grandmothers spirits to help us in our healing, then another set calling on our grandfathers as well. I got crystal clear portrait images, almost like highly skilled pencil sketches of each grandmother of mine one at a time; Mor Mor then Nana. And then the same of both my grandfathers; Papa then Mor Far. All of whom are dead now. The portraits were positions I had never seen them in in photographs, which I thought was interesting. This had a powerful resonance with me in a way of helping to heal the horrible sense of disconnect I have to my family. As it cycled through the four of them it then expanded to my great grandfather on my mom's paternal side, Pop, then my great grandmother on my dad's maternal side, Grandma Mabes; both of whom were strong personalities in the family. Then it continued on through my other great grandparents, and down the line into other great greats that I knew images of.

Then the song shifted to a different song about healing. As it did, those family images shifted to family alive now who are having problems. The first of which was my aunt who is struggling deeply with a host of health problems. Then came my Dad, then my sister, another aunt of mine, then another, my Mom eventually came up, as well as my cousins, then friends of mine struggling with personal issues. The over all impression I felt from it was that I was meant to help heal them, and use what I learn in this little odyssey of mine to help re-found the family. I saw a metaphorical image of chunks of cement shattered off of a larger cement foundation and could feel strings attached to each chunk pulling them back into one solid whole again. On that solid whole strong foundation I knew was where I was to build my own new family for the future, with my own wife and my own kids.

With that last vision I came out of it. My face was swollen and stained with the tears and drool I'd bathed myself in. As came back into myself again I was singing along with the rest of the group simple songs I didn't know the lyrics to, but was easily picking them up through mumbling a few verses. The ceremony drew to a close and after some hugs and goodbyes Wend and I retired to our cabin in the woods. We went to bed pretty much immediately and I journaled the shit out that whole experience still feeling the intensity inside me. Peru was also very heavy in my mind, wondering what that intensity was. I still had that compulsion to go get there now to find whatever it is waiting for me there, but instead I went to bed.

Tomorrow would be the Sweat Lodge...

The Art in Having Toys

2010-04-12T16:35:00.000-07:00

Its been over a year now since I handed in my keys to my last apartment. I left Denver then with a pack weighing in somewhere around 65 lbs complete with a bow fire stick, snow shoes, and a compact military style folding shovel strapped to my pack. All of these little "accessories" I knew were extraneous in the back of my mind, but my dreams of living out Survivor Man for the year were wrestling with my practical knowledge on road walking travel from years earlier.

I bussed a good 60 miles, walked 20 or 30, and hitched somewhere about the same in the first four days before Todd in our mutual impatience to "finally get going" scooped me up for 257 miles of the 392 mile trek from Denver to Santa Fe. It was a glowing example of me shaking off the dust of stable living and basking in false glory of becoming a Road Dog. When we left Santa Fe about a week later I watched Todd go through the same giggling some to myself at that ridiculousness while still blind to still thoroughly acting the same way in my own right. And we both would for some time after our departure, its arguable that I'm still in those throes.

Anyway, I felt like writing about all this now as I was roaming around tech store to tech store in a car and comparing my wishes and wants of last year with this year. The past year has been far from 365 nights tucked away in shrubbery and backwoods, foraging for nuts and berries, wrestling bears to the ground for simple sustenance and survival. In fact, in December, while staying at my friend Stacey's house for three weeks in Massachusetts, I tried to count out how many days I actually spent sleeping in my bivy. I think I came to 51 nights from April 1 to mid-December. Since then I can tack on another week in Slab City and around the Salton Sea in California, a night outside Tucson, 3 nights around El Paso, TX, and 2 nights on my way out of Texas in February. All told about 2 more weeks in the past four months.

Survivor Man would be ashamed of himself to call the way I'm living now "outdoorsy", or worse "survivalist". The interesting thing, however, is that although that living style does intrigue me, this past year has been a realization that its not a priority to me. Having reconnected with 20 to 30 friends from all ends of my life whom I completely lost touch with over the past decade or two surfaced as the real meaning behind why I enjoy this way of being. These friends pepper the country, as well as a few other countries, in such a random pattern that keeping in touch with them on a face-to-face basis would be neigh impossible.

About six months ago I stopped updating this blog of my day to day activities. It was around that time that living this way stopped feeling like "a trip" and began feeling more like this was just what I was up to, in the same way that life changes if you go from a stationary job to one that ships you all over. I keep about three or four other personal journals along with this occasional blog and what I was writing just started seeming redundant. I think I also was falling into more of a nesting phase with the onset of winter which left me not wanting to be more private with my life. Once I returned from Europe at the end of November I slipped into a much more private way of being, slowed down my roaming speed considerably, and started adapting to making my life more comfortable while still keeping the freedom I had.

This was an incredibly interesting process to me that I was only half conscious of at the time. I also distanced my contact with Todd around that time as well. Half out of annoyance with him and what I perceived as his judgment and negativity, and partly because I felt like I didn't have much to report and was tired of reporting it all anyway. Not just to him, but to everyone at large. All of this feeling of need to report, of course, was completely self imposed, and compulsively so. A daring to keep up with the open book policy of self probing Todd set up for himself and a refusal to admit I wasn't up for it and it was wearing me out trying stupidly to compete, if you could even call it that. With this winter withdrawal I started looking over everything else I missed and was stubbornly refusing myself.

One of the things I was teased about in those first six months of travel was that I was jumping lily pad to lily pad in reference to always having yet another destination to see yet another friend somewhere else, or be present at birthdays scattered across the country. I didn't like this notion, or at least the teasing, at first while I was still claiming to be King of the American Outback. I reckoned in my head that these were just necessary, convenient, or rare opportunity stops to see people important to me or those I hadn't seen in a while. While in Europe, though, I began to recognize more of what I wanted, and what I was doing, was sewing up this vast network of friend strewn about over my years of wandering to start forming a base for me to finally settle down. Suddenly I really took a liking to that term hopping lily pad to lily pad.

Europe was an introduction to true detachment. My plans to head south into Latin America still run strong, despite seeming to always be pushed back a few months at a time, and hitching through the French countryside was a stark introduction to what jumping in a car is like when you can't speak coherent words to the driver. The very first ride I got was with a guy who spoke only French, and me only knowing English with spatterings of Spanish. We drove, chatting away animatedly, for a good ten to fifteen minutes having only the vaguest hints of what the other was saying. It took me quite a bit to figure out we were going no further when we reached his destination. Down south this will be a far more serious problem with the conditions starkly different along with the language.

The next day I caught a ride with two French girls going in the complete opposite direction that I was intending, but hey, they were cute. One of them spoke English and I ended up at a party with them in Lille where I resorted to breaking out a computer for an online translator. I spent a few hours talking with another French girl through typing it into the translator and interpreting what the funky translation was saying she was saying into what it was she likely was really saying. Such luxuries will doubtfully be found often in Mexico, Nicaragua, or Peru, and this was the height of my mingling with the natives over there. Down south I'll know no one as I did in Europe and my lily pads will dry up quickly.

As I said above, when I got home from all of that I had that winter feeling of nesting along with much to chew over. What was I doing? Why was I doing it? Should I bother to keep doing it, or have I uncovered what I was after?

On my walk cross country I had a moment on the second leg when Angie and I broke up on the side of the road. After she hitched home I walked another two days coming to the conclusion that I'd found what I had set off for and was stubbornly letting it get away. What felt like a courageous soul searching march suddenly felt like an escape to lick my wounds in the wilds and build a few more walls of isolation around myself. I called off the walk, went back to Denver to win her over again and three weeks later discovered that was completely premature. Not because we didn't work out, but because I had left yet another thing incomplete. I'd half assed just one more thing, and when I set off on this sojourn I made the same promise to myself to complete it as I ended up doing with that walk. The difference being that there was the distinctive end to that by hitting another ocean. This goal is far, far more vague and intuitive based.

What I concluded over December and January was that I was far from done seeking what I was after. Sure I'd reconnected with a ton of my friends and even family I'd lost track of, but it was clear that was just the first step to whatever I was doing. What I found myself picking over more was what I could do to fill in the gaps of what I felt was missing in my life wandering that I take for granted when stable.

The joys of being stable is the comfort, something I'd come to see as a dirty word. I'd been knit picking over anything in my pack to lighten the weight of it up, but had stripped myself down to a very Proud utilitarian lifestyle. Now the balance was to figure out what I needed, what toy or gadget did I need that could make this feel more like a life and less like something to grunt through as a sort of purge quest. It introduced weighing in what it is I'm valuing about travel life against stable life and how to blend them.

I miss movies, diners, late nights out with friends, I miss being able to talk to whoever I want to talk to when I need to and not only on Saturday. I also don't like having to call everyone I know in one day whether I feel like being on the phone that day or not. I like the freedom to go where ever I want to go, be at whatever event I want to be at whenever I feel called to go. This agility I will be very slow to give up again, but it goes in the face of anything like the home and coffee shop I've started decorating and day dreaming about in my head.

In the past few months I've considered revamping all kinds of things about how I'm doing things. I was considering a car at one point, carrying a netbook around with me to ease up the restriction in communication, and replacing my cell with Skype and a headset.

Its an interesting little internal conversation I've found myself in. How to live a practical nomadic life in a world designed with hard lines for settlement living. Lately I've taken to alternate history books which has gotten me thinking about what would political boundaries, and life in general, be like had any of the Native American nations, particularly the nomadic ones, been able to keep the advancing western armies back east.

Anyway, these are my ramblings for now. This coffee shops closing so its time to go.

Short blurb

2010-03-09T10:37:00.000-08:00

There was a calm to the day. Something uneasy, something relaxing, as if to not do something would eventually lead to the unleashing of something fierce, but in not doing something this day it would be pleasantly relaxing and re-energizing for the time being. This was one of those nagging feelings. Subtle, but persistent. Distant, yet eventually consequential. The underlying effort in question seemed to be in answering what that something in question was. To discover this took digging. Digging unearthed demons, and demons, as we all know, are unpleasant to unearth.

Looking over 2009

2010-01-20T11:40:00.001-08:00

I've been meaning to write on here again for some time, but it never seemed to materialize despite many opportunities. When last I wrote I was reclining for several weeks at Stacey's in Springfield, Mass. A month later I find myself still reclining, but this time at my Aunt Holly's in southern California snowed in atop the San Bernadino Mountains. Between that 3,000 plus mile gap was an equally extended drop in to Denver for the New Year. All in all, at least for the moment, I've slowed down considerably from my blitz back in October and November.

This time has been a good time to sit back and look over what happened in these past nine months. The most valuable thing that comes to mind at the moment has been the onset of calming down from my fanaticism earlier in the year. Its time now to look over what really happened and share it.

When I posted my last post, which was really just sharing an allegory I liked, Todd, ever my foil, criticized me with a response post challenging that I was being told what to think since I had added no insights of my own. At the time there was some significantly unspoken tension between us that, in my view, had continued building steadily since our time in Michigan & Ohio back in June. I was, however, confused by the criticism as it seemed contrived.

A few days, perhaps even the next day, we ran into each other online after several weeks of only sporadic communications. We cleared the air quite a bit between us that night, and my confusion over his criticism was cleared up by a surprising realization. I had added no insight to the allegory because to me that seemed redundant to do. My thinking and my writing over those previous months had been dramatically separate from one another.

What Todd was pointing out last month was that I never really delved into what I was coming to believe in these posts, where I had thought I was going on about nothing but. While in Port Townsend, with plenty of time to write, I remember feeling like the writing I was putting up on this site were inadequately describing where my thoughts were going. Things were happening and I felt completely unable to describe them aloud.

To go back to June, I had given my sister a book called Many Lives, Many Masters on Stacey's recommendation. She enjoyed the book and concepts in it so much she highly recommended I read myself, which I did along with two others by the same author, Brian Weiss, as soon as I got into Denver in July. The book, as the title suggests, is about reincarnation, karma to a lesser extent, but mainly talked about physical life as a sort of school for the soul. The allegory I found in December at Stacey's a thought did a good job of articulating how I had come to understand the concept.

Back in July I was so inspired by these books that I felt the need to get my own experience on these concepts. I ended up meeting Greg through a Craigslist post who had a near death experience 20 years ago. I met with him to hear his description of what happened with the idea of comparing it to the stories I'd always heard from my grandfather who had also talked of dying for a minute after a heart attack.

Ever since high school I've always wondered about the point of life and all of that. Everyone in those days dug up their own hip new religion to follow, be it Wicca, Satanism, Hindism, Islam, Buddhism, or simply proclaiming agnostic or atheist. I read through many of those but the all seemed essentially the same. The options seemed to be nothing happens at all, one evolves to a higher plane of existence based on personal behavior, or you simply came back again. None of these seemed to serve a point to me. Clearly the most scientific of nothing happening served no point, behavior based spiritual evolution left me figuring that once in that next plane then what, and coming back again seemed equally pointlessly cyclical.

I've talked before about my great grandmother, Mimi's, family famed ability to channel spirits. This, among other stories and experiences I've had, left me convinced that the idea that nothing happened after death was quite unlikely. Reincarnation has always seemed to me the most likely but it left me wondering who these people were that Mimi was channeling if everyone's coming back, especially since an old 17th Century bard was the main character of a famous story that link will tell you all about, and he showed up over a span of 80 years in the past century. Anyway, all of this has always fascinated me and looking into it was a main catalyst for this past year's adventure.

Other things I've read, much like this story in India, added to my curiosity and the Many Lives book finally gave me a concept to look into that made sense. The concept that came from channeling "higher spirits", who were done with coming back to bodies, was, in short, that being in a physical body was a "school" for the spirits education into an eventual God-like reassembly. This still doesn't cure my cyclical notions, but the concept, along with Greg's description of what it feels like to be in this "light" everyone talks about after death, definitely sounded intriguing.

The overall concept is as cliche as any hippie can spew out amid crystals and pyramids, but looking over all the spiritual gurus of the past, my own experiences with spiritual pursuit, and the various first hand tales I've heard of others it all fits together. My grasp of it has shifted very little with all this, but has more been reinforced, so I could be still hanging on to preconceived bias.

That said, my overall belief is possibly best described as The Force from Star Wars. An energy surrounds us and binds us together causing influence over each other, plants, animals, the whole lot included. That energy is what we describe often as God, Allah, The Universe, The Fates, even luck, but I believe it is one large soul to which we are "driplets" off of it. This gives an explanation for telepathy and other such ESP-ish things.

From what Greg and my grandfather, among other second hand sources I've read about, when you die there's some sort of light that envelops you which brings a sense of peace and you are reunited with some important people from your life. According to the channeling entities in Weiss' books and the Many Mansions book I discovered back on New Years Eve of '08 many people you know in life travel with you life to life, sometimes switching roles and otherwise playing karmically off each other to give these souls a full perspective.

As I understand it, once out of your body everything becomes peaceful and serene, as described by the near death experiences I've heard. Going to the peace of this "light" is what I understand is the essence of the peace gained from meditation. It seems this school of the body for souls is the best way to understand the sense of overcoming hardship since it appears everything is honky dory outside of it. Souls don't need to be fed or sheltered, but stick them in a body and the test is seeing if that sense of peace can be maintained. Again, from my understanding, if one can go through all the shit life can handle and still hang on to peace you graduate to not having to come back anymore. The next role seems to be turning around and helping along those that haven't graduated yet.

So this has been what my understanding of the world has been honing in on. For much of the year I was deeply fascinated with the idea of "who was I" in my previous lives. When visiting my mom and sister in Jersey we all saw a lady who gave us each a "life reading", which essentially was her telling us bits about what happened and who we were in previous lives. This was met with mixed results. My sister was deeply unconvinced, my mom and I were really impressed, and as my mom put it, "if she was making it all up she's a great story teller."

I resonated a lot with what I was told, but as Todd later pointed out, there a couple lives in there that could easily just have been ego pleasers. Either way, the resonation still held since many of these characters she described had quite a few of my more deeply anchored personality traits, both good and bad. I said nothing for most of the hour and a half she was spouting everything off and nor looked at her conscious of subconscious tells encouraging her one way or another if she were a con.

After that summer with the Weiss books I became interested in his method of uncovering these previous lives which was hypnotherapy, and as I said before, by then I was after first hand experiences of my own. Wendie was too, and it so happened that one of his first pupils, Ari Klein, lived the next town over from her. This link tells the more in depth story, but basically money showed up to go see him the day after I made the appointment.

While in Port Townsend I had a few weird experiences that lead up to deciding to make that appointment. Being in this space with my sister of focusing on these concepts I began to have these experiences I was looking for. The first being when I had a day in the house to myself, drew a bath, turned out all the lights and meditated to one of Weiss' CDs in the tub. I had a very strange vision of sloshing rough seas off the coast of Venice and the strong notion that I was tied up and being tossed overboard into those seas. The year 1606 popped into my head as well.

A few days later I was walking home from work by down a path by some cypress trees and had a waking dream of five Roman soldiers on horseback charging at me, the one in front impaling me in the chest and running the sword up across my face. Two weeks later I saw Ari and had my first experience with hypnotism and "regression". The thing I like about the concept of this method is that the suggestion is definitely that you're remembering memories from previous lives, but that even if you're not, it is something coming from you and therefore must mean something even if its simply a metaphor. When I left Port Townsend a week after that the ride I caught to Portland happened to be with a lady who had been a hypnotherapist with very interesting stories to tell as to why she quit.

Leaving Port Townsend set in motion an interesting series of events, all of which seemed to be telling me very blatantly not to rush and that everything would be fine despite leaving with only $50 and three weeks to hitch to San Fran then Massachusetts for my Dad's birthday on Halloween. Looking back, it seems I was slowed at every presumption that I'd easily move forward, and caught long rides every time I relaxed and stopped putting pressure on myself to rush forward. My Dad and sister picked me up the evening before his birthday in Albany, NY; an hour from home. I had $9.31 in my pocket.

A week later Stacey had driven me down to NYC and for most of that week I had no money. I mention all this talk of my finances because of that concept of manna, meaning I had been quite convinced, through a series of examples on this trip alone, that what ever I needed would show up as I needed it. Here I was now standing on the thresh hold of going to another continent with nothing but a credit card, and no money to back it up other than my various stores of gold and silver I invested in earlier in the year.

Sure enough money did come my way, but from friends and family and one day in Iceland took care of that. Over the course of Europe no money showed up for me, but the debt I ran up was the exact amount my metals were worth when I returned with those values at an all time high. I interpreted that as The Universe telling me to put my money where my mouth was and do away with my personal safety nets. I still had the clear support of my friends and family, but no longer would I have the safety of my own funds to back any credit card rescues.

Money isn't, by any stretch, the only form I've seen this idea of being provided for manifest, but it is the easiest to relate and observe. My favorite non-money example is from my walk across the country back in 2004 when a Port-a-potty showed up out of nowhere when I desperately needed one. I mention all this because it was a significant sense of change that came out of Europe. A sense that I was going to have to secure away a much more complete faith in the concept for the months ahead rather than the dandy observations of it.

Sitting here in Southern California I'm readying myself to head into Mexico and beyond for some time where I have a feeling the challenges will increase tremendously. I don't know why I'm going down there as opposed to say Haiti right now, but its just where I feel drawn to go. That same feeling that I followed to find myself reconnecting with just about everyone I've known in my life, so I've stopped questioning it. Looking at it through this lens of karma and the school of materialism I can't help but wonder what sorts of things, lessons, await me down there. Coming from a non-metaphysical approach, there is an obvious wealth of lessons awaiting an American suburban escapee in the lands of Latin America, especially ones that are potentially lethal in several different ways, but at this point all I can do is wonder.

With the year that I've just come out of I'm strained to believe that it is simply a lust for adventure. I admit, for my ego it is precisely that, but if that was all it was I'd be on a plane for Haiti right now where they could use spare hands. Back in Denver I even had a connection to go there, and was pushing it to go as much as I could, but it simply wasn't happening. It also didn't feel right, even though crossing the Mexican border where drug lords are regularly beheading and kidnapping people, Americans included, did seem right. That comparison is the only thing I can rely on as evidence that it isn't fear preventing me from going to Haiti this moment.

So in short, what is this jumble all about? I just needed to recount in my head all that I'd seen and experienced over 2009, and figured I'd share it. Looking at the year ahead I'm trying to strip away the drama of enthusiasm at these experiences and try to pare it down to more honest understandings. Todd and I chatted last night online and were breaking down our concepts.

Patience and faith that The Universe is working, or as we call it, Sit Down and Shut Up, seems a clear principle. The concept that if The Universe is working then its working for everyone, not just you. We call that one COTU, or the Center Of The Universe. You may find yourself in a position you have no idea why you're in it, and in fact it may have nothing to do with you, but that you may have something unknowingly to pass on to someone who needs it. For Todd and I it seems most often to be when we consider ourselves stuck somewhere. For others it could be going through financial ruin to come to understand more valuable concepts than temporary physical comfort. I believe my Dad's ailing health is an example of this concept.

The concept we call, The Side Car, has to do with letting go of trying to control everything. This is one Todd likes to laugh at me struggling with from time to time, but I've seen him struggle under the same yoke as well. We call it the Side Car from an analogy I made back in Albuquerque in April that I felt like I was flying along in a side car off a motorcycle and loving the wind in my hair, but occasionally would lose confidence in the driver and try to grab at the wheel when things got harry. This generally does nothing more than fuck up the flow of things, and its born out of a blind sense of fear from the unpredictable. Relaxing and realizing life has a good hold on what's going on, and yes it might scare the crap out of you at times, its important to keep rolling with it and try not to force control over forces that seem to know where they're going.

An example from my run back in October comes to mind to best articulate this. I'd caught a ride with a trucker, Don, in the middle of Nebraska through a very unusual sequence of events. The kind I like to notice and interpret to all get out. The day after picking me up we were just outside Kansas City at a truck stop and I got anxious when he said he was going to stay there for the day rather than head on to St. Louis as he'd previously told me. That link tells the story, but in short I decided to try to keep running when everything pointed toward sticking with him. I finally succumbed to "the signs", or stopped trying to control my fate, and stuck with him. Two days later he dropped me off well beyond St. Louis in Binghamton, NY; 3 hours from my Dad's front door. Let go, let the world do its thing.

Todd also has the concept of not treating Karma as your bitch. I definitely agree with this one, but don't feel as threatened by following or not following it as he claims I am. The concept has to do with the good Samaritanism for profit, be it physical or spiritual. The idea of helping an old lady across the street simply because it makes you feel good and hope to score points with The Fates on a whole. Often has Todd accused me of hedging my bets against the benevolence of The Universe (correct me if I'm wrong, Todd... what am I saying of course you will). Essentially the idea of doing good things to off set things you've knowingly wrongly committed is what this is all about. This, I think, is the basis of many of our disagreements in feeling that the other is doing this.

That being said, it fits nicely into something I've been struggling with recently of trying to dispose of judgment of others. That one is a bitch when you really wrap your head around it. I have recently decided to start trying to pull my head out of offhandedly condemning politicians as corrupt, corporations as havens for the greedy, etc. Mostly I've just stopped paying attention to most of the things that don't concern me, but that's also putting my head in the sand. When I run across those who natural assumptions creep on me with I'm doing my utmost to really clean my slate with each individual.

With every car I've gotten into this past year, and the homes I've been welcomed into throughout any of my travels this has been ever present. I've watched the judgment of me, and revisited my judgment of them. There's always been something to disagree with, between strangers, family and friends, but leaving the conversation open has always lead to some interesting insights, or if nothing else, perspectives. There are still a good collection I have a hard time standing, but I can't think of anyone yet I haven't heard out at least for a bit.

We'll see what happens next.

Something I Read

2009-12-15T15:45:00.001-08:00

I read this the other day in a book I've been poking around in called Astrology: A Cosmic Science. Despite all my strange beliefs I've been going on about in this site, I'm not a big follower of astrology. I find it interesting, curious, and wonder what it is those devout astrologers are looking at when they profess the things they profess, but I wouldn't put my stock in it. Never-the-less, I do find it interesting to poke through.

Its filled with interesting concepts, such as saying "where the kidney's are the purifier of the body, relationships are the purifier of the consciousness" explaining how "no man can be an island". Toward the back of the book there was an allegory that I really liked and I figured I'll copy it down here for your consideration.

An Allegory

"I leaned from the low-hung crescent moon and grasping the west pointing horn of it, looked down. Against the other horn reclined, motionless, a Shining One and looked at me, but I was unafraid. Below me the hills and valleys were thick with humans, and the moon swung low that I might see what they did.

"Who are they?" I asked the Shining One. For I was unafraid. And the Shining One made answer: "They are the Sons of God and the Daughters of God."

I looked again, and saw that they beat and trampled each other. Sometimes they seemed not to know that the fellow-creature they pushed from their path fell under their feet. But sometimes they looked as he fell and kicked him brutally.

And I said to the Shining One: "Are they ALL the Sons and Daughters of God?"

And the Shining One said: "ALL."

As I leaned and watched them, it grew clear to me that each was frantically seeking something, and that it was because they sought what they sought with such singleness of purpose that they were so inhuman to all who hindered them.

And I said to the Shining One: "What do the seek?"

And the Shining One made answer: "Happiness."

"Are they all seeking Happiness?"

"All."

"Have any of them found it?"

"None of those have found it?"

"Do they ever think they have found it?"

"Sometimes they think they have found it?"

My eyes filled, for at that moment I caught a glimpse of a woman with a babe at her breast, and I saw the babe torn from her and the woman cast into a deep pit by a man with his eyes fixed on a shining lump that he believed to be (or perchance to contain, I know not) Happiness.

And I turned to the Shining One, my eyes blinded.

"Will they ever find it?"

And He said: "They will find it."

"All of them?"

"All of them."

"Those who are trampled?"

"Those who are trampled."

"And those who trample?"

"And those who trample."

I looked again, a long time, at what they were doing on the hills and in the valleys, and again my eyes went blind with tears, and I sobbed out to the Shining One:

"Is it God's will, or the work of the Devil, that men seek Happiness?"

"It is God's will."

"And it looks so like the work of the Devil."

The Shining One smiled inscrutably.

"It does look like the work of the Devil."

When I had looked a little longer, I cried out, protesting: "Why has he put them down there to seek Happiness and to cause each other such immeasurable misery?"

Again the Shinging One smiled inscrutably: "They are learning."

"What are they learning?"

"They are learning Life. And they are learning Love."

I said nothing. One man in the herd below held me breathless, fascinated. He walked proudly, and others ran and laid the bound, struggling bodies of living men before him that he might tread upon them and never touch foot to earth. But suddenly a whirlwind seized him and tore his purple from him and set him down, naked among strangers. And they fell upon him and maltreated him sorely.

I clapped my hands.

"Good! Good!" I cried, exultantly. "He got what he deserved."

Then I looked up suddenly, and saw again the inscrutable smile of the Shining One.

And the Shining One spoke quietly. "They all get what they deserve."

"And no worse?"

"And no worse."

"And no better?"

"How can there be any better? They each deserve whatever shall teach them the true way to Happiness."

I was silenced.

And still the people went on seeking, and trampling each other in their eagerness to find. And I perceived what I had not fully grasped before, that the whirlwind caught them up from time to time and set them down elsewhere to continue the Search.

And I said to the Shining One: "Does the whirlwind always set them down again on these hills and in these valleys?"

And the Shining One made answer: "Not always on these hills or in these valleys."

"Where then?"

"Look above you."

And I looked up. Above me stretched the Milky Way and gleamed the stars.

And I breathed "Oh" and fell silent, awed by what was given to me to comprehend.

Below me they still trampled each other.

And I asked the Shining One.

"But no matter where the Whilrwindsets them down, they go on seeking Happiness?"

"They go on seeking Happiness."

"And the Whilrwind makes no mistakes?"

"The Whilrwind makes no mistakes."

"It puts them sooner or later, where they will get what they deserve?"

"It puts them sooner or later where they will get what they deserve."

Then the load crushing my heart lightened, and I found I could look at the brutal cruelties that went on below me with pity for the cruel. And the longer I looked the stronger the compassion grew.

And I said to the Shining One:

"They act like men goaded."

"They are goaded."

"What goads them?"

"The name of the goad is Desire."

Then, when I had looked a little longer, I cried out passionately: "Desire is an evil thing."

But the face of the Shining One grew stern and his voice rang out, dismaying me.

"Desire is not an evil thing."

I trembled and thought withdrew herself into the innermost chamber fo my heart. Till at last I said: "It is Desire that nerves men on to learn the lessons God has set."

"It is Desire the nerves them."

"The lessons of Life and Love?"

"The lessons of Life and Love!"

Then I could no longer see that they were cruel. I could only see that they were learning. I watched them with deep love and compassion, as one by one the whirlwind carried them out of sight.

- Anonymous - "

The book I found this in is Astrology: A Cosmic Science; pg. 278-80, by Isabel M. Hickey

Beginning to Process That Which is 2009

2009-12-09T18:13:00.000-08:00

I’m sitting back home, once more, in Massachusetts. This has certainly been a year of many returns. Returns home here, returns home to NYC, returns home to Denver. All of the above, as well as many sojourns forward to visit old and long neglected friends. It’s been a weird and intense year in a host of different ways, and now I’m finding myself needing a little processing time.

So, as I mentioned above, I find myself back in Massachusetts running my mind through all that’s happened in the last place I’d have foreseen being back in January when I decided to leave. Being here in Stacey’s home is, in itself, a comfort and sanctuary for me now. The rediscovery of her friendship reflects a great many of the other old and new friends I’ve recovered this year, which, truly, has ended up being the heart of this Adventure of ‘09. The spirits of each of them hover about me tonight as I’ve finally sat down to process it all in this house.

The house itself is a home; cozy, snug, and filled with the life of hanging plants, Lucy, and Luca; the dog and cat. Outside there’s a good dose of thick wet snow and a dripping storm complete with occasional lightening, just as I had growing up. Clearly I’m feeling nostalgic as I plop all this down and I’ll try to pull my head out of it a bit to not get mired in sentimental sappiness, which I often succumb to.

I’m looking out over next year as it meanders up the front walk to me. It looks a bit intense, as I get the feeling that this year was yet another practice run; a testing out of the gear and methods in a sense. I’ve been jarred into having to recognize that I’m one of those people that has shut out their childhood, and my past in general, and it took the hulking mass of this year to recognize it and begin to reclaim it.

I watched a preview for a movie tonight about an Indian guy born in New York who shuns his Indian heritage, feeling like he has no part to it, and begins Americanizing himself in the name of claiming modernity. I never found myself able to click with these sorts of plot lines since it seemed like it was all about shallow characters trying to out run their pasts. Seeing that preview tonight, though, coupled with my feeling of nostalgia as I revisit the events of this year, I realized I have quite a bit in common with these guys.

Granted, I never needed to change my name to accustom myself to a culture, I’ve always enjoyed being an American (despite the massive amounts of negativity that comes with it) and, as I’m often reminded, have all the benefits-by-birth that come with it. I’m white, male, Christian raised, Anglican first, middle, and last name, not fat or ugly, not impaired in any way, physically or financially, and raised in a town acclaimed for its public education. The irony of all this is that this was what I had to come to terms with and accept finally this year. All this in light now at the end of this year, I've come to review my experiences with good fortune and how to wield it.

I’ve written at length my experience with money this year. It’s been a fascinating study on the world and its workings, and continues to be. Money continued to dependably show up at the times I would have feelings that it would as I drifted along catching rides and meeting up with these friends. It was consistent from July until October as I rode “the zero mark” up and down from Denver to Port Townsend, to San Francisco, to Massachusetts, and finally to New York then off to Europe. My accessible money would hit zero in my pocket then a job would show up, or someone would hand me $40 or $100. Others simply didn’t allow me to pay for anything as I tried to offer buying them lunch for the ride.

This to me was a phenomenon, but one I’d experienced before and through out life, so when I got on the plane to Iceland and then London in November with £6.36 and $124.00for two and a half weeks, where the American dollar is worth two thirds its value here in the States, I didn’t think much of it. I was convinced something would work out, somehow money would continue to show up for me as it had and all would continue to be well. This was, in many regards, a spiritual belief, and still continues to be.

My first day abroad I spent in Reykjavik, Iceland as a day long layover I provided for myself with some finagly ticket buying. Within 24 hours of being there my $124.00 was spent, though $104 of it was blown on credit card as I tucked the American cash away for my landing. Being that this was a spiritual belief I was very aware to read the signs I was being given and see that the bulk of those funds was for a private cab driver I had to pay to get me to the airport after narrowly missing the last bus by fifteen minutes. I took this to be telling me bluntly that I was going to be taken for everything I had, savings and all, and that I needed to start shifting this view on leaning on fate's ATM.

As I said before, my “zeros” were always from my accessible cash. I had locked up other money in gold and silver, both physical gold coins and silver bars as well as shares. When I did this back in March, and again in August, I had a feeling those reserves wouldn’t last the year and back then had thought sometime in the last three months I’d likely be selling them. I figured that this must be that time and was able to relax. I was taking my cues, right or wrong, from these feelings that it was time for the reserves to go and from my major lesson in October to not stress any situation, relax and work with it, and everything will come out fine.

I saw my friend Jane in London for a few days, then met my grandmother’s cousin, Morag, in Wells, on my way to spending a few days in Cornwall where I met a really amazing guy named Rob who put me up for two nights. After that I ventured over to Paris where I had coffee with Ingrid’s sister, Erica, who has now become a French citizen. I spent the night at a Couch Surfer’s place, Elsa, who took me out to the pubs to watch France controversially beat Ireland in qualifying for the World Cup against Algeria. The next day I took a commuter rail out of the city and spent the next two days hitching to Soissons and Lille as a foreigner who didn’t speak the language.

From Lille I took a train to Amsterdam and spent a few nights hanging out with Brandon, Loreli’s boyfriend, who was out there from Denver as her birthday present to him. Then I raced back to Paris and London to catch my flight through Iceland back to NYC. On the way out of Iceland I watched a four hour sunset as the plane chased it down. When I landed in NYC the day before Thanksgiving I had only my $104 in cash that I’d tucked away and a credit card debt exceeding a thousand dollars. By that Saturday night I had 75 cents.

No, this isn’t a random rant to explain where my money ran away to, or to complain about it. As I said before, I took that initial cab ride as a direct sign that Europe would suck me dry and I should start working on figuring out why this would happen after such reliability from the Universe before. What I concluded has to do with the original statement that I started this rant about. I am not poor, I am not disadvantaged (as I am often reminded)… at least in America and therefore came to believe that I should not be relying on these so called Fates to cash me out when I'm low. It was a lesson to learn, I learned it, and now its on to the next step.

It beckoned me back to one of the old favorites in conversation that Todd and I have often batted about of the suburban kid and the good fortune that comes with it. If you’ve been reading along these blogs at all, whether just mine, just his, or both together, you’ll know that particularly in recent months we both have been intrigued by the Biblical phrase “It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle then for a rich man to get into heaven.” The essence of which I take to mean that a rich man is inherently doomed spiritually because to be rich is to have an excess of wealth and to have an excess of wealth while others still wallow in third world gutters is not in the spirit of Love. The most basic principle of Communism if you want to be politically obnoxious about it, but in essence a stark truth.

Todd has spent much of his retreat months vehemently attacking those who aren’t completely dedicating themselves to truth and self awareness as charlatan zombies suffering from hypocritical self delusion of purpose. I tend to be a little easier on those not willing to sell their mansions outright, or those still looking for a peace they haven’t fully attained yet, as I struggle with the notion that I too still hang on to many an unnecessary luxury item that could go to better use. I believe in massive progress being eventually made through baby steps. My frustration, however, tends to manifest when even those baby steps aren’t being taken. Even being paralyzed by fear is in some sense a baby step, in my view, so long as you are steadily trying to work toward overcoming that fear.

To go back to what I was saying before, this year has been quite good for me in the sense of recognizing that if I work toward something the Universe, in my very firm belief, will meet you half way, and help you along in those completely unpredictable ways. The key requisite seems to be not to lean on it and then you’ll do fine. That lesson has been an important one to learn, but I’ve learned it and now its time to move on and build on it. This is what I believe I was to learn in Europe, so I decided to reconstruct my strategy.

The week after I got back to the States the price of precious metals shot through the roof so I sold it all receiving just enough to bring myself back even again, plus a few extra bucks to move around on. Another safety net removed. With that I decided to return to the original idea of the financial end of this trip and see if I can sell some of the photographs I’ve taken along the way in galleries of any sort and if sales work out I can take care of myself as well as spread that money back out to where it came from this year. Who knows if it will work, but there’s nothing like trying it to see.

What I’ve noticed prominently from this year in the resurgence of old friends is the reconciliations that have come about. I went to my 15 year high school reunion about a week and a half ago and rediscovered a long since discarded close friend, Brian. In those tumultuous days of teenage drama I wrote Brian off after having a good five or six years of brotherhood-like friendship with him because I had thought he’d written me off for the more popular clans. I moved on and became best friends with his ex-girlfriend, Allyson, and quickly there after become obsessed with puppy dog love for her. Something that took me a good six years to get over once all was said and done.

As I discovered the other week when we ran into each other again, apparently this had kicked him in the proverbial nuts pretty bad as a back stab, and I learned that in fact I was the dick in that scenario. Fifteen years, and it’s a pretty simple observation, and I never even remotely saw it until two Saturdays ago.

I also had taken a trip out to Boston at the beginning of November to visit a long gone old friend, Josh, who was the original brother of mine from back in the elementary school days. He was one I lost touch with for ironically the same reason I thought Brian had ditched me; I moved on to more popular kids for my brief stint of popularity in 7th and 8th grade. In 9th grade I had no friends at all… literally. Josh was welcoming with open arms and we had a great visit geeking out about our G.I. Joe days in front of his fiancé, Kim.

Seeing these beginnings of possibly rekindled friendships, along with the massive ex-girlfriend tour that I took this year rekindling those relationships, I see two more such visits to make. One I’ve been planning on since I left Denver back in March, and that’s to see Allyson. Originally I just planned to see her because I haven’t seen her since her wedding in ’03, and now she has two kids I’m quite curious to get a look at. Now, however, I’m curious to know what might come out of that visit in light of these reconciliations. To put it in Todd’s beloved AA terms, I’m wondering what amends I may have there as well.

The other is one I really hadn’t expected, and only recently cropped up as something I think I should do. I have long lost touch with a very close friend from college, my friend Dave. He was another I had a brotherly type friendship with for a good four or five years but had a bad unspoken rift that ended all communication. I think its high time I reconcile it one way or the other before I think about pressing on with another adventure.

There actually is one more that I’m going to have to hunt down, and that’s my good friend Katy from Texas. She vanished a few years ago off the face of New Jersey (understandable, really) leaving no forwarding address of any sort and leaving behind her a bit of a mess to untangle with another mutual friend of ours. It’s my impression that that’s why she’s remained in seclusion from us, but I think its time to reconcile that one as well. Time has passed and good friendships always improve after a mess like that anyway, and as I discovered with Brian there could be a whole perspective of it I missed.

Either way, I can’t get over the density of this year which has finally knocked me off my feet into Stacey’s home. I’m now around the corner from my Dad for a few weeks while I’m here, and am able to drop in on him as I did today which has long been needed in our relationship. I feel this massive year long life reunion with everyone is solidifying a wide base that I am going to need in the coming years. I don’t know why, or for what, if for anything other than just simply having everyone back in my life again, but it gives me the feeling of being apart of a huge, ever widening, family. Kinda something I’ve been seeking for a good long while now.

Notes from My Little Black Book

2009-11-17T17:32:00.000-08:00

Below are a series of little rants that I revisited recently and really enjoyed seeing them all now in sequence. I figured I'd share them here. I've left them unedited and uncensored, so forgive the poor sentence structure, I think I was drunk for quite a few of these.

Oct. 29, 2006
Seattle, WA

I spent today doing nothing, absolutely nothing. And though I needed it badly it doesn't at all feel good. I've been reading a lot of my old writings. Rants, poems, short stories, and they all say I'm lonely. They all say I have been since Hawaii. How is this? Are most people this way? I can see all these patterns in me, ways of being and circling thoughts. I keep striving for someone and its likely its that thats keeping me. Maybe that's what made the walk great. I had everythign but a friend with me, but I haven't had that so it seemed perfect. It goes all the way back too. Friends were always my family and losing that one ever present best friend was the loss of my family and now I can't function. I'm deteriorating quicker and quicker these days and I keep thinking writing or projects or something need to get me going. But I don't and won't and it makes the most sense to me now that its that missing friend, not a lover, just a friend. Whatever this is with Rachel too is depressing some. This flirtation/just friends thing. I don't know that I can do it, it sort of smacks hard of the Allyson scenario but more aceptable. She's scared of this friendship I think.

Nov. 24, 2006
Seattle, WA

Liberalized in as much bullshit as I can be there is a requisite that allows a certain allotment before it becomes stritly extremist PC. Why am I angry with my surroundings? They embody everything I believe I stand for. And I still think I do. Catch phrases, groups, gangs, organizations of the such stand to tell the world what about what they don't already know. And what we know is what they say, and what we could care about is why they repeat and chant into our heads like new age idolotrists chanting new religion. Who believes in religion? New Age or otherwise or slogans all the same.

Jan. 13, 2007
Wilbraham, MA

Nana is dead and the ties to childhood finally whither completely away. It does not feel like a stage into manhood or adultness, it more feels like the ideas I've known and looked to for family are dead as well and its time to form a new concept of the idea. With these ties all gone I must reinvent what family is to me so that I can find its beginnings and create it a new. Seeing how different other families interact among their own reminds me of this.

I look over my genealogy research and had always wondered how it came to be that someone was the head of the family, the father or mother of it all centuries ago. I knew each generation had its own head, ours was Nana, but she was not the "mother of it all". I'm seeing now, with all the divorces, the lack of family cohesion, that many of my generation will have lost the large families in closeness and potentially could become mothers and fathers of new segments of a family. I'm realizing if I have a family that will be my role in history. Family history at least. Maybe not, since Wendie and I are so close, so then I think it might fall to my mom. That seems wrong though.

The idea that I'm not apart of my family after today is oddly familiar and strange. Like my comfortability with exploring new places. The ground itself is unknown, but the feeling I have going into it is my most comfortable. I am alone and I've learned to love that and with that as my seed I can relearn how to have a family again.

Jan. 13, 2007
Wilbraham, MA

The Grocery Store story is my favorite of Nans because it tells most of the principles I inheritted from her. Her legacy was Loving and Family and in those are Trust, Faith, and Community. MJ told me of a new aspect to the story I didn't know so I'll retell it to myself here for a new meaning in it.

MJ said the day before this story she had been aught with a Tootsie Roll in her pocket by Nan. Nana gave her hell for it wondering where she had gotten the money for it. Papa had been out of work and money was extremely tight, so for little Mary Jane to have a nickel for a Tootsie Roll was suspicious.

It came out that she'd taken it from Nana's pockets without asking. MJ had justified it to herself because Billie used to clean out the car and was told any money he found in there was his, so MJ leaned out the coat pockets. Now MJ described Nan going off on her, out of character, as a sign of how tight money most have been. I'm sure that's true, but I also see it as how imparitive it was, especially during that time of hardship, for family to trust one another. So begins the story of the groery store.

They were living on Edgewood Ave. in Longmeadow and the house was becoming bare. There was no money to feed the family but there was no food to feed them either so Nana resolved against her values of Trust for her Family and set off to the grocery store with an empty checkbook. She wrestled with the idea of writing a knowingly bad check to feed her children and in the end couldn't bring herself to do it. She returned home wondering how else she could get food on her table when she opened her door and saw, like water turned to wine, it was already there.

Her neighbor had emptied out the food in her kitchen that would spoil while they went away on a trip and had delivered grocery bag upon grocery bag of food for Nana and Papa to enjoy knowing that times were tough then.

As I've found going through my life keeping unwavering to all your values as Nana did that day, and trhough out her life, everything comes to you as its needed. I've realized looking bak over my own life that I think on that very story at least a few times every year and I have always found it as my compass when my values were put to a test and I believe I've succeeded in those tests having had Nana as my guide.

Jan. 14, 2007
Springfield, MA

I'm in a place I've been in over a thousand times before and nothing's the same. Nothing has changed except the passing of years in my absence. Its hard to behold. The memories of my stay here have been washed away with Earth's rotations. My ghost does stay, but on a shelf, like a well read story loved quickly, followed quickly by a different but equally loved well read story. I am the past here and I can't see where I'm a future. My present is a muddled confusion of wishing the past and wanting a future. And this point I see as an historical point of power. Transition is when the sense of self is weakest and the power to change completely is at its height. A comfortable mind in a transitional period is the most powerful of things. I lack resolve and this is where it seems previous generations, save for the most recent, held their strength.

Jan. 23, 2007
New York City, NY

Today was an interesting bit of insight. I went to see mom's palm reader who, back in '93, predicted her meeting and marrying Musty and the quality of marriage it would be to an extent. Not bad for a '97 meeting and '99 wedding. Wendie saw him a week and a half ago saying its likely she wouldn't have kids and would find a man to love but not until late in life.

Anyway, so I went to see him today with all this transition going on in my life and we talked for two hours then went out to lunch for a bit. The things that shocked me but resonated were when he said I was trying to be someone I'm not with all my adventures. That that was a part of me but not a main part and that stability and security and routine were what was natural to me.

It rang deep in me, but what threw me was his insistane that I'd be happy as an accountant or insurance guy or something. That I hate that idea now beause I'm rebelling against that notion of myself. I don't see that, or more importantly, feel it. He did say it was high time I got off my ass and made up my mind career wise, and I agree my happiest career would not involve travel but more likely community. Something to keep present in my up and coming job hunt.

The other thing was he said in my mid to late thirites, 37 he guessed, I'll get involved with someone I know now, and have peripherally for a long time, and hate. And she and her friends hate me beause of our subconscious recognition of our similarities. He said likely we'd have kids and family, and though its rocky will last a long time.

I have no idea who that could be. Anyway, Margo's meeting me soon so I'll write more tomorrow.

March 21, 2007
Seattle, WA

So according to astro people the last 19 years are over. A new age and rise in change will be oming. Wend and I thought for us it was in reference to the divorce and family issues. I'm now thinking maybe I'll go back to the more reclusive self I was at 11 and earlier. The tranquil years of inwardness, its where I feel myself drifting.

Laurence backed that feeling up and encouraged it. I suppose I have been hiding that since then, the contentment with reclusion that is. Another Walk is a must, but in a few years. I'd love ot leave right now, but it'd be horribly unhealthy spiritually.

I wonder what all my cells ould remember if provoked. Its been the latest question among Wendie and I, and Rachel and I. What would I do best because I really think I could impress people.

Aug. 23, 2007
Somewhere on a train from Seattle, WA to Washington D.C.

And another trip is on. Looking over these last blurbs its interesting to read the shifts and turns that happened these past 6 months at SPUD. I'm still trying to recognize that its over and yet here I am on the train.

This is a definite first of being a night over inot a train trip away to drastic new change and still feel so very much like its a temporary vacation and will be back to work in a week. Wend feels the same way, like I'd be back in abit. Its very weird, unsettling, but also a little nice, oddly. I'm wondering if I've just driven myself into such a work mode at SPUD that, with all the website stuff, I still feel like I'm working?

Sitting here on the train, staring out the window feels strange, like something to get used to again. This slow recognition I'm thinking might be nice, because I hope it will be a steady unwinding from this.

Aug. 25, 2007
Somewhere on a train from Seattle, WA to Washington D.C.

I feel convinced of my lack of conviction and I'm not sure if that's good or not. Good in the sense of identifying something or not because it doesn't matter if that needs to be clearly seen or not.

I've been arguing in my head with Musty about what this step in my life is doing for me, this travel. Is it simply a palette cleanser from Stu, coffee shops, SPUD, and Seattle, or am I going somewhere with this and just haven't identified where? I strongly believe its the latter, but I strongly also agree that ould be wishful thinking to make this trip healthy. There's a lot to this trip because its a period ending not just a sentence or a paragraph, but a long chapter with no notion of what the next will bring. Like a cliff hanger with no subject matter for basis, just the knowledge that quite a bit still needs to happen to have as story.

Vague options hang hungrily in the air and I'm relutant to grab at any of them, but longing and desiring eah possibility there. Life seems to have ripened without maturing yet. This trip seems a lot like a way to keep stagnane off, while I work on decision making. Maybe that's why its good to do. Trying to figure out how or what to decide while growing stale sounds like a brilliant way to fuck everything up and lose myself.

Its interesting that that's the battle everyone is fighting as all these things ome now. Me, Wendie, Jane are all trying our damnedest to hold on to our sense of self. And I think we all feel time is our challenger.

Aug. 25, 2007
Somewhere on a train from Seattle, WA to Washington D.C.

Here's a good question. Where to live after this? I'm obviously not going to answer this now, but even that general idea of some plae new again or return yet again to some place known. Neither sound very good to me.

New but familiar feels better, but logically sounds like the worst of all. Leaving the country as a permanent or even just indefinite time I don't like either. I like being an American, minus all the connotations that brings with it. Its the only thing left I can solidly say I am in that way. I'm not a New Englander or a New Yorker as much anymore, and I@m definitely not from Denver or Seattle. I don't even have a place I can say my family is home to. I never really realized how extensively homeless I am.

I've said this before on the Walk but after this trip I really should dig in where ever I land next and arve out a new home, like a pioneer.

It feels somewhat like finding a wife for a family. I suppose it exactly like that. Someplace I'll love until I die, and love entirely until then. I am convinced I'll find both those.

Feb. 23, 2008
Denver, CO

Getting back into Denver, the reality is starting to settle. I'm mostly excited to get all my stuff back in one spot. I'm worried about falling back into my old pattern and dragging on my usual way of skimming. I'm feeling the need to settle and get life really going again.

Jane really got me excited about that and a real idea of a family. I agree with her though that maybe I want that too much right now. I know the key for me is to feel like I have a home. I need to fall in love iwth a plae as muchc as I need to fall in love with someone. Denver may be exactly what Jane was saying she was to me; the right enough person for me when I want it.

I lack resolve and I need to find it now. A business plan is porbably the most important thing because it gives me something to keep me from feeling aimless and it keeps me in Denver wiht a purpose and an attachment. Friends will strengthen around me as I prove to be a fixture. Then I'll find a family one I feel like I have a home.

My "big ideas" need to now be oriented around the idea of being in Denver. I like the idea of find a lake house for family summers. Classes are something that will help establish me as well and the tax course in September is perfect timing for that.

I'm excited to see Jane then as well, but I'm wary of letting the idea of her and I tempt me away because we won't be ready for each other then either.

Feb. 23, 2008
Denver, CO

Can I avoid dating? I know I'll hit a point where I'll want to date again and that it will only be out of loneliness and I'll be back in a pattern of getting excited about a girl and fous only on what's right about her until I'm used to her and I then focus on what's incompatible between us and break it off, then find another.

Jane sniffed all this out quickly and it possibly is what happened with her. She knew I was too exited for myself in the beginning and we both knew it wasn't right at the end. I still think that it could really work something in the futrue but a few years up. Until then I can hold a little comfort in knowing someone good for me is in fact out there and known.

Undated
Denver, CO

To avoid dating and drinking in the sense of it being hand in hand I need an alternative sense of excitement and sociability that I can do on a whim. Kareoke is good so long as I can always find someone or become known enough to drop into places.

Undated
Denver, CO

This is hard to remember that I am on the road to somewhere. Right now I feel like I'm back in the exact same place I've always been in. But I am heading somewhere and I need to figure out how to make that feel more concrete. I need to establish steps to take that don't need money or location specifics. Possibly set a size for the location as a base for planning.

March 18, 2008
Denver, CO

Since that last email exchange with Jane needing to be on her own I've felt a resurge of loneliness. I suppose I really was hanging on to the idea of us getting bak together, and still am, but I did know we weren't going to be anytime soon. Cutting off communication, though, really drives that point home that everything I want in life won't be attained anytime soon.

I think its more than just her and I, but an emphasis of how behind I've gotten on myself. I've been thinking a lot about my old film days wondering if I was right to drop out of it. I still know I was, but its hard to remember that at 23 I had a good career and was on my way and now at 31 I'm still starting over.

I should be working on a business plan these days, but I think above all I need to feel more sociable to feel like I live here now, and not that my boxes are all here. I think that's improtant so that I don't frustrate myself and decide somewhere else is better again and have to start all over. Then I can make a plan without feeling like I'm holing away, because right now I feel a frenzy of wanting to move elsewhere to Seattle of all places, to New York again.

March 26, 2008
Denver, CO

I am here again, and that location is irrelevant. Shades, Netherworld, Barricudas, Bonzai, the bars of the world. I'm here, enjoying it on my own and its strictly the hope of nostaligic resurgence. I like my regularity, but loath the routine of it. Why do I fight my natural ways?

Is it as Laurence says, that I resist myself? I seek repetition naturally and loath it when I get it. What cures that other than the walk? Would a walking lifestyle cure it? Why do I feel as if that's completely out of the question? As if its been assessed, considered, and dismissed.

How many parts of me am I regularly dismissing or ignoring? How much of me will have surfaced by 70? Will I have kids then or will I be handing these notes to Izzy and Aenea? Is that upsetting? Somewhat.

Loreli told me I don't understand infancy. I know that to be true all too well. I get the theory, but that theory, I believe, is what rules out a walking lifestyle. How much will Loreli appreciate having a daughter, of all options, when Izzy is 24 and out on her own and Loreli is 47 and still young enough to run around? Will she regret not being free in her 20's and 30's, or revel in her late 40's having all by then while I hopefully am in pre-teen hell.

This place is a pirate ship.

I should have kids by now. I don't and see none coming soon. Laurence holds me steadfast, but if I hit 40 with nothing I hold little to scorn but myself. I am baby crazy. Fucking 30's.

I say that but just as easily i could say fuckin' 5 year olds. It's pretty clear I just feel like I lack family.

Why is that? I do love Mom, Dad, and Wend. That's a political statement right there, isn't it, to myself. I was left out, I knew it at 5, I wanted family sine then. That seems wrong but not far off.

April 5, 2008
Denver, CO

What kind of jerk am I up to now? I'm looking to make friends yet I'm turning down obvious invites out for a strange variety of trite reasons. I can tell I'm resisting making new friends, as well as closing the gap in becoming closer with old friends. How do I catch myself quicker to stop this?

I am a hermit, and I am because I'm pining after long dead days in New York and mass in the deep recesses of my mind. I'm looking for new days like those without letting them manifest through the little paths they do. I'm controlling it.

How do I not? How do I make sure I go out when its my head saying no. Is this that seratonin thing? My reasoning tonight was money and rising early for something I can easily skip. Drinking also makes a case to me when I feel withdrawn. Nikki, tonight, was clearly looking to go eat and I could only think of getting home despite my ravenous hunger.

I need to route this isolation in me otherwise I never will be able to date healthily. Am I taking on too much to try to do this to myself on my own? Is that a symptom of itself? I'll have to draw in some outside thought on this.

Undated
Denver, CO

So celibacy? This has been an interesting experiment in counter intuition under the name of mental health reparations. I have recently convneced myself well enough that I should kiss Elizabeth. This process and resolution was so long and tricky that it seems to me that it has become more of a defence rather than a recovery, though I still realize the recovery is well needed.

I think removing myself from the equation may have been where I went wrong. The solution of things in general seems often to be finding and managing the balane of the extreme and the lack. Hence why most see life as a bitch. I do like a good teetering and tottering, however, which to me is the spice of life.

So, in lieu of this, how do I broach the challenge of putting more meaning back into sex rather than the hedonism I revel in so much today?

Aug. 26, 2008
Denver, CO

Following my feelings and intuition I believe is what I really need to do to move forward. I think the conflict and frustration I'm feeling is that I've stopped doing that and everyone has been encouraging me to stop. I need to start taking it very seriously and stop half assedly doing it as a way to conveniontly excuse my dreaming.

Faith is what I need to regrasp and I believe that's what Todd re-entering my life was to inspire but I don't think I'm meant to travel long with him. I think what i need to do is travel alone, but more intently, and in the same way Todd's doing now, I need to follow the signs provided for me but fearlessly, patiently, and without hesitation. I should leave after jane goes adn publish everything I do and experience.

The focus needs to be not on what I'm to do when I'm finished, but of who I am. I think people are right in seeing me as a waste away. I have incredible potential and I'm wasting it on aloofness and fear of responsibility. I need to own that and open up to truly accepting concequences.

Oct. 15, 2008
Denver, CO

There is nothing here. Not here in this room, but here in the muscle memory of my hand and fingertips. I sit straing at this lined blank page waiting for the expressive automoton to turn back on and vent reflexively its surroundings. Instead I feel a deadened connection between my brain and the fingertips that manage the pen work.

Thoughts ramble continuously through the forest of synapses and grey matter marsh encompassing them, but when the book opens and the pen is in hand a blockage pops up, somewhere around the neck and shoulders I think. As I walk notions bombard me and the world articulates itself. My mouth will open to expel it and there it becomes stuck again in my tonsils.

This could explain my cough and shallow breathing. My gnawed fingertips are possibly chips away at walls to break out from the inside. Everyone around me seems glazed over in a similar focus on trying to emerge from themselves. Open books with eyes looking anywhere but the pages, conversations with half written expressions between faces betraying the lack of interest or comprehension of what's being said. Laptops seem the only ones successful at suking in all sense of attention, taught by its television cousin as primer.

Feb. 1, 2009
Denver, CO

I am planning to leave Denver once more to go on this crazy intuitive journey with Todd. I want to go but I don't want to leave for once. I don't even know if I want to go, I just want to live out of a pack again.

I am a little concerned about traveling with Todd, or even just wiht anyone particuarly with the purpose for this trip being to reconnect with myself and intuition. That may be difficult if two intuitions clash and one wants to control the other. Something to watch out for. Otherwise it will be nice to have him to rebound thoughts and notions off each other.

What am I really looking for? It seems I'm after reconneting to life which I've been distant from with these day-to-day coffee shop jobs. In film it didn't seem that way as much. I need to regain that freedom of moving my own way again. I've been doing that but only with tension all around me like Vince, Nick, Henri, etc. all cracking down over me.

Todd wants the same, I think, but isn't as clear on the reality, I think. I might be totally off about that. Either way, I travel for a while, or not, but I want to be able to go to the plaes I need to to answer questions, and I don't wwant to stop until those are satisfied enough to stay put again.

Feb. 25, 2009
Denver, CO

These past two months have been quite amazing. I find myself, once again, on the cusp of picking up everything and traveling again. The difference this time, however, is that I'm not feeling lost at all about it. I'm not having the hesitations now about should I or shouldn't I, or what will happen next or to me in the future; am I just wandering? Any of that.

I think the convction comes in facing up tot he fact that I am just wandering now, whether I stay here or move on. I've been aimless since things began falling apart in new York back in '99. Ten years later I'm finally identifying that, not that I haven't stabbed at it, or had inclinations in between, but the bouts of stability attempts and intersest lock downs confused me into thinking I'd solved the mystery feeling. Then I'd quickly realize I hadn't at all.

Groping is what its been. Wendie was one who helped me along on this realization when she said last fall that making a commitment to either staying put or wandering is still a commitment and seeing a commitment through is what helps focus you. That was the great achievment of The Walk. It was the only thing I saw completely through. And even that had blank spots missing with my incessant pushing forward to conquor my dwindling savings time clock.

I am feeling like I'm not abandoning a place this time, even though I don't know how long I'll be gone. It feels more like going on sebatial, an intense researh trip from wich I'll returne when I'm done. That's what makes me feel not uprooted, like still have a home.

Shift in Perspective

2009-11-13T08:20:00.000-08:00

The weekend in Massachusetts visiting my Dad was a rather introspective one. With my sister there to relate the strange layers of complexities recently developing in the land of our upbringing, with family of every variety in the mix, it brought to the surface a lot of the thoughts that have been swirling around under the surface with me. Things that didn't even relate to being there at all, but just what's going on with me.

Being comfortable with calling Massachusetts home when people ask that ever elusive question to me of "where am I from?" has only just resurfaced this past year. In fact, only since the visit earlier in the year with Todd back in May. It wasn't a shame or anything like that which prevented me from feeling comfortable calling Western Mass my home town, it just seemed inaccurate. Longmeadow life, and my life from 18 and earlier, has been dead to me for a long, long time. Probably ever since I returned from Hawaii in April of '95 to a grey town, literally smelling of sewage, and scattered friends, half of whom I'd felt had betrayed me, the other half had run off as I had. My stay there was only for a summer, and that was only because I felt I had nowhere else to go. It was the last time I was to feel trapped by lack of options.

It was during this time I met Stacey. In fact, I met her the first week I was back and was a horrible boyfriend to her the two months we dated. Gus was my companion as usual for the summer, and when I left for New York that fall I had no intention of ever returning, and only hoped Gus would eventually make his way to NYC to keep up our daily friendship, but that never happened.

Years passed and I went through many lives in that time. While in high school going through my suicidal teen phase at 14, as I think most go through, I came to the conclusion I didn't like the idea of suicide at all. It seemed very final, perhaps I was afraid of the commitment. Instead I decided that if life got to that point where an end seemed the only solution I would simply pick up and leave rather than off myself. I did this going to Hawaii and after New York I did it again moving suddenly and inexplicably to Denver. This is what I mean by saying that I'd lived many lives between 18 and now.

Being home in Mass, now, particularly with my sister, all the business going on with my Dad's health and living conditions, and the reacquaintance I've been growing with my aunt and cousins both in Mass and on a whole it was a very tangible reconnection to a past life deeply buried in my subconscious. Wendie has been going through very much of a similar process as well, and having her to reflect with while both being in the home we'd long rejected and forgotten about was refreshing.

We took a trip up to Amherst and Northampton for Saturday. Driving up through the old New England winding stony roads it no longer looked like plowing through a ghost town, and grunting through a return to appease Dad. As we drove up the landscape, and hung out in the area for the day, it oddly felt like going to a place you'd never been to before, but felt comfortable in as if you'd lived there before.

My Mom and sister talk about when they go to the west country in England and how they feel very "at home" there. The three of us are all firm believers in reincarnation and they have strong feelings that they must have lived very impressionable lives there for it to resonate so strongly. It was this feeling I was getting from a land that I had in fact lived in no more than 15 years ago. It was interesting to me that it was a mystical feeling of home rather than a concrete recognition of home. That sort of feeling that boils out of your flesh as if its tied to the land rather than simply knowing this place or that place. Tourist spots to revisit from your youth and say "huh, I remember that".

I'm not sure if I'm making sense, but anyway, that was the jist of the mindset I fell into upon returning home, and Wendie seemed very much to be feeling the same.

There were also still tensions among the family between Dad and Barb and the reactions being given to the great mustering by the family for his 63rd. Dad was sweet, he was more emphatic than I'd seen him about coming up to get me with Wendie in Albany, as well as spending time with us on Sunday, when the party for him was. Because of that there was a undertoned bitterness brought to that Halloween evening when there was to be a dinner at my cousin Tim's house with the family and Dad and Barb opted not to show. None of us could understand it, but in my mind I've resolved just to let these things go and enjoy the family that did come.

I got to see my Uncle Bruce and his wife Cheryl who I rarely get to see. I was also able to meet my cousin's new daughter, Mina, and roam around the neighborhood for his son, Deniz's, first trick or treating venture. It was still Big Family feel, but I was wishing Dad could have been there, and more so that he could have made the effort to get there. He is relatively immobile, though, in regards to driving distances, and completely reliant on being taken there. For this, the gap in his presence there fell to Barb in my mind, whether fairly or not.

Sunday, however, was a nice display of family which was bitter sweet for me. My Dad's favorite cousin, my Uncle Don and Aunt Mary Ellen, came down from New Hampshire since "the kids" had flown in declaring this odd numbered birthday a big event. My Dad's sister, MJ, her husband Frank, my cousin Tim, his wife Burcu, and their kids also came to my cousin Amy and Corrin's house where Wendie and I were staying to really make it a grand celebration. We'd all chipped in to get my Dad a laptop since he's recently taken to writing up stories of his life.

The gathering was bitter sweet because it stung of nostalgia to me of a long dead tradition of big family gathering together and this seemed like an isolated tribute to those days 20 to 25 years ago. It was a wonderful day, and knowing it would end not to be repeated anytime soon was the lingering thought in the back of my mind. I think Wendie was of the same mindset.

Over that weekend, she and I entertained ideas together of either one of us, or both, returning to live there some time in the near future. This has been the main shift in perspective lately. For the first time in a long time I'm contemplating returning to the place I had long sworn off as dead, and regarded as a life failure if I ever returned. For the first decade of being gone, my visits back had rarely been longer than 24 hours if that's any indicator of how little I regarded the place.

Things now seem to be in the air that have rerouted my compass from south to north, much to my very great surprise. I don't see myself settling in there, but I do see myself possibly setting up there as I have in Denver. While in Boston in the beginning of that week I reconnected with my old best friend, Josh, whom I hadn't seen in about 20 years. He and I were inseparable from about preschool up until I was about 12 or 13, and this reconnection was intensely casual.

I couldn't get over how much of every detail of our childhood together that, not only he could remember vividly, but that I couldn't recall at all. I've always regarded myself as having a very good memory extending back well into my youth, but as he quizzed me I realized how little I knew.

Along with him, my friends Bill and Laura have moved up to Boston from DC, and although they aren't all keen on it now, its interesting to me to see they are part of this new draw home. Stacey also is a major reconnection. When I left Boston she picked me up for a ridiculous day and a half roadtrip from Boston to my Mom's house in New Jersey. I have completely fallen in love with her spirit for adventure and outlook on life.

While on this wandering, twisty road adventure we talked over all of our thoughts and events concerning our lives these days which obviously included these new thoughts on returning home on my end. She was very kind to offer her place up as a place of refuge in exchange for me building her a shed. I'm not sure she knows my complete unfamiliarity with carpentry, but I think I could pull it off.

The road trip, however, was immensely fun including an hour long visit to Ikea for an impromptu photoshoot, a visit to the Gillette Castle in Hadlyme, CT, and several stops along the coast. We were also very strict to her brand of roadtripping, which means staying clear of any and all interstates, hence taking a day and a half for an otherwise five our drive.

During this week I spent a lot of time revisiting my old writings, as I often do when I'm under shift in perspective. Normally these revisits are somewhat depressing as I can literally read the depressing cycle of my life; go off and travel, get bored of that, return home and try to root in, get bored of that, repeat. What was inspiring about this looking back was that I didn't see that this time.

Instead, this time I saw progress. Granted it was unrecognized progress forward at the time, dating back to '06, but seeing it now with three years hindsight it became quite visible. I've decided I think I'd like to share those writings on here, so in the next few days I'll update them.

As for right now, once I got into New York with Stacey we had a grand visit with my Mom, then a really great night meeting Stacey's friend Craig. I flew out the next day to Iceland, had a day there, and now have been in London for the past few days whiling away my time on the computer with evening jaunts out to the pub with my friend Jane, and her friends. Life is good, and the best part of it being good is that I'm now looking at December which two weeks ago I had seen as "all laid out to me" and am now completely baffled as to what to expect.

We shall see.

10/30- Homecoming

2009-10-31T11:43:00.000-07:00

Sometime mid-morning Don and I pulled into Binghamton and it was a real goodbye this time. I couldn't believe I'd just spent three days and four nights on a ride that proved to be incredible in many ways having ridden from the middle of Nebraska to four hours from my Dad's door in upstate New York. It was now Friday and his birthday was the next day, and I was within spitting distance. Once again, I had to look back over the course of events and realize all I needed to do was just trust that everything would work out and follow my gut, and it would.

Don bought me a coffee then slipped me $5 saying I'd have to eat again before I got home. I wished him well on his endeavors that he had coming up and we told each other we'd stay in touch via email. I then sat down with my coffee in front of the truck stop and he went off to drop off his load. I was there maybe half an hour, and hadn't even finished my coffee, before Dave came by.

Dave had just come for a coffee, I think, and when he passed me going back to his car and found out I was looking to get east, he said he'd give me a ride 50 miles when he got back from the junkyard. I offered to help there and he accepted. I hadn't been to a scrapyard in decades. Probably not since I was 8 or 9 was I going through old cars watching my Dad pick out parts for his beat up old green Toyota. It was nice spending a while pulling out starters and just wandering around with tools.

From there we went back past the truck stop and hit NY-17 East. Oneonta, the town I was born in, was right up the highway north of Binghamton, and I later found out that down 17 was the road my folks would take to get into the city. Dave, as it turned out, had been an avid hitcher and had all sorts of stories about sleeping under bridges, cutting open palm trees down in Florida for some sort of fruit inside, and general survival skills along that line. He was interesting to listen to, but definitely had a bitterness about people and life in general from those days.

Eventually he dropped me off at a rest stop in Roscoe wishing me luck since he spent much of the ride telling me people in New York don't pick up hitch hikers. Pennsylvania, yes, definitely, but upstate New York was a different lot. The skies were grey again, and it was another rest stop like the one in Auburn; just a bathroom pit stop. I sat out front and broke out the crackers and peanut butter I'd been hauling around since Missouri. As I got close to finishing those up about forty five minutes later I noticed a big pink rig hauling what I figured to be trash pull in.

I didn't take too much notice because it definitely looked like a company truck, no cabin in the back or anything so I didn't even try hitching it. When the guy came out he looked over at me and asked where I was going. I told him I was shooting for Kingston to get to Mass, and he waved me over. I've never caught a ride with a company truck before.

Harold drove me the rest of the way down 17 with few words. The few things he did have to say were a little shocking that he was telling some kid who just jumped in his truck. Apparently two years earlier he'd had an incredibly bad year. He had a stroke, found out his 11 year old was being molested, and his wife left him. The rest was silence.

He dropped me across the Hudson in Fishkill, NY at a gas station and told me to wait there, he was going to get more garbage to haul, and he'd be back to pick me up and bring me to Albany in about two hours. I took him for his word and didn't even try to hitch those two hours. I was still processing a lot of what Don had said and trying to interpret the past two weeks as to what, on a whole, was going on around me. Again, this is where people say I take this all too seriously, but for me it does seem to all make sense.

Two hours later Harold pulled right over and I jumped in. Soon I was up in Albany at a truckstop well off the main road. Wendie had flown in to Springfield a day or two earlier and I had been in touch with her through texting as Harold drove me to Albany. She offered to come pick me up there, since its an hour from home, so when I got in I just hung out there waiting on my ride.

Eventually I moved over to the bus station, since its an easier found landmark in town. Dad was coming with her and he knew precisely where it was. In the end, it all did work out. The three of us had a good family visit for the hour ride home, and I had made it in time for the birthday gathering.

10/27- The Long Haul with Trucker Don

2009-10-31T11:05:00.000-07:00

There were many different facets to this ride with Don. The first bit of intrigue would show up that first day.

I had been under the impression that we'd be in St. Louis early in the afternoon after he'd picked me up. We pulled into a Pilot 20 miles east of Kansas City, however, and when we parked he told me we'd be here for most of the day. It turned out Don had been hauling a triple load pulling overtime through the past few days and needed to stop driving to catch up on his hours in his log book. This is the way these guys get things delivered on time is by fudging their books until they get to a point where they can reconcile the made up times.

On hearing this, since it was about 1pm, I started to get nervous about time again. It was Wednesday, and if I wasn't going to be dropped off in St. Louis, just three hours down the road, until tomorrow some time then I may as well get out here and try to press on. I told him as such, and decided to have lunch with him there, then I'll sit out front and hitch. It was a decent sized truck stop, perfectly located for me, and quite busy. I also had Don as a safety net on the random occasion that I couldn't get a ride out of there.

Over lunch Don was a bit sad. We had already grown attached to each other, and I did feel like this was a premature move to be making. Other than that it all made sense. When we finished I thanked him again, we swapped contact info, and I sat out front and he returned to the trucker's lounge.

It was a grey day and cold. So far, since leaving Matt's back in Oregon, I'd had rain predicted for every single day where ever I was and had only had that hour of drizzle back around Florence and the bit of drift snow outside of Denver. The next day Denver had gotten slammed with a huge snow storm, but where I was in Nebraska was blue skies. Anyway, sitting out there at the previously mentioned busy gas station maybe one car came through in an hour. No one was coming and going, the skies were grey, threatening, and cold, and I was starting to wonder if I was getting greedy for miles again. Perhaps this was a time to just relax again, enjoy the rest with Don, and keep on with him until it does feel right to get out. After all, this whole trip was supposed to be about following your gut, right?

An hour after sitting there with nothing but cold and desolation in the lot a lady who worked for the place came around collecting trash. She looked at me huddled up by a pillar with my bag and asked me why I wasn't inside watching the movie with the drivers. It struck a chord with me and I looked back at her and said that sounded like a good idea. So I went back in.

Don was watching TV upstairs in the lounge and I nudged his shoulder letting him know I was back and interested in staying on with him. He was happy about it and we watched TV for a bit before heading across the street to Walmart for a new phone for him. While there I picked up a new journal to write in and he wouldn't let me pay for it. In fact, the rest of the time I traveled with him he wouldn't let me pay for anything.

When we got back to the Pilot we watched Blades of Glory in the lounge then retired to the truck for the night. He let me use his laptop to check my email and I ended up on it until he needed to wake up and get moving around 2am. That put a strange twist on the next day, because when he got up to drive I passed out after a little while and didn't get up until we were past St. Louis.

The deal from the get go had been that he'd either bring me to St. Louis or I'd hang on until he made his drop where he suspected he'd be going to Arkansas after that, and hopefully Texas. In which case he said he'd drop me off in Memphis. I know that seems like some strange geography since I'm heading to the Northeast, but my theory was that Memphis was better than St. Louis because the South is easy to hitch and I could likely fly through to Virginia. Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio looked like more barriers to me. So when I passed out he asked if I wanted out in St. Louis and I told him I'd hang on past the drop.

I woke up as we were just heading south away from St. Louis. As we headed down I started working out my plans again as to where I should get out. I was eyeballing a place called Sikeston, MO which was right by the bridge to Kentucky and right on Don's way. I figured I could sit with him through the load to see where he's going next, although it seemed entirely likely he'd be heading west and he was going through Sikeston to get there, then I'd have him drop me there and I'd try flying through Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, to New York and Mass. They all seemed like easy hitch states.

We hit the drop, and I tucked away in the back of the cab since I wasn't supposed to be there anyway. When he got back in he was chuckling. While winding our way out of that little town to get back on the main road he told me I was going to love his new load. We were off to Binghamton, NY and it needed to be in Friday morning.

Now Don had spent a lot of time telling me he hated the Northeast. Not just because he was a Texan, in fact I think that had little to do with it, but more as a trucker because no loads come out of there. According to him, if you head to the northeast you're probably deadheading out (riding empty) for a few hundred miles, which is costly in gas and time, before you get to another pay load. He took the job because the pay was nice enough to make up for that.

It was later that night, when we parked at a stop near Herculaneum, MO that Don completely whigged out my brain. Somehow Don got into saying that he really didn't like Malls. I couldn't agree more with him, but his reasoning was different than mine. He claimed he could read people and that when he went to crowded places like that it was hard for him because images of what was going on in everyone elses life around him would crowd in his brain.

Of course you can't have a conversation like this and not ask "well, what do you read off of me?", whether you believe him or not. He didn't want to tell me, but when I egged him on he said that, for one thing, I wasn't going to be going to South America when I thought. In fact, he said it wouldn't be for a few more years, his guess was 5 or 6. There were two reasons why, and they both had very short time frames. I've decided, however, that I don't want to write them up right now, because one was really good and one was really bad and I'd rather not put the notion out there in the air which could encourage the manifestation of the negative one.

The main point was that they were very direct, inambigious predictions coming out of nowhere talking about life changing events in my personal life within the next few months. The fact that one of them had a hard end date as to whether or not the prediction would come true or not was good for me, since I try to slump these things off with a grain of salt but in the end I can't help thinking about them. This way, when that time passes and nothing at all happens then I'll know the rest is bullshit.

What I found strange though, was that after he told me this stuff the conversation then changed to something else. About ten minutes later, as part of the new conversation, I made a reference to his ominous predictions. He didn't get it at all. Only ten minutes later he had completely forgotten about what he'd just said to me. When I reminded him, he told me that usually happened. Once he said what ever it was, and the message had been delivered, it completely left his brain. In his words, there was no reason to retain it. He promptly went to bed after that.

The next day was just a drift day. We blew through the midwest and by nightfall were camped out at a truckstop in Pennsylvania about an hour from Binghamton. Everything seemed said and done by then and it would soon be time to get out.

10/26- Sleeping On Either Side of Kansas

2009-10-31T11:02:00.000-07:00

The night wore on in an absolutely freezing way. I must have slept at some point in there, but I couldn't even guess for how long and definitely wouldn't even be sure that I did. By 4:30am I decided I had at least laid down long enough and it was time to get up again. I was bored mostly, and wanted to get walking again to warm up. Feeling around for the zippers at the mouth of the bivy I felt ice from the condensation that had frozen over there. When I did poke my head out the bivy and my bag were completely covered in ice. On top of that, my foot, the entire night was itching like crazy. I had decided that I was either wearing my socks for too long of a stretch, or I'd gotten into some poison ivy back in Willits, CA.

Through a long, painstaking process I pulled myself out of the bivy and got myself dressed and packed. I stuffed the bivy in with the frost still on it having no idea what else to do about it other than sit still for the sun to come up and warm it off. Once I did get walking, though, it was quite beautiful. I figured out that I think I was walking into the sunrise right around where I'd walked into the sunset and made camp the first night I saw the glow of Denver six years ago and got all excited about it.

I walked for another good ten miles or so that morning as the sun slowly rose over the empty road. Around 9am, I took a break for a little while and thought about making some oatmeal until I discovered the water in my camel back still needed to thaw. Not long after that I was walking over a hill and a work truck blew past me, then clearly had a change of heart and suddenly slammed on the breaks. I ran for it, hoping he wouldn't change his mind again.

Steve was feeling a bit grumpy that morning, as he'd thought he was going to have the day off until about 6:30am. He was near Denver then and found out he needed to be in Holdrege, Nebraska by 7am. It was now 9-ish and had another 5 hours to go to get there and he could care less when he got there. He later told me he thought about blowing by me, but when he did he thought about how long and desolate that road is and couldn't imagine stranding anyone on it. The theory works, though I do feel a little guilty that I'm preying on pity.

Steve and I had good on and off conversation most of the way. Mostly he grumbled about work and such things. We'd stop for coffee along the way, and by 3pm or so he pulled into Holdrege and let me out at the center of town. I made my way to the library from there to figure out were to go next, but all the computers were used up. It was a cute little town, but by 4pm I was making my way out of it only to be picked up by two college kids.

Andrew and Jaime were tooling around running errands and had seen me taking a picture of the town sign for Funk, NE up ahead. They got a kick out of that and on their way out again picked me up for a ride into Kearney, about 20 miles off. As we rode there we got to talking about things and Andrew got all wrapped up into talking about these cars he rebuilds. Jaime had decided that there were better spots to drop me off at than the ramps and truck stops they were going to be near, so she said if I was fine with going with them on their errands they'd take me to a gas station on the east side of town right by I-80 seven miles east of there. Sounded good.

Once we'd done their chores picking up car parts they kept to their word and drove me down the highway to exit 279 leaving me at a Shell station there. I waved goodbye to them, but on the way set my sights on a billboard I'd seen for a Pilot station at exit 300. I waited for them to leave then walked up the road a bit toward US-30 which I knew wasn't too far off figuring I could hopefully hitch a ride from there to the truck stop. It was three miles off.

An hour later, with no luck thumbing it, I finally got onto 30 just as the sun was nearing the horizon behind me. It was a busy road, but it suddenly seemed like one of those roads that are so busy nobody stops on them. Again, there was a freight train to my right which I kept eyeballing, thinking now I would definitely hop it if it wasn't going so damned fast on that track. I walked another hour or so as the sun set and began seriously considering places to drop down for the night.

I was starting to see my idea as futile and was eyeballing the dead cornfield across the street as a perfect refuge from the wind as well as a hiding spot. Along the ground by the tracks were inch thick broken up boards of styrofoam that would be perfect for bedrolls for the night. Things were lining up to stop there and make camp. I didn't want to make the same mistake as I had the night before of passing up a perfect set up only to walk a mile more and end up freezing again. The difference this time, though, was that for whatever reason it just didn't feel right to stop there.

At this point I had physically stopped walking and was looking at all these options. Behind me, to the west, down the road the sun was well sunk in the ground now and still no one was stopping, to my right were the boards of styrofoam, to my left was the corn fields to tuck into, and straight ahead of me was a sign for Gibbon and I was getting a strong feeling that I should keep going at least to Gibbon for the night. I decided to go with the gut and walked about ten feet before a car pulled over.

Hector was right at his turn to go left and be home. I really don't know why he stopped for me, but he did, and when I told him I was trying to get to the truckstop twenty miles up he told me he'd take me the whole way. Weird. As we drove I found out his brother was also waiting for him to get home so he could use Hector's cell phone to call his girlfriend, and Hector figured he could wait. Again, weird that he'd pick me up and go 20 miles out and 20 miles back out of his way to drop me at a truck stop.

The other strange part was that when we got close to the town of Wood River he told me he was going to take a backway he knew to get there because he didn't want to go through that town. Apparently his ex-girlfriend of ten years ago who he was still in love with lived there and he didn't want to see her. Down that back road we saw one other car and he told me it was hers.

When he dropped me off at the Pilot I went inside to use the bathroom. I came out from that, looked around the store for a minute, then sat down at a table figuring I'd charge up my cellphone there while leaving my bag in a good place to advertise that I'm looking for a ride. I barely touched the seat before a trucker came over and started talking to me. This was Don.

Literally within minutes of arriving at this truck stop, through already interesting circumstances, I think, I had caught what would turn out to be the longest ride to date. Don was just tired and wanted some company on the road. He told me he was going to a place just south of St. Louis and I was welcome to ride for as long as I wanted. I jumped at it, and that night spent the night at a truck stop in St. Joes, MO.

I had to laugh when we parked there later that night because when I'd set off going down US-36 in Colorado I thought it'd be neat that I'd get to add Kansas to my little list of states I'd hit on this trip. I'd really enjoyed walking through the state back in '03 and was looking forward to traveling through it again. The route Steve took to get to Nebraska took us within 10 miles of the western Kansas border, where Don and I slept that night was about 3 miles east of it.

10/25- The Eastern Walk Out

2009-10-31T10:35:00.000-07:00

The morning was a typical one for Ang and I and our history of goodbyes. She's not one for them and niether am I, but I also don't like just leaving when I know she's up. I had woken up and packed a bit then for whatever reason missed her getting up and going into the bathroom for her readying routine. I lingered about a while straightening things up until she came out so I could give her an official see ya later. When she was ready we walked out together with Wookie and did our usual cool, calm, and collected see ya.

From there I hopped the 15 bus down Colfax and rode it to the end of the line. I started in on making my calls along the way since I'd shifted phone day to Sunday that weekend. I talked to Victor who had finally left Vegas to Oklahoma City, but his truck had broken down again there and was stuck again. His thoughts, though, were that he might be heading to Michigan next if I could catch up with him. When I got off the bus, just past I-225, I talked to Todd a while as I started into walking the reverse route down US-36 that I'd walked west on six years earlier coming into Denver.

Todd and I finished chatting just as US-36 was connecting with I-70. It was also starting to snow and the roads were looking fairly barren. I walked a good ten miles in the snow before I was picked up. That ride drove me to Bennett and dropped me off with some really good cookies. He had been a hitcher when he was younger as well.

I walked maybe half a mile before a pick up swung around pulling a U-turn to pick me up. These rides always impress me, because clearly you're going in the other direction so it always makes me wonder why you'd turn around to give a ride in the direction they just came from. This guy, apparently, was just driving around. As he drove me on to Byers asking about my trip he stopped at one point to blow into a breathalyzer to keep the car running. Apparently he'd been caught driving just barely over the limit five years ago and had to keep that installed in his car for another three years past when I met him. We had an interesting chat about that, but I agree with him that it was a bit excessive, especially since he was three years sober now.

He dropped me off in the parking lot of the last anything I knew of down that road. It was a grocery store, and I debated picking up more oatmeal, but then figured I was fine for at least a few more days. The snow was still coming down then as I walked out of the lot stepping down what I knew to be 31 miles of absolutely nothing. I was counting on my theory that I'd be more likely to get some good rides walking down a long desolate road in cold, shitty weather. About ten paces in the theory proved correct.

Almost immediately a guy in a work truck pulled over, while sipping his beer, and picked me up. The look on his face as he pulled over told me it was the snow and the audacity of walking out into it was why. He gave me a lift about ten miles in then dropped me off to turn north to his house. I was committed now, there was no going back and only forward to walk. I was actually looking forward to it quite a bit.

As I walked the next few miles or so I called my Aunt Hea to see how she was doing. We had a good long chat as the snow came down only to be interupted toward the end of the day with another quick hop ride. Lisa, Chris, and Jose pulled over to drive me another six or seven miles up to where they lived in an old hotel. Here was where another theory of mine developed learned by having not learned the lesson of the time.

When we got to their place Lisa was really concerned about me walking off down the road in the cold, emphatically warning me that there's nothing down that way. I was well aware of this having walked it before coming the other way which is why I think I didn't weigh it in as much when she asked me to stay for dinner. Knowing how things generally go dinner usually becomes a place to stay, even if its camping out on their lawn. It was a similar situation to when Russ dropped me off on the beach back in Oregon since it was about an hour to sunset and here a place was quite possibly showing up for me. I, however, was greedy for miles and figured I could probably pick up one more long ride before sun down and hopefully make it to Kansas that night. I would forever kick myself for that decision.

I turned Lisa down, thanked them for the ride, and wandered off down the road with the nagging feeling of thinking I should go back and take them up on it after all. That feeling persisted until I couldn't see the place any more. Three miles passed before the sun was low enough that it wasn't worth walking any more and I should bed down for the night. It was the coldest night of my life.

I don't actually know if I slept at all that night or not. I didn't have any bedroll supplement, like the cardboard from truck stops, and using the clothes in that way was somewhat helpful, but if I moved at all I felt the cold again. Long story short, it was a long, long night.

10/24- Zombie Crawl in Denver

2009-10-31T10:11:00.000-07:00

It was quite nice waking up back on my couch again since the morning before had been frost-ridden. Ang and I had arranged to hang for the day since Loreli had things she needed to get down in the early part of the day. Later in the evening, however, she invited me to a Zombie Crawl that was going on downtown in Denver. Izzy would be back from her Dad's by then so it'd also be a great way so see her as well.

Being that it was Saturday it normally would have been a phone day, but I decided to shift it to Sunday and focus my visiting energy on just hanging out with Denver chums. It had also been a debate as to how long I was going to stay. At first, with the rush to Halloween growing on my head, I figured I should leave by either noon or one, evening at the latest. Waking up that morning I decided to relax, go with the "don't rush" mojo I've been feeling, and stay the full day leaving Sunday morning.

Normally Ang works on Saturdays, and for whatever reason she had this one off. When she found out she had this Saturday off she specifically had decided not to plan to do anything that day and to just enjoy it. Now with me suddenly appearing out of nowhere for the day it worked out perfectly to hang out that day. I text her I'd meet her at Dazbog, then made my way over there for a coffee and a visit with the folks there.

After a bit of a visit with Vince, Nick, Mike, and Boobs as well as some of the regulars passing through Ang showed up and we spent the day touring around Capital Hill. We stopped for another coffee at Pablos where I ran into Angie, my ex from the walking days, and got a brief visit with her. Then popped in at Kilgore Books where my friend Luke was working for a quick visit with him. We hit a few other places as well, then meandered our way down town, all the while catching up on each other's gossip.

As we neared the theatre downtown we got to talking about how we both wanted to see Where the Wild Things Are. I had just seen a preview for it at a truck stop, and she'd had plans to see it with some friends on Thursday but was held up for some reason and they went to see it with out her. She even said, normally she'd be pretty pissy about being ditched like that, but she uncharacteristically wasn't bothered and had thought then "I'd really like to see that with Chris". We decided to get midnight movie tickets as a last hurrah before I shoved off in the morning.

We found ourselves down at Tattered Cover later in the day where I picked up the English version of the Paulo Coelho book I've been barely trying to read in Spanish. From there she treated me to lunch at Illegal Petes. By the time we were done it was time to meet up with Loreli for the Zombie Crawl.

Being downtown already we had seen a few done up zombies here and there, but nothing that would really suggest a gathering of them anywhere near by. We met up with Loreli and a self-zombiefied Izzy a block over from where we ate and soon discovered the cluster gathering under the Lorimer Clock Tower. It was amazing.

There were zombie wedding couples, Tim Burton zombie doll girls, a zombie Jesus, zombie robot, zombie aliens, and even a zombie baby nursing on the spine of a severed head (pictures in the folder). As the sun waned zombie hunters also started to appear. Guys and girls in gas masks with oodles of rifles, a Storm Trooper, and more faceless armed V for Vendetta styled troops.

Loreli's friend Faith was the one who had invited her and spawned the whole of us gathering there in general, and one of her two kids was Izzy's age, both of whom started attacking me immediately on our arrival. Faith's older daughter was a bit more reserved and stuck to her mother, but the young one was a bit ferocious. She actually bit me, and continued wrestling me with Izzy for a good half hour before I figured out a way to bow out.

I also ran into my friend Tym from the earlier days of D&D gaming in Denver. He was there on his own so we hung out some for a bit and caught up. As the sun got closer to the ground the party ramped up little by little. Crazier and more out landish zombies started showing up. Faith's friend, Josh, was a pedicabber and had a make up kit in his pedicab so he did me up as a zombie as well.

Ang spotted some friends after a bit and meandered over there, Faith ran after her kids somewhere, and Izzy wanted to play on the blocks near by so Loreli and I took her over there. Somewhere in all the confusion of us wandering off every where the rest of the 1,000 people gathering broke itself up as well and Ang and I were soon texting back and forth wondering where the other was. In a moment's time the green that was littered with zombies was barren and strewn with trash. The sun was setting.

Loreli went off with Izzy and I managed to find Ang. The zombies had now all gathered in the middle of the 16th St. Mall. Dusk was creating an ominous coloring through the buildings and then suddenly everyone started running down the Mall. It was pandimonium. I have never been in such a fun, realistic depiction of what zombies taking over the world would be like than that evening.

Ang and I decided to head home, but as we walked back down the Mall zombie kids were banging their hands against the Mall bus that brings tourists up and down, scampering past us, running at top speed, and soldiered outfits in hot persuit of them. Back down by the clock tower you could hear loud moans, screams, and screeches unlike what normal loud crowd noises are like. I started taking video and one guy passing me told me I should put that away because they're jumping anyone with cameras.

Eventually we got to the end of the Mall, still hearing the chaos down the road. We agreed to meet back at her place around 11pm because I was going home to do laundry, swap some things out from my stuff at Loreli's, and just repack in general. Most of this I did get done in a timely fashion before Loreli returned home with Izzy and her best friend Jade who I knew from the summer at Julie's.

Izzy and Jade had decided they were dogs for the night, dalmations to be precise, and I think I was their Dad. I seem to always end up being their Dad oddly. I have to admit I got really caught up in playing with them, rolling them up in a big blanket and carrying them around the house like a sack of potatoes. I'm a sucker for fun with kids. The four of us also played a game of hide-and-go-seek until Brandon got home. Then I began the putting them to bed routine by reading them a story. It was about 10pm when all was said and done and I still needed to get some things done.

Loreli was also having a hard night and I felt like a real dick trying to listen intently to what she needed to talk about while rushing to get everything in order to meet up with Ang for the movie by 11. In the end it was futile and I was darting out the door apologizing for not being able to be a better listener at the time. I was then texting Ang that I was running late and that maybe we should just meet at the theatre. I caught a bus, and in the end, it all worked out.

Ang and I met up about fifteen minutes before the show started and got good seats in a sparsely filled theatre. The movie was completely amazing. It turned out to be a perfect way to wrap up my day reprieve in Denver. Afterward Ang and I walked back to her house where I stayed the night.

10/23- Wyoming

2009-10-31T10:10:00.000-07:00

I got a pretty decent nights sleep and was fully appreciative of my new method of grabbing cardboard boxes from dumpsters on my way to finding a place to bed down when I peeked my head out of the bivy to find frost on my bag. Inside I was still quite toasty. Seeing that frost, and feeling the morning air made getting out of the bivy a little bit of a chore, but eventually I did it. I put my boots on immediately to start warming them up for the day since they were absolutely freezing.

As I proceeded to pack everything up I kept thinking I should make myself breakfast for the day ahead. Its something I have a habit of forgetting to do, then suddenly I find myself feeling really weak and hungry. Very strange phenomenon, but I think I'm narrowing down its cause. Soon enough I was back down at the J and setting up shop with a coffee a picnic table between the truckers gas station and the door to the store.

I had finally busted out all the stops on my cold weather gear and was wearing everything. My long johns and thermal undershirt that I'd picked up at Penney's, my walking t-shirt, hoodie, rain parka, and winter jacket along with my jeans and rain pants over my long johns. I also donned my hat with the hoodie up under it and my winter gloves on. It was cold outside, but I was actually a little bit hot after all that.

I roamed around that general area for a couple hours just enjoying the morning. I had woken up around 9am again and was not feeling any rush, or at least, no immediate rush for that morning. In general, I was both a little bit nervous about my timing and my cash since Salt Lake had taken quite a bit of both from me with the two day wait and bus fare. With that lingering around in the back of my mind, I was doing quite well not feeling rushed at all for the present moment and quite proud of myself for being able to trust that everything would work out one way or another. In my mind, this was all apart of a series of lessons.

After a while I went off to have my breakfast away from the Flying J. I felt it was rude enough for me to be lingering around with only a coffee purchase for so long, so I may as well not cook up my oatmeal like a true hobo in front of their 24 hour diner. It was nice sitting off on my own for a bit anyway. There was no chance of thinking about hitching, so it felt like a lunch break to fully just enjoy my meal.

When I returned and washed everything up in the rest room I sat back outside for a bit. A guy had taken notice of me when he went in the store but didn't say anything that I recall. I sat there a bit longer then decided to get another coffee. When I went in he was walking out and asked if I'd gotten a ride yet. I told him no and he waved me on to go with him.

Peter was a really interesting guy on his own, as well as an interesting study in how people react to me. When I first got in the car and we headed off down the highway we got to talking about me hitching. I'm pretty sure he offered the ride because he thought I was down on my luck and stranded. When he found out I was hitching by choice he seemed to lose respect for me as one of Todd's trust fund travelers. I've had this reaction before and pretty much ignored it.

Once it seemed as though that was his image of me he told me he was sorry he was going to bore me to death and hit play on the tape he was listening to. It couldn't have been a more perfect selection as the audio documentary of Andrew Jackson continued on from where he'd just left off. It was even right at my favorite part of his presidential career of when Jackson takes on the Central Bank through his second term. This opened many doors for Peter and I to talk about.

Normally I'm not one to talk through a tape, movie, TV show, etc., but Peter opened the door with a comment and I ran with it. I started unloading everything I learned about how The Fed works, how Jackson's fight to remove the Central Bank was the biggest achievement on his watch, and all of my theories on what's going on with this down turned crap economy now. Much to my surprise I sounded like I knew quite a bit, and Peter was quite impressed as well. Suddenly the lost respect for me he had when I got in flipped 180 and doubled. He was soon asking me what I thought of the administration, government in general, how did I know so much about banking and the monetary system. All I could say was that I saw a really good documentary and recommended it to him. Money Lenders, or Money Changers, I believe it was called. Another good for content, bad by production, film is Freedom vs. Facism talking about how income tax is completely unconstitutional and illegal.

This took about half an hour for us to start getting into these conversations, and soon we were having really lively, intense conversations while pausing and playing the Jackson tape to really figure out what the world is doing now. It was a really great ride all the way to Laramie, and when he dropped me off at the library there you could tell neither of us were really ready to part ways. Alas, I thanked him again for the ride and he went off to his lecture.

An hour later I was heading into downtown Laramie a few blocks away where 287 crosses through town. The whole way walking there I kept running a debate in my head of whether or not to head south down 287 where I'd likely pick up a ride in no time toward the Front Range sprawl and hopefully Denver, or do I head north back to an on ramp by I-80 and try to make some miles east. I had a week now to get half way across the country and was thinking any more slacking off would keep me from getting there in time.

At the same time I couldn't help but notice all the Colorado plates driving around up there as I turned north toward I-80. I also passed within 100 yards of a desperately slow moving freight train with all the right kinds of cars to jump on to heading south. I even walked toward it hesitantly before turning back. Starting over the bridge toward I-80 a kid picked me up for a short hop and dumped my right by the exit. That was it, I was hitching east.

It was about 4:30pm now and I stood right at the on ramp until sunset with my thumb out. No one. Stunning view though. I decided that once the sunset and I was little more than a creepy guy in a hat standing in the dark under a single street lamp by the on ramp in a state its illegal to hitch in that I'd head down to the truck stop and get some dinner. One lady had stopped, and again, in place of a ride she gave me $7. That $7 convinced myself that I should have a $17 dinner of an all you can eat steak buffet. You'd have done the same.

It was the best damn meal I to memory where I stuffed myself silly with three or four courses, bottomless coffee, and was sitting in the drivers section by invite chatting with all the truckers as an obvious hitcher. The waitress roaming around was completely adorable too, that didn't hurt. After a good hour or so I had eaten all I could and saw no promising leads that one of the truckers I was chatting with was even entertaining the idea of giving me a lift, so I paid my bill and left.

Once again, I did not think about drinking tons of coffee along side going to bed afterward. I decided to sit out and hitch a bit more in front of the truck stop, but it was completely dead. I crossed over the bridge back to the one on the other side and just felt creepy over there. Returning back to my original spot that I'd had in the day time I figured that I was just going up there to wait out the coffee buzz and feel productive in the meantime, but really didn't expect anyone to pick me up in the dark when nobody did in the daylight.

A half an hour later Juan pulled up next to me to my very great surprise. He told me he was heading to Greeley in just enough English for me to understand. Greeley is 50 minutes north of Denver so I hopped in and started sending out texts to Ang and Loreli.

Both were ecstatic, which of course made me feel really good. I asked Loreli if I could stay at her place if I could catch a ride from Loveland down I-25 to Denver that night and she responded with "don't be silly we're coming up to get you". I was beaming the rest of the hour ride down with Juan as we decided to work on each others linguistic skills. I spoke in my crap ass Spanish to him and he'd respond and correct me in his broken but relatively fluent English. When our brains hurt after a bit of that he turned to showing me transvestite joke gifs that his cousin texted him that day. Good times.

I bid him adieu at a gas station in Loveland right by the ramp to I-25 and he went off another ten minutes down the road to Greeley to his family. As I waited for Loreli and Brandon to drive up I started talking with the guy working the register there. He was a pretty cool guy in from Brooklyn who was another who'd been converted to being strictly a Colorado guy now. It was a good way to pass the time, and he was an interesting guy with good perspective and insights as well.

By about midnight they arrived and we were cruising back down the highway talking about the weirdness about me just suddenly popping back by again. It was odd for all of us, but no one was complaining. At that point I was up for a good dose of home before continuing on east.

10/21- Salt Lake City, Utah

2009-10-31T09:59:00.000-07:00

The scenery I awoke to was stunning. One giant mountain rose up behind me and another rose up a little ways off to the west as well. I was having another one of those lazy morning feelings, when in all logical reality I should have been panicking from the get go about being stuck in the Deadzone that is Utah. I could've cared less, and was confident against rumors that things would work out.

Slowly I packed up by about 9:30am and made my way over to the Flying J for a nice liesurely breakfast. I was conscious, at the time, of a pattern Todd and I had noticed in time and liesurely mornings. Several times both of us separately have woken up around 9:30am and felt like not doing much in the morning. Sitting around writing, having breakfast, just pondering, which ever. Then around 12:30pm I feeling strikes us to get to the day finally, and when we do usually something quite phenomenal happens. Whether its picking up one really long interesting ride, or catching a serious of hops, or something else completely. Most times those inspiring or thought provoking days have happened they've had that kind of morning. So when I saw myself heading into the diner around that time I wondered if such a day was in store for me.

At my table there was one of those truck stop table phones. Between ordering and eating my food I called my Mom at work to catch up with what she was doing and tell her how my visit with her sister had gone. She was a bit busy, so couldn't talk long, but it was nice just touching base. I ate my meal and watched the news on TV completely unpressed about getting out and hitching for the day.

Sure enough, I was done and full by noon, paid my bill, brushed my teeth, and out in front of the place by 12:30pm. I was there for a bit. Maybe an hour passed before I got my first ride offer, though it was heading west. A couple of dread head hippies heading back to Northern Cal to go trimming. I liked the idea of riding with them, and thought about catching a ride with them back to the eastern edge of Nevada thinking a ride would be more likely there, but I wasn't willing to succumb to the rumors just yet.

Eventually I switched from being in front of the building to being out by the exit where more people could see me. While waiting, thinking on the principles of just being where I was, I set to writing a letter to Loreli. By 3pm I did end up with a ride. Jordan picked me up offering me a ride to the Flying J truck stop in the city. I jumped on it remembering Jorge's concern about trying to get a spot there late at night. He claimed it was always busy and never any parking after 6pm which sounded promising to me.

Jordan was another guy who went out of his way for me. He went so far as to research the address of the Flying J as well as going a little out of his way to get me there. He was going to pick up a new car he'd bought a week ago and had to return for some repairs. According to him he said if they can make him wait a week he can make them wait half an hour to get me where I need to go. He also believed he could get a ticket for picking up hitch hikers, but that he believed that law was stupid which was why he gave me the ride. Despite the reputation, Utah has some really nice people living there.

Once there, I set to finding myself a spot to nest in. There was a picnic table set perfectly by the corner of the building where the truckers all walk by to go inside, cars are all parked nearby, so they can see you, and the staff isn't staring at you from any windows. I dropped my pack so it was visible to all and got back into my letter.

A few hours of being there and I went back to wondering what I was missing. Was I doing something wrong, was there some lesson in this for me, what can I do to correct my situation? In all reality, no one was picking me up and that was that. I had moved to the center of the hive and wondering why no rides were coming. I decided to get myself moving around a little to see if that would be "stepping out the front door" of getting myself in some right spots. I sought out the Post Office for my letter to Loreli.

It was a bit of a hike, but not too bad. Along the way I could hear freight trains in the area and wondered if that would be a possibility. My aim at this point was to get anywhere clear of Utah. Victor had text me saying he was still stuck in Vegas with a broken truck, Grand Junction was seeming appealing, though a little south for my tastes, and then there was Wyoming of which all of my usual reservations for that state had oddly fallen away and it was looking quite appealing right about now.

I mailed my letter and returned to the J, this time actually spotting the train on my way back. As it turned out the track actually wrapped around the truck stop I was camping out at. This had hints of being somewhat of a sign in my mind, but at the same time I was resistant to making my first foray into train hopping just yet. I would say it had to do with fear, which is also a good indicator that something's pushing me that way, although it also didn't feel entirely right either.

I sat back down at the J for a bit then decided to explore other options. The truck stop wasn't in the best location. It was off of a sub-route and not an interstate, although not too far away were I-15 and I-80. Also I had run into a guy who gave me some tips on where to catch a train if I were to hop one. I wandered up that way toward the city to look into this hopping option, as well as scope out what the ramps looked like. I didn't find much in the way of anything helpful, and basically just found myself going for a stroll. I did, however, make a call on Amtrak and Greyhound to discover tickets to Grand Junction or Evanston were not terribly expensive. The sun was setting by now so I figured I'd get back to the Flying J. On my way a car pulled up to me.

The lady inside was specific. She said she didn't want to give me a ride but she wanted to help me out, and handed me $5. That perked me up a bit. When I got back I sat out for another hour or so, then went off for another stroll in a different direction to look over the train yards, some other ramps, and the possibility of just walking out through back roads. None of these options looked good when I saw them.

It was about 9pm now and I was ready to call it a day. Reasoning my options out I figured I would give the next day one more good solid try, and if all else failed I take the bus or the train out that night. I picked up some cardboard and found a perfect spot behind the truck stop amid some tall weeds for a good nights rest.

The morning would prove to have its new elements to my challenge. I returned to my table and began working on an actual sign, something I had yet to use on my own yet. While drawing it up some employees came to sit with me for a smoke and warned me that if management saw me flying the sign I'd be kicked out for sure. They continued on to say that management was thick that day and that every level from regional on down to local managers were inspecting the place because Pilot had just bought them out. I took this as a huge indicator that I was not to stay in Utah much longer.

I sat flying my flag from the table anyway. It was out of the view of the counter people, and I could easily hide it should any of the roaving management come out. In the meantime I'd let as many truckers and drivers get a look at it as I could to hopefully find my way out of there. Nothing took, and eventually I moved to in front of the store, then over to the truck exit, then back to in front of the store. Finally, after a day of spending an hour or so in each place I got cocky and moved to the exit of the regular car gas station part, in full view of the counter people. About ten minutes later two people came out and asked me to move across the street with my sign. I asked if I could stay where I was if I chucked the sign and they told me I was loitering and that was intolerable. Fair enough, I'm pretty sure I sabotaged myself subconsciously on that one anyway.

It was about 3pm then and plenty of day light left. I resolved to myself that this must be not only a lesson in patience, but money as well. Easily this could be seen as self conviction, but I'll portray it to myself however I like, thank you. I decided to just commit to taking either the 8:15pm bus to Evanston, WY or the 4:15am train to Grand Junction, CO and enjoy the city in the meantime without a hint of trying to hitch. There is the famous Salt Lake City library that I'd heard so much about for genealogical studies so I figured that would be my first stop.

Took me about an hour to get there, but once I did it truly was lovely. I even excited some of the locals when I asked where it was. One thing about Utah folk, they are extremely proud of their monuments. The guy at the library was hilarious too as he got into asking me if hitching life was as exciting as it was cracked up to be. I assured him I've never felt better or more alive in my life, and turned him on to the website. While online I ran into Todd for a quick chat and decided to take his suggestion of busing past Evanston, although only to Rock Springs and not Rawlings as he was suggesting.

When my time was up I made my way over to the Greyhound/Amtrak Station. This was one place in Salt Lake that I knew, as I've come through here many times. The debate was in my face then of taking the dollar difference ticket to Grand Junction and get myself on the low road and guarantee a stop over in Denver, or go straight on to Wyoming and get further west. I opted for Rock Springs.

Come midnight I was the only one getting off at the McDonalds stop over. I had debated just staying on, since the Rawlins stop was at 3:59am and the bus driver really had no clue who was getting on or off her bus at midnight or 4am. In fact she saw me with my pack on when they were reboarding and looked at me questioningly not quite believing this was my stop. It did seem like the honest thing to do though, which is important to me whether I'm caught or not.

I know the common argument that big corporations like Greyhound and such are stealing my money regularly with over charged pricing and such things, but I figure stealing is stealing regardless of whether your stealing from another thief or not. I had the same debate about the train hopping, and I'm still not sure about that answer. Am I caught up in law or morality? Not sure really with something like train hopping, or bus hopping for that matter.

Either way, I got out and found out the truck stop Sean had droppped me off at a month and a half ago was two miles down the highway. I got up on the darker edges of the interstate and walked until 1am to that Flying J and dropped in to the diner for some dinner. Back in my struggle to leave Salt Lake I'd asked Todd to post something a Craigslist under rideshares saying I was looking for a ride out of town. He embellished it to read that I was struggling to get home to Massachusetts where my sick father was and could anyone help since I was stranded. When I sat down for dinner I got a text from another Salt Laker concerned for my plight. Again, they weren't offering a ride, but I think they were offering a place to stay if I was stranded. Nice folks, they just don't want you in their car. Fair enough.

I ate, read, and wrote until 3am then crossed the road to some high rocks and made camp for the night. Regardless of what any of being stuck did or didn't mean, it felt good to be moving forward again.

10/19- Heading West

2009-10-31T08:59:00.000-07:00

Now my time crunch head was back on, and I was trying to remember the lessons of the previous week to not worry and relax. I had twelve days now to get from one end of the country to the other and I was thinking it seemed quite feasible. If I could get from Denver to Boise in three days, I could certainly get from San Francisco to Springfield, Mass in twelve.

I got up early and nearly crept out of the house before Hea stopped me at the door. She left me a note to wake her that I'd missed, but it hadn't mattered anyway, she woke herself really wanting to see me off. It was really sweet. I gave her another big hug goodbye, and thanked her again for the visit. She reiterated that if I felt like staying I could for as long as I wanted. Later on, I'd get another voicemail from her, concerned I'd miss my train from the rain that day, and urging me to turn around and stay as well. I was really touched.

Alas, I did make the train I was after. Using up the last bit of Amtrak Gift Certificate I had, plus $1, I caught a train/bus combination to Auburn, CA to clear the sprawl. It also put me within 80 miles of the Nevada border. The day on a whole was fairly quiet since most of it was on that rainy train. By the afternoon I found myself in sunny Auburn and a library right down the road, so I went.

An hour later I put myself up on the ramp and stood there with my thumb out one more time. I was there for quite a while watching SUVs and mini vans come and go on to I-80. I had talked with my trucker friend, Victor, before wondering where he was at. It turned out he was in Vegas, but likely heading up Central California to Sacremento to head east. I looked to that notion as a safety net of sorts if nothing came of this on ramp. After an hour or so a truck load of yard workers pulled over and told me they were only going to Dry Creek, but they'd take me if I wanted.

Ten minutes later I was in Dry Creek, which is a completely dead, nothing there, exit. I had managed to strand myself. The brief ride was interesting though, they were a couple of Mexicans and the driver was really curious about me travels. In that brief span I told him about my thoughts on heading down to southern Mexico and what so he offered up some advice on areas to hit and areas to avoid.

At the Dry Creek stop I felt a little foolish. Maybe I was a bit too hasty in taking the first ride that came along, and maybe I should start being a little more critical of destinations. I liked the idea of just jumping in the first ride that came, but maybe that time had passed now. Either way, I was there for another hour or so before a lady brought me to the next exit, Colfax.

She was interesting, I can't remember her name, but she was going to pick up her son and other car poolers with him. He was 15 and she told me she was encouraging him to do something like what I'm doing. She actually wanted him to go out and hitch the country when he got out of high school. It somewhat reminded me of my Mom's unusual suggestion when I was 18 and talking about walking it. She thought maybe it'd be wiser to get a motorcycle and do it that way.

Anyway, ten minutes later I was standing on a new corner in Colfax by an on ramp watching cars go by again. Every place I left I'd look back on the positive elements of. Auburn had a heavy stream of traffic to pick from and places to camp if stuck. Dry Creek had ample places to camp though no traffic. Colfax had a bit more traffic but no where to camp. At least none immediately showing themselves.

After an hour there and watching the sun set I decided to get proactive again. I figured out there was a rest stop not too far ahead. If I could walk there I could have a place to bed down and the possibility of some good car flow. Finagling my way around the streets I finally worked out that there would be a road running parallel I-80 on the other side. When I made my way there, sure enough there was one, so I headed down it with my thumb out.

It didn't take long before a pick up pulled up by me. When I told him where I was trying to get to he told me I was definitely on the wrong road. Apparently the one I was on went up for about a mile or so then turned due north, rather than west. As I sat there in his door completely perplexed as to what to do next he then offered to take me to the rest stop regardless of it being out of his way.

I'm always amazed when people go out of their way for me like this. The fact that anyone's letting me in their car for a ride their going to make anyway is always fascinating to me, but when they take rides that are completely out of their way is a real kicker. He drove me about 15 miles up and wished me luck when he dumped me out. We had talked some about hitching and traveling, and if I remember right he had been a hitcher in his day as well.

As he pulled off I looked over the rest stop and it was quite different from the one in my mind's eye. It wasn't a TA, Flying J, Pilot or anything like that, it was literally just a rest stop. Bathrooms and picnic tables with parking and trash cans. Either way, people would be coming through. The sun was setting and the temperature was dropping. It turned out I was now pretty close to Donner's Pass, which I found somewhat amusing. I decided to just call it a night and wake up fresh in the morning rather than try futilely to hitch a slow rest stop on a cold, rainy night.

Around the back were some nice paths, and in there I picked out a prime camp spot. I slept well and was up and packed by 9am the next morning. Hauling my stuff back to the picnic tables by the lot where I could be seen I had a nice leisurely breakfast of oatmeal with agave. I was back in relaxed mode and in no rush at all.

Once I washed up I sat on the benches by the rest rooms so that everyone could see me as they came and went. I spent a good while there just writing in my journal and even tried calling my Mom on the pay phone that didn't work. Having chatted some with one of the workers there he became annoyed with me that I didn't have any pot for him, so a little while later I moved over to the exit ramp. I was there maybe twenty minutes before one of the truckers honked their horn and waved me over.

Jorge was only two hours from having left his house that morning on his usual three day circuit. He told me he never stops in at this rest stop that he passes twice a week, but today he'd had some indegestion from breakfast. I don't know why he picked me up, but my only guess is that he just wanted company.

He was heading to Salt Lake City before he was going to turn south to Arizona. Utah, and particularly its capital Salt Lake City, are hitching deadzones by reputation. My thoughts, however, were of the possibility of Victor coming along behind us going from Sacremento to Cleveland. Also, I just didn't want to pass up a ride that long. I was greedy for miles.

As we drove off we got into talking about his trucking life and the ways of the world through those eyes. Truckers have an interesting vantage point as the movers and shippers of all the goods the country buys. When the economy is good there's a lot of stuff being moved, when its slow, there are less loads to haul. From Jorge's tales the economy was still in the shitter, but getting slightly better.

The most interesting story, as I heard them, was about how truckers work. Every December Owner/Operators have to shell out thousands of dollars in taxes to be able to use their rigs commercially the next year. Last year, with all the business in September with the Lehman Brothers going under and everything, the economy tanked, but by December people were hopeful it'd blow over so the truckers went about business as usual. January and February are generally slow since everyone just blew their wad for Christmas, but when March hit and it was deader than ever the nerves started going. By June people were selling rigs.

Over the summer it was still pretty dead, pay was low as truckers undercut one another just to have something to haul. According to Jorge, who already sold his other two rigs, it was only in September that pay rates started getting back to something even remotely considered reasonable, though still quite low. Having met him toward the end of October with that still being the case he said many of the truckers are just not going to sell their rigs and move on to some other vocation. This will leave a shortage of trucks on the road. Not sure what that will do for the world, but I'm curious to see. If truckers can charge high again to recoup their losses from this year then I suspect the price of things will go up as well.

The other story was of the brokers. Jorge told me of how he believes they are the ones to blame for low pay rates. He told me of a time he was stuck in Denver looking for a load home to California and didn't want to take anything else. His dispatcher called saying a broker was offering $600 to haul something to Billings, and he turned him down. A bit later the dispatcher called again saying he was now offering $900. Again, he said no. A third time offer went up to $1,200. Finally Jorge told his dispatcher he really doesn't want to go to Billings, he just wants to get back to California to see his family for the weekend. He told his dispatcher to relay that he'd take nothing less than $2,000 for that load knowing there's no way the broker would take it and would finally leave him alone. The broker went for it, so Jorge did the job.

Thinking about that, if the broker is paying out of the pay he's being offered from the client and he can afford to pay $2,000 why did he first offer Jorge $600? I think its fair to assume that the broker isn't going to pay him anything out of his own pocket to get the shipment there. Jorge just lucked out on being the only truck in Denver at the time, and his resistance to wanting any load other than a California bound one. Anyway, more food for thought on the workings of the world.

Other than these topics Jorge also was telling me about coming up from Mexico when he was 15, and the mentality behind that. I hadn't realized back in WWII the US invited the Mexicans to come up to fill the war time shortage gap of workers. When the war was over, and everyone returned, the Mexicans were no longer invited, but after four years it had already become apparent that this was a good living. Since then fathers and sons have been arriving as their fathers had, and its only been relatively recently that the US has had a problem with it.

These were the sorts of things he and I talked about on the way through Nevada. We stopped in at Winnemucca for lunch which Jorge insisted on treating me to, even though I told him I'd get lunch and was trying to give the money to the cashier. Around 10:30pm we got into a Flying J 20 miles west of Salt Lake. I was now committed to Utah completely. It was time to see if the rumors were true.

I got out with many thanks for the huge lift he'd given me, the great company and the lunch then set off to a table by the truck stop. I called Todd and talked to him a little while then wandered into the sage brush for bed.

10/18- A Day of Visiting

2009-10-31T08:42:00.000-07:00

The room Rachel had was perfect for me. It was a tiny closet side room that held all of her stuff, since she didn't quite live there officially, but had a patch in the middle where I could bed down. I slept so well I rose before anyone else in the house and set to sorting things out. The night before I'd asked if there was a buzzer I could use to straighten out my head a bit more, so I did some work on that, took a shower, and packed up some before I ran into Rachel.

She and I had decided to go out to breakfast to get a good visit in before I went off to meet my aunt again. There was a place around the corner that had big fat burritos and good coffee with back patio seating that we went to. The reason Rachel doesn't officially live in the apartment I stayed at was because she's in transition from having come back from Nicaragua recently. She was crashing with Rich until she could move into a place in November. Pretty much our entire visit was me pumping her for stories about being down there for a month and running the vague notions of a plan I have had about being there. I also ran Leann's suggestions by her to see if she'd validate them a bit more.

It was a good time, and really nice to be able to talk about current things in each other's lives, rather than crutch on the good old days of high school together. Not to mention that we were in our good old days now, and that high school was something of a faint vague memory to us both. You could see the old person in either of us, but we were clearly different people now, and actually much more similar than we had been then.

I made my way back to North Beach and to my aunt's apartment after that. I've always liked her boyfriend, David, and was happy to find him home when I eventually arrived. His apartment is completely amazing for a San Fran place. Two stories with a little tea garden in the back and an old timey feel through out the place. We sat up in the living room all three of us chatting for a good while before he had to go off and run some chores. My plan at this point was to have lunch with Hea and catch up some more, before heading out that evening either by hitch, train, or bus. As things went on that was seeming like a dumber and dumber plan. One might say... rushed.

As David was leaving he invited me to dinner and to stay, as my aunt had been all along. Later, she and I left the house to wander around the neighborhood and look for a book I'd been telling her about. Eventually we landed ourselves in a coffee shop again, after meeting some of the neighborhood characters, and I finally took them up on their offer to put me up for the night. I had tried both of my trucker contacts and neither were looking promising. To take a train out at night seemed stupid too, since I'd be getting out somewhere in the dark and most likely a city. On top of it, I did want to visit more with Hea. I rarely get to see or hear from her and I really enjoy her company and insights.

That night we all went out to a nice place around the corner for some San Francisco seafood. It was a good, long over due visit before we retired back at the house for the evening.

10/17- Leann to San Fran

2009-10-31T07:46:00.000-07:00

I met Leann just about first thing in the morning. I woke up in my little nest haven tucked in by the tree, packed up, crossed the street to the gas station and brushed my teeth inside. All of this was around 6am or so, under a very foggy, dark dawning sky. So when I crossed the road to stand with my thumb out in this spooky atmosphere at about 6:30am I was really surprised when the first truck that past me pulled over, and even more suprised to see a really cute single girl inside saying hop on in. It was to be a good day.

One thing Jay had told me when he dropped me off in the Mecca was that within minutes I would probably find myself with a ride to Ukiah, but that I likely wouldn't want to go there. The place was such a good hitching spot that if I held out I could quite likely find a ride all the way down to San Francisco, where I was trying to get to. Before Leann said hop on in, she told me she was only going to Ukiah. Sounds good, and in I went.

Leann was a really cool chick. Right away we got into talking about hitching and traveling, as she was an avid expert at both. Now at 28, she had settled back in to Cali for 5 years building her own house up in the mountains. For the five years previous to that she had been hitching all around Mexico, Central, and northern South America on and off. She stay down there for several months, then come back up to replenish her funds before heading back south again. In high school she had also been an exchange student in Ecuador for a year. Clearly a fondness for the Latin American world.

It wasn't long before we were in Ukiah and she let me out by the ramp. I was sad to see her go so soon because it seemed like we had a lot to talk about, but as I got out she said something I half caught that if I was still here when she came back she'd pick me up again. I'd missed where she said she was ultimately going, but it settled nicely as I sat by the ramp for a little under an hour with no luck at all. I even had the dirtier variety of road kids start to cluster by me which I think was not good for my hitching market.

Sure enough, Leann swung back by again and picked me up like I was an old friend waiting for a ride. We moved some plants around that she'd just bought for her mother and arranged a spot for my pack to sit comfortably before we took to the road again. The destination I'd missed was Santa Rosa, about 60 miles south, so now we did have a good long time to chat. Among one of our first topics was that dirtier variety of road kids I had just left.

Obviously I'm all for leaving your job, your house, your stuff and roaming around for long periods of time. One thing I have a major problem with, though, is the stereotype that generally is involved with this sort of lifestyle, and is my main reason as to why Kerouac and I just don't see eye to eye; although I hear I might like Ginsberg. What I don't believe in is an abandonment of responsibility and respect for others. It seems with this lifestyle comes such a level of personal freedom that there is a tendency to not give a shit about anyone elses freedom. Reading On The Road Kerouac seems to become a complete dickhead when he gets together with his buddies and starts stealing cars, using and ditching chicks, and abandoning friends when they need him. This then becomes the archetype that others want to follow.

I suppose where Todd gets all up in a tizzy about McCandless, I do about Kerouac, and for the similar reasoning of iconography. McCandless seems to have become my generations Kerouac with the subtly blaring difference that he had no desire to. That his adventures were hijacked and twisted to the beliefs of Krakauer and Penn, but Kerouac wrote the words we know him through. Anyway, Leann and I were both of the belief that there are definitely two distinct sorts of travelers. The ones who are running away and the ones who are exploring. Both can and will be lost from time to time, but I think the distinction is in the level of respect you pay your surroundings and hospitalities.

That said, we then got back on topic of her Latin American adventures and the abundance of hospitality she found down there. She was quite emphatic that people would look out for me more down there, rather than look to rob me, and gave me good tips on how to make money, where to stay, and where not to stay. When we got to Santa Rosa an hour later she told me that this was an awful place to hitch from, pulled into the bus station and gave me money for the fare. As I started to protest that I had bus money, she pushed it on me and said "take it" it makes me feel good to have helped you.

Soon enough I was heading to San Rafael by bus, just across the bay from San Francisco. The bus did go straight into the city, but my Dad's sister, my Aunt Sandy, lives around San Rafael and after a small debate figured it'd be easier to see her on the way in than on the way out. She picked me up at the station and I was among family again.

My Aunt Sandy is one of my three California aunts that I rarely see. Her husband, my Uncle Artie, is even more elusive. I realized, as I walked in their house, that I haven't seen him in 22 years. No one had known until an hour earlier that I was coming so I ended up missing my cousin Jen. She was out hiking for the day and I had resolved to get into the city by night. The stand still, don't rush mentality does have its boundaries to understand. Don't rush, but don't get fat and lazy either and expect the world will carry you where you need to go.

I had lunch with Sandy and Artie while telling tales of my adventures. When my aunt asked how I liked living this way I told her with an obvious glow that nothing has suited me better. What I love about either side of my family is in her response of "well, than that's what you should do". I recognize that's extreme good fortune on my part to have a family that supports me on these sorts of endeavors, from my parents and sister on to my grandparents (when they were alive) and aunts & uncles. Finances come and go, but belief support like that is hard to come by.

After lunch Sandy drove me down to the Golden Gate Bridge so that I could walk it at sunset. It was beautiful, and I took my time loving it. On the other side was my other Bay area aunt, Aunt Hea, my Mom's younger sister. As I walked over we coordinated to meet on the other end and go have some coffee together to catch up.

Hea is the youngest for her generation in her family, just as I am for my generation in mine, and we have a good solid bond over that. I also rarely see Hea as she and her boyfriend, David, really detest the weather of the East Coast, and I rarely make it to California. In fact, I realized this was the first time I'd been to San Fran since I came back from Hawaii at 18 and took my four day Greyhound ride home.

Through our standard fare of neither of us really being sure what the other wanted to do, and not really caring ourselves what we did, it took some time to make our way down to the neighborhood of North Beach for a coffee and some sweet treats. It was really great catching up with her. It seemed she needed some good ole fashioned family bonding as well. Around 10pm we parted ways with an arrangement to meet up the next day for lunch.

I was off to meet up with an old high school friend, Rachel. Another whom I hadn't seen in something like 13 years or so. She was living with her boyfriend, Rich, up in The Haight but were off at a party I was welcome to. It was a nice wander through the neighborhood to their apartment, of which they left the key for me, dropped off my bag and made my way to the shindig. I felt a little strange showing up with a crappy, retarded haircut and my bland walking clothes on to this very hip house warming party where at first glance I thought there was a 1920's theme going on.

Rachel and I caught up over a beer or two in the kitchen of the apartment, while others would occasionally join in, find out our connection, and reemerse into the party. Not too long after arriving, though, we all went outside for that group cigarette chatting thing that happens, then we set off for home and bed.

10/16- Entering California

2009-10-31T06:41:00.000-07:00

I was still on my high the next day of "stand still, don't rush". I didn't feel like rushing, and I felt no need to rush. Instead, I woke up around 9 or so, meandered up to the picnic tables, and cooked breakfast while writing a few more letters. Locals started pulling in to walk their dogs, and travelers were pulling in to stretch their legs, use the bathrooms, and stare at the ocean from something other than a moving car.

About three hours passed while I lazily went about my morning. One guy, who I'd seen the evening before, returned to practice his swing by knocking a rubber ball into the dunes for his dog to chase. I found it amusing to watch then ended up chatting with him for a bit. After about two hours I decided it was time to phase my laxidazical morning into a half assed attempt to hitch by moving my things to a more prominently located table on the south end of the rest area.

By about noon I ended up talking to a lady there who had come out of a southbound camper. Lynn asked what I was up to, and after I told her we somehow got into a discussion about my walk across the country. Apparently she really wanted to do something like that, but her husband, Dom, wasn't quite there, so I think the camper was a compromise. Either way, it was a short talk and she went back to her camper and I went off to the north end of the rest area pull in, figuring it gave people time to see me then pull in and come back around.

I stood there maybe five minutes again when I saw Lynn and her husband pull out in their camper to head south. I watched them drive off about 100 yards before they pulled a U-turn about a 100 yards down on an extra wide corner designed for scenic stop ins and head back up the road again toward me. Pulling up next to me Lynn popped her head out and said they didn't think I was ready to leave yet, but seeing me head out as they headed out they spun around to see if I wanted a ride. Why, certainly.

My pack went in the camper in back, which I know is a big hitcher no-no but I've stopped caring about what the rights and wrongs of safety are and just gage by the people. Up front, in the cab, it was still a bit cramped quarters, but Lynn sat in the back giving me and my long legs the front. She and I spent the whole way down talking about travels, where they'd been, where I'd been, and got into interesting places to go. She has been fascinated by Egypt, which has been a slowly growing curiosity for me as well, so she recommended a few books to me to pick up when I can.

They're turn off was in Brookings, just north of the California border, and I really wanted to stay on the coastal road, so I got out there with an exchange of email addresses, phone numbers, and regular addresses for the possibility of post cards. I've been slacking on those this year though. Thinking of my believed lesson the day before of standing rather than walking I waved goodbye and strutted right up to the busy intersection nearby half expecting a ride to pop up within five minutes given my luck with Rodney, Russ, and Lynn.

I stood there for about 10 minutes maybe and it felt completely wrong. The uneasiness was back in me about standing there and it just didn't seem like I was doing the right thing. In my mind, I believed the lesson of yesterday was to change modes of travel and get comfortable with standing in one spot to enjoy it, rather than continually keeping myself in motion as I generally like to do. It seemed today that that was old news and now something new was building on it. Again, I do recognize that all of this is just what I'm thinking is going on, and the accuracy of it is up for interpretation, but its hard for me to explain my actions if I don't put in the reasoning behind what I'm did through out the day.

What I concluded this day was calling for was to really learn the heart of the previous days lesson; not to rush. It wasn't just about standing vs. walking, it was about not freaking out that I wouldn't make it to my Dad's birthday 2 weeks and 4,000 miles away and just trust that I would. In the meantime, the act of not freaking out is to embody the behavior of just enjoying where ever I am while I'm there. This thinking lead me to remember it had been a while since I'd checked email and I had three letters to mail, so I went to the Post Office and the Library for a bit.

It took me a little bit to find the library since everyone I asked told me it was right across the street, regardless of which street I was on at the time. It turned out to be about five blocks away and about two or three off the main road I was on. After some time there I made my way back up deciding now that I'd adequately relaxed and was now ready to move on. Todd is quite likely rolling in laughter reading this now, because he often accuses me of trying to manipulate fate to get what I want. This was a prime example of what he's talking about, because I do concede it happens on occasion. It takes a bit of practice to really let go of the wheel.

I ended up hanging around town for another 45 minutes to an hour wandering up and down a few blocks on the main street standing at one corner, then over at another. I wouldn't quite describe myself as antsy, but its not too far off either. I was liking being in that little town, and I even got to enjoy a sudden Homecoming Parade that appeared down the street. Finally, after an hour, I decided I just didn't want to be in the town anymore so I turned to see what was in the next one, and that was when I ran into Zack.

Zack, as it turned out, was one of two Zack's. He was on foot and had seen me roaming corner to corner while he cooly drifted about town in sunglasses and an iPod. I was surprised when I passed him for the third time and he asked where I was trying to get to. When I told him anywhere south he said he might be able to help me out, but needed to check with his homie. I started going with him, but noticed he was uncomfortable with that idea. I'd been warned twice now, by other roaving drifters, that the cops were none too keen on hitchers in Brookings and I would get hassled should I stay too long. With that in mind I told him I was going to head across the bridge, which was the end of town, and if his chum was up for giving me a ride just pick me up, and if not don't worry about it. He liked that plan and off he went. Not more than five minutes after I crossed the bridge the Two Zacks gathered me up.

Both Zacks were just under 18, so it was a bit of a giggle fest for the 20 mile jump to Crescent City as we bantered about what cool things we could each think of in our heads. Traveling with teenagers is always such a surreal experience for me these days, partly because it seems strange that those days are so far from me now and I only seem to recognize that when I'm among them again. Breaching the California line was another typical thing of my traveling mentality. As soon as we crossed in it was old news, though I was happy to be there, where as up until that point it seems like some forbidden fortress you may just yet cross into one day.

As we got closer to town they started asking around where I wanted to be dropped and giving me suggestions as to where I should aim for on the way out. Arcadia being top on their list of suggestions. Once I described what I tend to look for in a spot one of the Zack's then made a suggestion and I soon found myself standing on another corner at the south end of town with a pull over, and little else, behind me.

Once again I shuffled my bag over, my straps still folded in since the day before, and threw my thumb out. Another forty-five minutes passed as I watched cars head south in droves. This time my head didn't wander. It did feel right to be there this time, unlike that intersection in Brookings. Instead my head wandered around what it was I was meant to be learning then. This is where many tell me I'm over processing, that there isn't a lesson in every little thing, and every little wait. I disagree with that, but I also really like symbolism, patterns, and other such mind occupiers when standing on corners waiting for someone you don't know to get you.

Jay eventually came to get me. He was a bit funny about it, both funnies, the ha ha and the odd sort. Pulling up he had his sunglasses on and looked like he wanted nothing to do with anyone. To this day I still don't know why he picked me up. He rolled down his window, to my surprise, and leaned over to me roughly barking out "you don't have shit load of pot in there, do you?" When I told him that it was just your basic camping gear he told me to hop in.

It reminded me somewhat of the family in Kansas that took me in while I was walking. They seemed nervous to have a stranger off the road staying in their house despite having invited me in to stay. In fact, when we all were heading for bed the husband went so far as to tell me they didn't have much in their home and there was nothing to steal. I found it to be rather touching, rather than offensive, that they'd still put me up for the night as a sense of honoring hospitality despite clearly not being comfortable with the reality of doing it.

Jay was different, but similar, in that it seemed he really didn't trust hitchers since they often were just couriers for the heavy marijuana economy in Northern Cal, and generally wanted a ride plus whatever else they could get. With all of that he still offered me a ride, and a really good one, it turned out, too. He took me 220 miles south to the, in Jay's words, "hitching mecca" of Willits, CA. We spent all day speeding south raving about all the really completely outlandish government conspiricies and spiritual beliefs. So much so that I was the conservative one in the conversation.

When we eventually landed in Willits it was well into night with a heavy fog in the air. He dropped me off at the south edge of town by a gas station and wished me luck. Everything we'd talked about on the way down was still running around in my head, more as food for thought rather than revolutionizing my sense of the world. A lot of what he had to say was still on the outer limits of what I was ready to start considering reality, so imagine the topics when on here I'm already going on about money showing up when needed as a reality based theory. I went through about half an hour or so of standing by the intersection before deciding bed was a better option for the nights events.

Past the gas station the road fell into darkness and was lined with trees, so I managed to squeeze myself into some brush between a large tree and some barbed wiring. It was quite a nifty, snug little spot actually.

10/15- Stand Still, Don't Rush

2009-10-31T05:34:00.000-07:00

Matt and I had a lazy morning the next day as we chatted over his upcoming travels. He's suped up his RV for a multi-month drive around the US. We even swapped numbers when we found out some of our ideas of where we'd be might overlap in the future. Downing the last of our coffee, he broke out this behemoth tricked out mobile home and drove me to the Walton General Store.

People lately have been telling me that I'm taking my experiences a bit far. That I'm getting a little too wrapped up in the "metaphysics" of it all and ignoring the possibilities of simply having coincidences or things working out on their own. I know I also have a tendency to run with concepts a little excessively, but I do feel like that's part of my process to wanting to understand something. Once I've run that concept, theory, or philosophy to the far end of the other side to the point of ridiculous then I reel myself back in to try and figure out where the middle, and hopefully the understanding, is. That said, I'm going to try and keep myself from editorializing my experience getting from Eugene, OR to Springfield, MA.

Matt dropped me off at the little lot, that was actually the last pull over for the next 20 miles at least. He did his business there and I took up a spot by a wood carved bear and we waved goodbye to each other. I felt a little silly just standing there, staring at the curve in the road, and chucking my thumb out whenever a car or truck came around it. I've always tended to feel a little silly just standing there waiting for someone to come along and help me out when I'm doing nothing to help myself out other than waving my thumb flag to let people know I'd like a ride. It feels like a waste of time, and time was on the crunch now having only 15 days to get down to San Fran and across to Massachusetts for my Dad's birthday.

Half an hour after standing there getting, comfortable with standing there and not figeting calculating how many miles I could have walked down the road by now, a cop rolled up next to me. Todd flashed through my head quickly, but then the cop said that this was the last spot on the road to get reception for his cellphone and was just checking his messages and making some calls. Just to be sure, I asked him if I was fine hitching here and he let me know that hitching was fine, and that the only thing the police don't like are when you're walking with your back to traffic because there's no shoulder and its unsafe.

Joking around, the cop apologized for being there saying he was probably bad for advertizing for me. I told him he might actually help me out, because the last time a cop held me up I picked up a big rig trucker that took me all the way through Idaho in one go specifically because he'd watched me get IDed. Never-the-less this guy didn't ID me, and soon enough he was on his way. About fifteen minutes later I met Bill.

Bill was running deliveries down the coast out of a cube truck and was happy to have the company. It would take him all day to get down about 100 hundred miles from Florence, which was the coastal town I was aiming for at the end of this road. He was happy to take me to Florence, but figured I'd be better off getting out there and picking up a longer distance ride out of that town. We talked mostly about his days living around here, how the roads had changed completely, and how he really loved fishing. Just casual talk, and when we got to Florence half an hour later we shook hands and I was off again.

Oregon is great because there is no sales tax to be paid. There was a Dollar Store across the way from where Bill dropped me, so I strapped on my pack and resupplied myself there tax free. I also picked up a canned lunch, when I finished that I set off walking down Rt. 101, my coastal road south.

I walked for probably about an hour and a half, if not two hours. Again, cars were just wizzing past and there was just as enough shoulder for me to walk on, but not enough for cars to comfortably pull over to get me. After this stretch of 1.5 to 2 hours of throwing my thumb out a pick up finally pulled over with Idaho plates. It was a beat up, rusty old thing, and the dog inside accompanying Jim was one of those rough looking mutts you don't mess with. He was a sweet heart, though, and kept nuzzling his nose into me for the duration of the ride.

Jim had only picked me up for a 4 mile hop, however. The entire four miles he spent telling me that I shouldn't be walking on the side of the road like that. There's no place for anyone to pick me up and that I needed a pull in so folks could stop if they wanted to. He dropped me at literally just a pull in. I'm not even sure why it was there, but it was a fifteen foot deep thirty foot long pull in with nothing there opposite a road across the street coming to a T.

Dropping me there Jim told me that if I got stuck there for the day all I had to do was go down that street, take the first right and look for the yellow school bus. That was his house and he'd be happy to have me for the night. So I got out, now with a complete understanding that I should not be walking anywhere, if nothing else just due to the physicality of the roads, and here I had a safety net of refuge provided for me if nothing came. Once again I stood there and threw my thumb out.

One thing I like about the bag I swapped out in Denver is that it isn't actually meant for long range, rugged hiking. Its a touring bag, it can go on your back, or the straps can fold in and zip up to turn it into a duffle. I hadn't used that feature too much, other than when I stayed at people's places, but I figured now I might as well fold in the straps because it doesn't look like I'll be doing much hiking with it in the next few days. About forty-five minutes later a car pulled in for me.

Amy and her son were heading down to Reedsport, about 15 to 20 miles south. I was a bit surprised to be picked up by a mother and her son, but she was totally comfortable with me, especially with my pack on my lap wedging me in. She was hilarious. The whole way down she went on about some YouTube video her sister in Florence had showed her about the people of Florence and their problem solving skills when a whale lands on their beach. It was hilarious and traggic all at once and got us talking about the Darwin awards for the rest of the ride.

When she dropped me off in Reedsport it was at a perfect spot. I was on the south end of town right by the last traffic light with a pull over on the south side of the intersection. This time I wasn't about to strap on my pack and keep walking. Instead, I thanked Amy and wished her well, then carried my bag to the light and stood on the south side with my thumb out. Ten minutes passed before I got into another car.

Rodney was cool as shit. We hit it off right away as we sped down toward Bandon some 50 miles away. He was less than enthusiastic about having to leave Portland and spend his weekend on a cranberry hunt of some sort. He wasn't even sure what he was doing down there, he just knew work was making him go. Either way, we clicked immediately as we talked about my travels and his. There was a lot of connection there on my more intuitive based ideas which was the bulk of the conversation.

As we got closer to Bandon we realized his meeting spot for the next morning was somewhere between Bandon and Port Orford, the next town down. This spot turned out to be dead center between the two towns, and rather than turn around once we'd spotted it, he decided to just get a hotel down in the next town in hopes that it would look a bit more lively than Bandon did. Rodney's keen hopes were set on finding a suitable bar to spend his evenings in while there.

Port Orford was another 26 miles past Bandon, and directly on the coast. He spotted one bar in town, a hotel diagnally across the street from it, and then a beautiful rest stop diagnally the other way across from hotel again. We pulled in and said my thanks and goodbyes while admiring the sea. We even had an elderly couple take our picture together. As I started toward the roadside again he invited me to come have drinks with him if nothing came. Given that I was about an hour or so from sunset, and the setting was so nice, I figured that would be my plan for the night. It'd be good to talk more with him.

Instead, five minutes after stepping on the curb Russ pulled up and told me to hop in. Russ is a self proclaimed 65 year old hippy that he's waiting for the cops to arrest. Back in January he opened a medical marijuana store and pretty much treats is like a regular pot dealing dwelling and is surprised he's been open as long as he has. He advertizes all over the county that he has pot brownies and cookies every Tuesday and Wednesday and can't get over that what he's doing is legal. In fact, if I were to take a guess, I'd say that's the one aspect he might have any shame about.

As he drove me another 26 miles down the coast he told me he had the perfect spot for me to camp out at. Perfect, right at the end of the day. It was on the beach at a rest stop where free camping was legal. It had full facilities, picnic tables, and was a great spot to catch rides from either into the night or the next morning.

It had been threatening rain all day, and even peed a little once I got into Florence and set off walking 101. I'd also seen at Matt's, the night before, that rain was heavily predicted all week down the coast. When we pulled into the rest stop it was nothing but clear blue skies. I said something about it to Russ, as he dug out an ounce of pot from his trunk for a picture, and he said that it had something to do with a mountain just north of there that threw off the weather patterns and generally left this spot with sunny days. A perfect spot indeed.

I snapped a picture of him, thanked him again, then he was off. The whole day had been such a whirlwind of people and, to me, lessons that I felt I'd learned that I had that giddy joy Todd and I both had back in April at Cape May. I even did the same things. I snapped a bunch of pictures of me in the dunes, then ran down and played by the tide, then bedded down under the stars and just stared at them for an hour or so. The only differences this time was the inability to immediately share it with everyone. Todd wasn't there to glow in it with, and with my pre-paid phone system now I couldn't call anyone to tell them all about it. Instead I wrote a letter, then just enjoyed it quietly to myself and that was just as fine.

10/14- Mountain or Coastal Run?

2009-10-30T21:48:00.000-07:00

Penney left early that morning for work, so after a groggy hug of thanks and goodbye, I moved up to her bed in the loft to sleep a little longer. When I finally did get up I set to getting things in order for my departure again.

Among my pre-packed things they'd hauled for me I had put buzz clippers in my bag and had meant to see if Penney would cut my hair for me. I had forgotten about this when we got wrapped up in all the landlord talk so the task fell to me for the morning as I prepared some oatmeal for myself. This idea of cutting my own hair was not a very good one. After an hour or so buzzing away at my head I emerged looking slightly retarded. Thankfully I had my new hat and if you'll notice in the pictures I have that hat on in just about every picture until I get out toward the east coast.

By noon or so I got everything squared away, the bathroom cleaned up from the barber butchery, and headed out the door. I had looked at a map of Eugene to figure out how to get out of town but couldn't decide if I wanted to head straight west to the coast, then turn south down 101 or wander through mountain roads south of town that would eventually land me by the coast around the Northern California border where I had heard the real scenery starts anyway. I found a route that would encourage letting the rides decide. It was my theory that when indecision strikes, at the opportunity is there, just step out and The Fates will push you one way or the other. The simple trick is movement in what ever form the situation calls for.

So I made my way down to Chambers St. and from there to 11th Ave. At 11th I had marked as the deciding point. 11th was the road heading straight west and continuing down Chambers was the way to the southern routes. When I hit 11th I was inspired to turn down it, but then a block or two later was suddenly intrigued to turn south. I didn't know where those roads lead, but it was sort of a grid system so I had an idea and just walked on. Soon enough I was finding myself heading west again and had figured that it had been resolved in my head that I would be heading through the southern mountain roads. I walked for maybe another hour or so before a pick-up finally swung by and scooped me up.

Tom said he'd give me a ride about 15 miles to Veneta. I had no idea where that was but I told him that was fine. There was a little trouble in communication since I wasn't sure where I was going, only that I wanted to go either south, west, or anywhere in between. He pulled off of the road I was walking and went north onto 11th Ave. and it was then I realized I'd be heading straight to the coast first. Dropping me off just far enough out of town to not head back he wished me luck and sped off.

I spent the rest of the day walking down the side of that road. It was a busy backroad highway and a decent shoulder to walk, but not quite enough to pull over on I think. I walked until about 5pm when I decided to sit down by a bridge and take a breather. After resting for about fifteen minutes or so I black van pulled out and pulled up next to me. Matt offered me a lift just a few miles down the road, but as we drove he then offered up his 40 acres to camp on for the night if I wanted.

Matt and I hit it off quite well. He was a California guy who had moved up there with his girlfriend a few years ago only to have it not work out a week previous to meeting me. She had gone back to Hawaii where they owned a business and the distance was just not working for him. She had been gone quite a while by the time I met him and he was not liking that he was spending all this time on his own in the back woods of Oregon, so the company I offered was inviting to him. His dog was truly his best friend out there and it was apparent. We hung out in his house having dinner, watching TV, and he would continue to talk to his dog as much as me, if not more so. I thought the whole thing was adorable to watch.

As we got to talking about my travels and hitching it turned out that he had been hitching since he was 13 years old and was an avid traveler as well. In fact, he was working on an RV he had to ready it for a long road trip he was planning to set off on in a few weeks. We exchanged numbers when we found out we may be in the same areas come December if each of our plans follow the ideas we have of them now. It was a pretty laid back night of easy travel talk and it wasn't long before he offered for me to stay inside. Apparently his apple trees by the gate were very attractive to the bears in the area that were preparing for hibernation.

One of the last things he mentioned as we were readying for bed would end up being a theme I'd dwell upon often over the next three weeks. He recommended I take his suggestion and let him drive me back a mile to try hitching out of the general store parking lot. The logic being that it was the last good pull over spot down the winding logging road to the sea. If I walked it, not only would there be no room for people to pull over to pick me up, but it would be dangerous for them to do so and it would be dangerous for me to walk it due to the logging trucks careening around those sharp corners for 30 miles. I agreed to let him take me back, but it would be a long day the next day before I heard the message in it.

10/13- Eugene, Oregon

2009-10-30T21:17:00.000-07:00

Waking on my hill it was overcast above and starting to drizzle some. It would prove to be a grey day throughout, but I still sat up and cooked myself some oatmeal before packing up and heading down to explore the town. I text Penney as well to let her know I was in town so that she could let me know where to meet up later in the day.

I wandered down toward the library first off. Along the way I attracted a busker kid who wanted to get some money out of me to afford a sixth string to his guitar. When I told him I was broke too he simply joined me on my walk into town going on about his ideas of the universe. I'm not sure if he was high or not, but it seemed pretty clear he would be soon if he wasn't already. I didn't get the impression that he had too many minutes with sobriety. Then again, I'm sure people think the same of me often, so who knows, but his tale of sitting down with the Universe Elephant admiring the flowers was an interesting one to listen to. It was akin to how I read a lot of religious dogma, between the lines he seemed to have a lot of good things to say but the surrounding "flare" made the whole thing sound completely disregardable.

Once at the library my busker and I parted ways and I sat for my turn at the lone 15 minute internet terminal. It was the first library I'd been to where they actually charge for internet use, save for this one 15 minute use computer. I was a bit offended until I discovered it wasn't a public library. In fact, there was no public library in Eugene. Turning the town library private was the town's way of saving it from state budget cuts. Everywhere else libraries are suddenly open only Tuesday's and Thursdays from noon to 4pm, or something along those lines, Eugene's is open 8am to 8pm 7 days a week. Three dollars for two hours, one per day, over two days suddenly didn't seem so bad, but given my schedule the 15 minute one was well worth the half an hour wait. After my 15 minutes of fame were up I spent an hour reading/translating the first page of my new Spanish book, A Orillo Rio Piedra Siento y Llamo.

From there I just ambled around town. The sky continued to be grey and leak water off and on through out. Penney text me back sometime in the afternoon agreeing to meet up after work, so I made my way to her neighborhood and found a coffee shop to drop into. She was only about two hours behind me which gave me plenty of time to eat, drink some Joe, and do a bit of reading and writing.

Once she arrived, however, it was really great to see her and my energy picked right up. I had been in mosey mode all day and suddenly found myself in an energetic social mode. Her house was around the corner and I got the gossip on all the landlord drama she and her housemates were going through. It was interesting to hear about from my perspective. As she told me her story about driving out from Denver, meeting all these people in Eugene, a great job landing in her lap, and the house situation working out perfectly all of this flow of good fortune finally slammed down with the return of a self involved landlord. I couldn't help but find myself reading the whole scenario as a test, much like the ones I see myself in from time to time.

I met the orchestrator of the house, Crystal, and later on another housemate as well. All of them seemed very big on energy, signs, that sort of thing so it wasn't a foreign thing for me to start speaking in those terms as well when they were asking my thoughts on the whole ordeal. The landlord is apparently a notorious slumlord. He has been in and out of court with many of his tenants and has a reputation as being impossible to deal with. He also seems to come out on top with these cases from what seems like a case of having more resources to fund his way through it and the stubbornness to not back down. Apparently he is not well liked in the community.

I'll spare you the details of the case, but what I saw, at least from Penney's point of view, was a series of events that all pointed toward her living there in Eugene with these people and this shady landlord as their one obstacle to overcome. Having met Crystal and hearing a bit of her story, it seemed to fit as well that she had a good series of great fortune that was only interrupted by this landlord trouble. To me it seemed like challenging this landlord as a united house with a case that sounded 90% solid, since some of the questioning agreements were verbally arranged, felt like their test with a built in reward. All of the housemates were after solid community and it seemed like this challenge would address each of their issues in one way or another and they all seemed to be pointed in the direction of facing it together. Even the third housemate had plans to work down in Northern California but those plans were suddenly cancelled and she found herself back at the house ready to fight.

Who knows? It could be the road is having an affect on warping my thinking, but perhaps the more important thing to note out of this is that my perspective on how the world works seems to have irrevocably changed whether accurately or not. Penney and I retired to her little carriage house in the back afterward and chatted some more about these things while I picked through the bag I'd packed back in Denver and given them to carry in the truck. I got out my winter coat, gloves, long johns, and metal water bottle for my agave then we called it a night.

10/12- Ride to Portland

2009-10-30T20:14:00.000-07:00

My last morning at Wendie's was filled with a lazy scramble to make sure I had everything packed, took care of all the house hold things I needed to have done, and was leaving the house in good condition for their return from their bike tour of Idaho. Then it was out the door and down the street to return some things at the library and meet my ride down by Tyler St. Cafe. This ride of mine was yet another fortuitous meeting made over the counter the previous Friday.

Joe and Roshella had driven up from Portland the previous Friday to visit some friends of theirs. It was the first of my "new shifts" that I was covering to pay for my visit to Ari, and my only hesitation on taking them was my concern over getting back across the country by Halloween for my Dad's birthday with a few days in San Francisco along the way. I figured a few extra days was no big deal, and meeting Joe that first shift sealed my conviction of trusting it'll all work out as its supposed to.

Joe and I got talking while I was making his drink when I heard they were up from Portland. Through my asking about the city I mentioned I was hitching around the country and heading to Portland come Sunday afternoon. He then offered a ride down if I wanted to wait until Monday morning which, come Sunday, allowed me the time to pick up yet another shift before shoving off. Now it was Monday morning as I sat by the harbor, but I had only a few minutes to concern myself with whether or not they'd remembered the offer or not before they swung by and scooped me up.

It was quite the kick off to what would be an amazing coastal run to San Fran. Joe is an old school musician who spent many of his years roaming town to town playing gigs and living that guitar pick/beer bottle lifestyle. He generally played folkish, country, sort of blues type music that's probably best described as Americana but he doesn't like that moniker. Mostly, as we talked about his music and social beliefs, he reminded me quite a bit of an American version of my friend Jane's father over in England. Later I connected with Joe through Facebook and suggested the two to connect. I have no idea what came of that, if anything.

This was maybe the first hour of the ride, if that. Soon enough Roshella chimed in when I began murmuring hints of my more spiritual beliefs. It began with a brief mention of having seen Ari for the hypnotherapy session. To my very great surprise Roshella was a trained hypnotherapist, and apparently quite a gifted one with tales of her experience practicing it that were so intense it drove her from the profession. This spurned further conversations into the nature of the friendship with the people they had just been visiting. It turned out these people ran tours of little known Celtic spiritual spots in Ireland and the UK. Of course that lead to my interests in looking up those very things when I got to England the next month. It was that sort of back and forth, and immediacy of familiarity that struck me quite intensely with the connections of that ride.

When we arrived in Portland it was too soon for us all. Roshella invited to take me out to lunch so we extended our conversation another hour or so. After lunch we wandered over to Powell's Used Books, the largest used bookstore in the country, so that she could pick up a book I recommended and I could pick up a Paolo Coehlo book in the original Spanish so I can work on learning the language. From there they drove me to The Basement Pub on the east side of Portland. Here I was hoping to meet up with an old New York friend, Drake, who I'd heard back in May was working there. Joe, Roshella and I said our goodbyes there and I strode into the bar.

I liked the place. It fit that Drake would work in a place like that since it had the same dark, dingy, but comfortable feel of our old coffee shop, Auggies, back in NYC. Sitting at the bar I asked if he still worked there, which he did, but when the bartender called his house to tell him I was around she got no answer. I stayed an hour or so sipping on a beer and doing some writing, but when he never called back I just figured I missed him.

From there I walked back downtown trying to work out what my next move would be. I returned to Powell's and spent a good two or three hours reading in there until they closed up around sunset. My mind had been working in the background on what to do about a place to stay that night, and where to go. I had sent a text off to Penney and Robert down in Eugene to see if they'd be around to get me should I take a train in that night. Joe and Roshella had also offered their place if I got stuck, but for whatever reason I was just feeling like moving on from Portland. I liked the city quite a bit, but was feeling a hair anxious about making time. I had 18 days to make it 4,000 miles with very little money. As the quest would press on it would soon become very apparent to me that this would be a sort of "final exam" for the various lessons I believed I'd learned on the way out.

Patience was the foremost of these lessons and I didn't do so well that night. My mind became set on the idea of using some of my $50 gift certificate to clear the sprawl of Portland. It was only $22 to go to Eugene but the train got in at midnight. I got a response back from Robert saying they wouldn't be up around then because he was catching a 5am train to Portland to fly back to Denver the next day. I went to the train station and, for posterity's sake, tried to call Joe before buying the ticket. The pay phone ate my quarters so I took that as a sign saying just go if you want to go south; so I did.

That night I got off the train around midnight as scheduled and found a park across the tracks from the station. It was a much hillier park than it seemed in the dark and every time I tried cutting through "tall grass" up a "small hill" I found myself wading through prickers up a never ending hill. Eventually I found a clearing, still sloped, but comfortable enough to bed down on, and it actually turned out to be quite comfortable. Penney had let me know that if I did come down and got stuck for a place to stay that I was definitely welcome, but I figured this was better form for a guest that was clearly told it wasn't the best timing. Either way, I was now in Eugene and still got a good nights rest.

10/11- Port Townsend

2009-10-11T21:10:00.000-07:00

I have a few beers in me. Only two, Chocolate Oatmeal Stout brewed by the Water Street Brewery in town, but it helps quell the giddiness I've had in me over the past several weeks of just being here in Port Townsend to a more even keeled sense of comprehensive expression... hopefully. This month has been a blast between having a month to simply hang out casually with my sister at long last to working at Tyler St. Cafe to having strange experiences into this metaphysical realm that has been delicately tapping me on the forehead all year like Chinese water torture and now seems to be breaking the skin, in a nice way.

For me, this time with Wendie has been quite over due and wonderful. Following the events I've already written about; the initial weekends activities, Todd's visit, and my Seattle excursion, things simmered down to a sense of normalcy and dailyness. She and I had this for about a year, two years ago, when I moved from Denver to Seattle back in '06 until I left again in '07. The intention then was to achieve what we really got a good dose of with this visit. A revisit to our day to day interactions that we had as kids growing up together.

To spare you all the full recap of my upbringing, Wendie and I had always been extremely close growing up for my first 13 years. I consider her to have raised me, and I say that with no jab at my parents, they were good overseers of my sister raising me, but she did a lot of the hands on work. My parents then divorced when I was 13, and she protected me as much as she could from the impact that will invariably have on a child, absorbing much of the damage herself. To my parents' credit they're main concern was to keep us kids together in the split, but also, and unseemingly contradictory, allowed us to make our own minds up as to who we wanted to live with. Wendie quickly and decidedly chose my Mom, so I then chose my Dad figuring with two kids and two parents we should spread the wealth. This lead to a separation no one foresaw, no one knew how to deal with, and was never remedied.

A few attempts were made with me following her, encouraged by my Mom, to Hawaii after high school, but the both of us were too much of a mess to make anything of that. The second attempt was my move to Seattle 12 years later which is the aforementioned move I just talked about above. It was nice being near by, but by then we had defined ourselves so much individually that our lives simply didn't coincide naturally, and so we saw much less of each other than we had thought we would. It didn't help that I didn't really jive with the city too well.

Finally we come to this month long visit I am now about to move on from. Sleeping here in the yard and on the couch I've been just... around, with no agenda of anything to do. Wendie has her active life that is orchestrated in such a way that visitors are more than welcome. I was able to join her going to work and help out, since she works in a non-profit with troubled finances and a need for things to get done that I am quite capable of doing. I would join her for coffee runs, grocery excursions, random drives, bike rides, or walks to just get out of the house. I was present when things would go wrong and she'd get frustrated, and I was there to hug, cry on, or talk to for those days of upset. In other words, it was real family again.

Toward the end of this visit she was starting to realize I'd be leaving soon and started worrying that we hadn't done any of the things we'd talked about doing when I was on my way. But neither of us really cared, and the ultimate goal of spending genuine time together at long last was finally being achieved.

Part of this was that I ended up sprouting a daily routine of my own. While helping her out handing out fliers for her work, Third Ear Project, I ended up finding work at a coffee shop in town, Tyler St. Cafe. They were hiring and I offered my 9 years of barista experience as a temporary fill in giving them time to really find a good long term fit. They also had people heading off on vacation soon and no one to cover for them. This turned out to be an amazing place to work.

I liked Teresa, the owner, from the first minute I sat down with her for the interview. She has a laid back, fly by the seat of her pants, approach to making the shop work and it completely works. There was a schedule board that I rarely looked at because everyone had the same schedule all the time and we would just move our hours around as we saw fit. There was no system for doing pretty much anything, so you were given free rein to do things the way you felt comfortable doing them. All of this worked because everyone there got along really well and were very capable of the job they were doing. On top of it, they were all hilarious.

It didn't hurt that all the people that I was working with up front were really cool, and really cute, girls to hang out with. It harkened me back to the good ole days at the Monkey Bean in Denver the way the place just came together in personality. It got me thinking quite often about the days I see far up in the future of finally settling down and opening a shop of my own.

What dawned on me, during this time in Port Townsend, was how this year has been going in the sense of traveling and settling. Back in March I envisioned these days of travel as being like those of my walk, constantly on the move. I pictured dreams of survivor man trudging through backwoods with Todd, learning how to eat plants, hunt game, and live self sufficiently on my own. These notions have long since been thrown out the window, but the contrast of the reality is stark.

The reality is that I'm not traveling all that much. As Todd puts it, I'm happily hopping lily pad to lily pad, and I love it. I've been getting my high adventure getting between lily pads through hitching, sleeping in the weeds, etc., but I'm thrown daily routine living time and again. From dropping in on Todd in Santa Fe for a week back in April, to staying at my Mom's in May for a few weeks, the five weeks I spent at Shelly's in Ohio, then seven weeks in Denver, and now another month at my sister's. This "trip", I can't help but think, is teaching me to stop thinking of moving around as traveling, but to see this way of living as just that, living.

Being alive is something I've been quite aware of lately. As stupid as a comment as that may sound, its the only way I can think of to put it. I feel completely energized and enthusiastic all the time these days. Not because I'm footloose and fancy free, but I've reconnected with a huge percentage of lost people in my life, and made just as many new friends on top of it. I've gotten quality, unrushed visits with family I haven't had time to see and friends I've long forgotten about. What is living a life if you're simply trying to catch up and maintain it constantly?

I've loved my time working at Tyler St. not because it paid for some upcoming things, but because I loved meeting the people there. Perhaps it was the lack of needing to go to work that allowed me to love it so much. I can understand dreading having to return to work day after day if you feel trapped into doing so. I know that was exactly how I've felt about jobs I've loved in the past. It was one of the things I really relished about film work was that you took it job by job. If you needed time off you just didn't take the next job that came along and gave yourself some time off. The worry on that was that you would run out of money between work, or maybe that next job wouldn't come in time to make rent. All of this builds to the realization that we spend huge amounts of our time on the maintenance of being alive rather than experiencing life.

Lately I've been experimenting with ideas on maintaining life. I've written about my new views on money as manna, the idea that it shows up when you need it and that there is no need to hoard it as a safety. I write about it only to share my experiences, not as a proclamation that everyone should be doing what I'm doing. This Tyler St. job was the most recent example of it.

Since deciding to take this trip back in January I've been figuring on going to England to visit Jane in November. I had no idea how this would be financed, but as time went on I've trusted more and more in the notion that money shows up as you need it. Leaving Denver at the end of August I still had no idea, and now it was two months away, but by then I did have the sense that work for that money would be in the northwest near my sister. Sure enough, Tyler St. came around and the money I made there paid completely for the ticket to England and back.

Over the summer I got wrapped up in reading books by Brian Weiss on hypnotherapy, theories on reincarnation, and developing ideas of the purpose of reincarnation. It started by Stacey suggesting the book Many Lives, Many Masters to me on our road trip, so I got it for my sister for her birthday in June. She loved it and looked up a hypnotherapist that lived near by, Ari Klein, to see more about what it was first hand. When I got out here and learned more about him I became quite curious to also see for myself, first hand, what exactly these books I was so fascinated with were talking about. I made an appointment with him, having no idea how I'd pay for it but with the option to cancel 24 hours in advance, and just trusted the money would show up. Sure enough, the next day at work four shifts opened up for the weekend I had planned to leave on. I snatched them up and that covered exactly the price it was to see Ari.

Todd and I have since talked about this theory of things appearing when you need them. Not just money, but people, rides, shelter, food. Since he's returned home his experience with Andre the billionaire he took to finding the Biblical quote "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." This lead him to really reading the Bible which to his surprise brazenly spoke, with no ambiguity, of this exact principle. If you go to that link I attached to that quote you can see for yourself. As Todd says, it isn't sending him to church, or converting him to Christianity, but it is quite validating to see a belief you came to through your own experiences show up in an ancient tome that has been worshiped for two millenia.

The hypnotherapy session in itself was quite fascinating to me. It confirmed nothing for me, but it definitely did reinforce questions I've been looking to answer and clarified a few points I now recognize as things to be wary of in myself. Primarily how I manage control.

I would be quite surprised if any would accuse me of being controlling of others, but I have long heard I don't relinquish control to others. While running the warehouse in Seattle my boss' most notable complaint, and the only one I can think of, was that I didn't delegate. Because of this I would work myself 12 hours a day to enact a labeling system that I devised, or rearrange the layout on my own to my design. Girlfriends often have accused me of being too much in my head and not letting them in to my real thoughts. I had never really thought of this as a control issue until I saw it as a way of keeping people from questioning my actual ideas.

I found it interesting that when I returned to work the next day, despite having the normal amount of sleep and such, everyone commented that I looked really well rested. In fact, I did feel much more keyed in. I'm quite curious to see where this takes me.

9/22- Seattle

2009-09-25T17:28:00.000-07:00

The morning returned me once more to my buses, though these were far more streamlined than the ones on Saturday. Daniel lent me Walden as well which I started reading on that trip down. I'd never really read Thoreau before, I knew of his ideas and thought I knew about his deeds, but I'd soon be finding a drastically different man than what I'd expected.

I read the full hour of the first leg before I was dropped off in Poulsbo again for my connecting hop to the ferry. While there I kept reading until a kid swung by and asked me what Thoreau was bitching about now. He guessed at the same time that I spoke leaving us saying collectively, "Clothes". I have to say, I'm a little disappointed in the guy.

That kid and I only talked briefly before he realized my opinion of him. We both agreed that Thoreau was a bit of a whiny bitch, and that he had good overall ideas, but seems to fit more in the category of McCandless's breed than Ghandi or King's. The introduction clued me in to the fact that Thoreau didn't live out in the wilds at all, but a mile from his mother's kitchen. He, as well, goes on with the great line "I have traveled a good deal in Concord" to show that he is a towny. I'm not quite sure if I'm annoyed with him, or simply his icon, because I agree with many of his ideas. My problem, which I realized while briefly annoying this kid at the bus stop, is that what I've read so far all seems like theory that he doesn't want to strain himself too much for to test. He also seems to go on at length about his labors seemingly to let us know he isn't just a guy squatting on his Mom's land for free. I'll have to read more, but that's my initial impression.

Anyway, I got into Seattle sometime around noon, again with no real concrete plans, so I dropped in on Trish again. This time she was working at D'Annunzio's across from our old coffee shop. She made me a sandwich while we caught up briefly, then devised a plan to hang out later in the night once she got off of work. From there I put out some calls and hit the library for an hour. By the time I got out Laura and I finally made arrangements to meet up.

Once again, plan making with me is quite difficult when I drop into town for a visit. Not only because my phone usually isn't on, I rarely know precisely what day I'll be in town, and usually call when I arrive rather than before hand, but also because most of my friends are exactly the same way. Laura is one of these friends, though I had decided to turn the phone on for the day to try and make things run a little bit smoother.

Laura is actually a former employee of mine. I'd hired her to be a truck driver when I was running the SPUD warehouse mostly because her resume showed she was a sea captain and I wanted to have someone driving for me who I could call Captain. We've never hung out outside of work, which was two years ago, but we did keep up on occasional sporadic emails. When we met up that afternoon I found out she's far more nomadic than even I am.

We met up in the U-District where the college kids hover and caught up over a few beers then took a little walk when we got tired of that. I hadn't really known too much about her, other than the sea captain business and that she lived in Steamboat Springs as ski patrol for a bit. It turns out she's been all over the world sleeping in the streets of Johannesburg, drinking in dive bars in Laos and Singapore, and just got back from Chile not too long ago. Clearly we didn't know too much about each other since, while talking of Johannesburg, assured me that of all the places in the world that one I could avoid for safety reasons which just served to put in on my list of places I want to go now.

After about three hours or so she went off to meet some other friends and I went off to meet up with Lawrence. He was at his house working on a project, as I'm getting the impression seems to be what he is eternally doing. It took me a little over an hour to walk over there, passing through my old neighborhood along the way, and when I got there, there he was in his workshop devising a new type of dome structure. The more I learn about him the more fascinated I get.

He had some things to move around in his storage unit, so we chatted as I helped him out with that, then, after meeting his neighbor, Maria, he took me out for a burger again. I was a bit of a disappointment that I wasn't staying in town longer since he was going down to Portland the next day to go rollerskating with a friend and wanted me to come along. It did sound fun, but I told him about finding a job and all that, so after the burger I headed back downtown to meet up with Trish.

On the way, I reconnected with Penney and Robert and their adventures. It seems the fates haven't passed them by on their travels either. They had gotten into Portland, picked up their friend Joe, and gone down to Eugene to visit some of his friends. They all live in a coop, much like the one Todd and I visited in Oklahoma City, and Penney liked it so much she decided to stay. Robert then decided he'd roam around Oregon finding farms to volunteer on and learn while Penney brings in the real funds, and then he'll drop back in to visit on weekends.

I got off the phone with them right by the Merchant Cafe where Trish was hanging out. That was a hoot. Tricia always seems to attract the more odd sorts of folks, and tonight was no exception. We ended up drinking with Krystal and her husband, and Krystal was covered in ridiculous plastic gem jewelery that was simply amazing, yelling about her uterus and that her husband has many eggs. Most of the night was babysitting her, and fixing her flashlight that she broke when she tumbled off her chair. Its probably one of those things you had to be there for, but it was truly great. I haven't lost my breath laughing in a long time.

That night I stayed and Trish and Chris', her boyfriend. The next morning I rode the bus in with her and we were treated to a guy wheeling his "perfect wife" onto the bus. They were dressed identically in black sweaters, pants, boots and goggles, though the wife had on one of those S&M crotch belts on. She was strapped to his wheely luggage because she is a plastic mannequin. Through out the entire ride he was professing to a lady sitting nearby that his wife was the perfect wife because there was no back talk, no waiting games, and knew her place. Fair enough, I suppose.

I left Tricia downtown and returned to the library for a bit. Chieu and I had arranged to meet up after 5pm and I'd yet to reach Rachel. I got a text from her, however, on my way out of the library and within fifteen minutes we were sitting outside of Top Pot having a coffee.

Rachel's a special one to me for bonding over this kind of lifestyle. She's studying nursing right now, and when she started back up in school she'd told me it was part of her training to be a hit man. I'd never really dug that deep into my spiritual philosophies with her until this meeting and was amazed out how alike we are. After a little while in the sun we retired to her new apartment and talked for hours about everything. It was a really great visit. I even ended up pushing meeting up with Chieu back to 7pm since it seemed like leaving at 4:30pm would be cutting something really good short.

Eventually I did go, though. We both had friends to meet up with, and I was excited to see Chieu as well. I had to work the next day again, but by this point I still hadn't decided if I'd head back that night or the next morning. Chieu ended up making that decision for me.

We met up at my old favorite, Bau Haus, which was actually where she and I had met for the first time. From there we grabbed dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant on Broadway where we caught up on everything that was going on. Its funny, because her boyfriend, Scott, is yet another who has suddenly got a supreme interest in sailing and also spends the bulk of his days traveling the world. By the end of dinner Chieu, being the more organized between us, insisted I figure out if I even had the option of leaving tonight. I did, but I'd have had to have left right then, and she was inviting me to stay at her place anyway which sounded nice.

Busing back to her place we continued our visit. She'd rented Australia, an absurdly long movie, but we watched that for the evening drinking milk and eating truffles.

9/20- The Slow Down

2009-09-25T16:37:00.000-07:00

Since arriving in Port Townsend on the 9th life seemed to suddenly crank up its speed. From the rope climbing, sailing, Todd's visit, getting a job, and all the little things in between Saturday was promising to continue that pace. Thankfully, but much to my chagrin at the time, it didn't.

The plan Friday night when Todd and I left for the movies was that we'd leave at 9am for Seattle. From there Todd would catch a bus back to Santa Fe at 1:15pm. That would give us leisure time to peruse the city for an hour or so before getting to the station. As seems to be our way with plans they changed over night. There were five people to coordinate with for the ride down, all of whom had shifting schedules that had been changing all week. The fifth was a girl who was going to catch a ride down with us for a gathering Wendie was going to. As far as what was known of our end of the plans, all Wendie knew was that we needed to be in Seattle for a 1:15pm bus.

We woke up around 8:30am or so to find the plans had changed. Rather than getting out of the house by 9am we left by 9:30am missing the 10:35am ferry out of Bainbridge to Seattle. This heightened a mood that was already feeling heavy. The dynamics over the week had continued to feel a little odd as Wendie and Daniel were hosting more than they'd intended and Todd was struggling with finding a place to go, ending up unenthusiastically finding his way home again in the end. With the missed ferry came the prospect of possibly missing the bus since Greyhound has a habit of over selling buses and if you're not their early you can be shunted along to the next bus leaving five hours later. It was a cluster of miscommunications that day.

Oddly, the tone was set from the beginning with the weather. Since arriving it had been bright and sunny all week, this Saturday it was overcast and rainy. It had rained in the night as well and Todd had left his phone out of the bivy since the night before we were staring up at stars. This caused extra havoc since his phone got washed out and was still needing to make calls to Shalain for arrangements.

This was the beginning of the day.

Thankfully the fifth girl had decided to cancel. With the weather Daniel became nervous about his boat loosely anchored out in the bay so he decided to stay as well and take care of it. It ended up just being Wendie, Todd, and I riding down, and just Todd and I being dropped at the ferry since Wend intended to head over with Daniel in the evening after her gathering.

I had been trying to reach people all day to meet up. Lawrence's days off were Monday and Tuesday, Laura was at a wedding, Rachel was moving until 4pm, Trish is a drop in anyway, and I couldn't get a hold of Chieu. The day was not looking good, and I still wasn't sure if I'd be able to make it back to work Sunday afternoon. Getting to the ferry terminal Todd finished up his repacking and I finally did the final checking on the two buses I wasn't sure about for returning the next morning. As it turned out, those buses didn't run Sundays.

About fifteen minutes before the ferry arrived to take us to Seattle I decided not to go. Todd would be taking a cab straight to the bus station, I had no real plans with anyone over there other than Rachel at 4pm, and this new discovery had me leaving Seattle that day at 3:30pm to make it to work Sunday. I walked Todd down the gangway and bid him good luck. It seemed we needed plenty of it this day. Thankfully before he left he gave me $10 to get him some mate Daniel had been telling him about whenever I finally did make it to the city.

Turning around to head back I looked over my finances and discovered it was a very good thing Todd gave me that cash. I had miscalculated in my books and found out I was short a few bucks for the many buses I'd be going home on. It only cost $4.50 all told, but when you have $3 it can be a problem. I got a coffee for some change and began my wait for the bus in a somewhat aggravated mood. Luckily it was Saturday, a phone day.

I called my Dad to see what he was up to and had a really good, over due chat with him and found out he's doing quite a bit of writing of his own lately. After that I caught my first bus to Poulsbo then spent a good while talking to my Mom as well. She was in Maine at Chauncy's, a favorite lobster place of her Dad's, with her sister Holly who was in for the week. Holly lives out in LA and was visiting my Mom to support her through a process of getting new eyes, as my Mom says. She's always had horrible vision, but finally has come across new contacts that bring her 50/20 vision up to 20/20 vision. The two of them were having a great time just hanging out all week.

The connection in Poulsbo was a four and a half hour wait so I visited the library as well, and spent some time catching up with Ang back in Denver on the phone. There was a strip mall nearby with a grocery store, so I bought some crackers and peanut butter to eat for the last hour of my wait at the bus stop. While there I ended up sharing them with this guy, Mike, who was hobbling around on a bum leg. He and I had a good chat for a while about my travels and his life. In fact, he'd seemed bummed about the long wait before we started talking, then when his girlfriend called a while later I heard him say everything was great and he was having a good time, so I guess I wasn't boring him.

About a half an hour before the connecting bus came the bus showed up coming from Port Townsend. When I checked if I needed to get on that bus Daniel hopped off, so I chatted with him while waiting for that bus to swing around and head the other way. By the time I got back to the house I put on a movie and zoned out for the night.

Sunday I returned to work and had a great time meeting Jessica. She was the girl working with me that day and was just full of life. It was completely dead in the shop all day, so she and I just spent time getting to know each other as we wiped things down. A little after I got home, Wendie and Daniel returned and we all retired to a movie. The shuttling through had ended and now I felt like I'd dropped, temporarily, back into the regular day-to-day life I left in March.

9/18- My Work Week

2009-09-25T14:27:00.000-07:00

Monday morning was a big to do as Scott and Gail, Daniel's friends we'd had coffee with the day before, came over for breakfast before they headed back east past the Sound and Cascades to eastern Washington. Wendie and Daniel were now hosting quite a crew as Matt and I were still staying there, Scott and Gail were coming in for breakfast, and then, of course, the two of them tucked around a table in their little apartment. As we sat around eating and visiting it reminded me of meals in the little cottage my family used to rent when I was a kid back at Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. It was one of those island bound cabins with no amenities, and just a front porch and a fireplace to crowd in on as the family gathered.

After breakfast, with a quick tour of the garden outside, Scott and Gail were off, then Matt as well, and finally Wendie and I were bound for work. As mentioned in the previous post, Wendie works for a non-profit called Third Ear Project which has been having severe financial difficulties this year. So much so that Wendie only works 10 hours a week despite a mother load of work that needs to be done. Being that I am in town with little to do other than visit with my sister I figured I'd volunteer my assistance. It would surprisingly turn out to be quite profitable for me in the end.

Now, I've skipped over a few important events that happened over the weekend because it seemed more fitting to talk about them now. The first was that Wendie's boss, Alex, who is the only other person in the office had a horrible accident Friday night, a day after I'd met him in town. He was out riding his bike and ran into an unseen ditch that flipped him over the handlebars landing him on his head and right arm. It knocked him out so bad that when he came to he had no idea where he was and barely had the senses about him to call his girlfriend to come find him. In the end, he had a concussion, his face got all messed up, his right arm was broken, and possibly has some broken ribs. All of these are bad things beyond the obvious because he's the only one who worked full time in the office, and is the one who goes out to pitch the organization to places like the Rotary Club who are unaccustomed to seeing scabbed faces and casts before them. Not the best for fund raising at a time when business is suffering.

From all this, my help was quite welcome so I spent the day working a bit of computer stuff like data entry and organizing things. For me the day was great, I felt useful and was just puttering along at my own pace enjoying feeling the facade of settlement again. Meanwhile my sister was not having a very good day. There were obvious stresses in the office over what to do now and how to get things done. The organization teaches classes, and they were starting that week, but had only one student for it. So by the time we were driving home again she was beating herself up for a whole myriad of reasons.

The other event I'd skipped was a call I'd gotten from Todd over the weekend. We'd talked on Saturday as usual, though only sporadically because he had been taken in by a billionaire down in Portland and was between soirees with the Prince of Ghana and the President of Wells Fargo Bank. Yeah, that's billionaire, with a "B". From what I could gather he was quite possibly either heading to Canada, or getting dropped off here. All of this was very tricky timing with the elements here on the home front.

I found myself in Todd's position just a week earlier, though different. Where I was coming into Boise in the dead of night with no official nod to stay at his newly found sisters house, now Todd was possibly dropping in to a recently crowded home from the weekend while tensions were growing at work and personal space was a definite need. As Todd had felt, I likewise didn't want to leave him hanging saying, no, don't come, the timing is bad. The happy medium was to have him camp out with me should he be popping in.

The next day was much better. Wendie felt more productive, Alex had given a great Rotary Club presentation despite being banged up, and due to my updates of the website pushing the class two weeks back we'd gotten several students signed up. By now I had also gotten a pretty good idea that Todd was planning on stopping in as well. On our way home from work, as Wendie was asking me if Todd was coming in that night or the next, he called saying he was on the ferry approaching town. Wendie stopped in for groceries and I walked down to meet him.

It was an understated self consciousness with both Wendie and I that it wasn't the most hospitable welcome for him of "welcome to our home, here's the woods", but the nice thing about Todd is that all he wants is honesty and he's happy regardless of the situation when he gets the straight answer. I had warned him when he was still in Portland of the situation here, but on the same tune, I was camping out as well and he would simply be joining me. Either way, it was a good reunion as we met up just passed the ferry dock and I was able to catch up some on what had been happening in Portland as we walked back to meet my sister.

That night we all had dinner together and the mood was much lighter than it had been the night before. We all retired somewhat early and the next day I had volunteered to do some errands for Third Ear. With Todd in town now I figured it was the perfect sort of work. At the end of the previous day we'd printed up a bunch of revised fliers to replace around town and it seemed fitting to wander around and show Todd the town. Daniel works from home, so it also helped to vacate the house for the day to let him concentrate.

Port Townsend is one of those quaint little Victorian sea towns that are just adorable to wander through, and we took our time doing it. It also provided us the time to really beat around the ideas behind the weekend Todd had just had. It had been such a flurry outside of a normal days events that it seemed it helped Todd to have someone to voice them too.

I would highly recommend checking out his write up on it all, but the long and the short of it seemed to boil down to the struggles of escaping identity. The billionaire, Andre, had been bitten by a brown recluse spider some years ago and was now clearly dying of it. He had all the money in the world, and as Todd found out, apparently quite a good insight into spirituality as well and the two aspects were in deep conflict. Along with Todd Andre had taken in another hitcher from Canada, and with both he was treating them to a lifestyle neither had likely ever tasted. From what I gathered he believed seemingly random encounters all reasons behind them, much like Todd and I do, and that helping others along was a key aspect to living a good life.

What the conflict seemed to be was his identity as a man made of money. I'll let
Todd give all the details, as its his story, but essentially he seemed only to be able to offer gifts that enhanced vanity and prestige rather than genuine service to another. This was a gold mine for Todd and I to explore that day and it retouched into our differences over the benevolently mis-channeled suburban kid archetype, like those on charity vacations as Todd calls them. In short, that debate of ours is a reexamination of the old adage "its easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven". My question has always been, what does a rich man do then? I suppose, to answer my own question quickly and to keep in the Biblical references doing so, I guess you just treat money in the same way as manna in that it should be a non-hoardable resource.

This segues quite nicely into how the rest of the day progressed. Early in our fliering route we stopped in at a coffee shop that was hiring. I asked, clumsily, it they would consider hiring me for a week or so until they got a permanent fixture in. Of course they refused, and I really hadn't expected them to say yes anyway which was why I sort of bumbled through the procedure. Todd saw it and offered a way to rephrase and see if I could fill the gap while in town with my 9 years of experience behind me. Later in the day we hit another shop that was hiring. I tried this new approach, was handed an application, and told the best time to talk to the owner would be between 6am and 7am. The next day I rose at 5:30am, had breakfast with Wend on her way to her other job at the Challenge Course in Port Angeles, then meandered down to the Tyler St. Cafe to meet Teresa, the owner.

Teresa didn't even really look at the application. I pitched her the idea and she told me to come in the next day at 5:30am to open and see how much training I would need. It turned out one of her two baristas was taking a week off the first week of October and the Port Townsend Film Festival was also coming to town the following weekend and both baristas were anxious to get time off and join in.

Now to go back to that idea of money as manna. Before all the defensive hate mail starts pouring in about it being great that I can profess wandering around penniless while others have responsibilities to take care of I understand all that. I am, by no means, suggesting that everyone should just trust to faith that money will appear whenever its needed. All I would like to do is write about the incidents in which it does happen to me, or anyone else I hear about to hopefully reduce the stress of those who are bending over backwards to make ends meet in order to take care of themselves and their family. I still have quite a difficult time trusting in that idea, but being in the fortunate position I'm in I've decided it be a wasted chance not to test it out.

I'm not sure if I've told this story before on here about my Nana back when she was raising my Dad, but its such a good story I'm going to tell it again if I did. When they first moved to the town a grew up in in the '50s they were having a lot of bad financial trouble. Nana was a very religious woman of Christian Science and there are hundreds if not thousands who would attest to her kindness, but one day she found herself with no money in the bank and no food to feed her family with in the cupboards. She went grocery shopping anyway, rationalizing that her family was more important than a bit of business to the grocery store and had resolved to write a bad check and make good on it later. In the meantime her kids would be fed.

When she got in line to the register she couldn't do it. She put everything back up on the shelves without saying a word and went home deciding that somehow something would work out. When she got back to the house her back steps were covered in grocery bags filled with groceries. It turned out her neighbors were going on vacation for a week and decided to give all their perishable food to them so as not to waste it.

Its my belief that things like this do happen, the trick seems not to rely on them happening. What then of my good fortune? I've often asked myself if I'm relying on this good luck that I have, and Todd has told me he worries that I am attempting to manipulate fate in this way. The only thing I can offer up is that I always am plotting some sort of plan as to what to do when I do get down to nothing. I got to zero in Denver, but I still did have my locked up savings which made that zero a false zero. Money came to me anyway though and let me unlock that savings and dole it out in different ways. I also left Denver low on cash figuring I could stop and work on the way, and by Boise it had tripled. The big one has been that I've been planning for a while to go to England in November, but had no idea how that would be funded. I worked out the hours I'll get from this job and the cost of a ticket there and back and it came out just a little over what I need. Spending money, I think.

Anyway, so that was the magic of the week. After getting the job that Thursday morning Todd and I went out to finish fliering the town. Todd's heel had started nagging him, though, so I dropped him off by the bay to write until I was done. On the way there I bought myself a congratulatory hat for the new job to replace the one I lost in Denver. I spent the rest of the day roaming outer Port Townsend and picked Todd up in the evening to head home again.

By now he was trying to figure out where to go. Originally the idea was out to Cape Alava to finally hit the Pacific this year, but with his heel going that didn't seem like such a good idea. Nothing else was really calling to him though, in fact, even that wasn't calling to him, it just seemed more like the thing to do. The other nagging thing was that on Saturday would be his birthday, and its always nice to do something fun for your birthday, regardless of how much you don't like celebrating them.

Friday morning I rose at 4:45am for my first day at work. It cracked me up that the girls there were on their best behavior for "the new guy". When they finally told me that I asked them to please stop since I do really badly with well behaved people and would much rather everyone just be themselves. At that they began petting me. One girl, Mary, had wanted to touch my hair and finally did when I told her to be herself, then her sister, Teresa, the owner, started stroking my arm hair. It cracked me up, and from then on I've been comfortable working there. I also got along quite well with the girl training me, Kelly, who was quite specific on getting my shots to pull perfectly... which is probably good for me in the end.

After work Todd and I hatched a plan to give Wendie and Daniel the house to themselves for the evening for the first time in a week. Todd had finally decided it seemed best to just head back home and recoup his heel issues. Talking to Shalain, his girlfriend, it turned out there was a paying house sitting gig waiting for him there. Another "it just shows up" example. We were all planning a trip to Seattle the next day anyway, and although a birthday Greyhound trip is a horrible sounding idea, the whole plan fit well together other than that. That night we borrowed Wendie's car and went to the drive through for an explosive evening of Inglorious Basterds and District 9. As Todd noted, we started the trek west with a drive-in and we're going to end it with one.

9/13- Lazy Weekend

2009-09-25T13:44:00.000-07:00

The weekend here in Port Townsend was a very relaxed one. The Wooden Boat Festival saturated the little town with boat enthusiasts from all over and the sun stayed out with clear blue skies for thorough enjoyment of the event.

Wendie had work Saturday morning running a booth at the Farmer's Market, and Matt and Daniel had gone down for the day to admire all the wooden boats floating out in the harbor. I was happy to be left at the house for the day. For the most part, once I'd woken up, I spent the day on Wendie's computer updating posts in the quiet that I figured wouldn't last.

Around noon Wendie called to see if I could run down to the market and bring her a pair of shorts. This was my one break in the day that I took to get outside, and even manned the booth while she went off to change. I loved watching the people circulate through, and lazily mingle amongst each other for the day. The booth Wend was running was for the organization she works for, Third Ear Project, which teaches Non-violent Communication. I'd learn more about what that was in the next few days, but for that day, when ever anyone asked me what it was about I'd muddle my way through what I understood of it which, it seemed, related quite closely to how I'd relate to each ride that picked me up along the way. Essentially, just listening to what someone has to say, whether I agreed with the opinion or not, and responding to what's said, rather than what could be inferred as an opinion of me. Basically refraining from jumping to conclusions and automatically assuming people are judging you.

So that was the bulk of my Saturday, typing away with a brief venture outside. The day had more to promise, though, closer to when the sun set. Across the Sound, on Whidbey Island, Matt had a friend who was having a little gathering in Anacortes that night. Rolling with the synchronistic theme of my travels I had recently discovered my friend Laura lives there and had been trying to figure out how to coordinate visiting with her. Here it landed in my lap, yet again. Though the results didn't work out quite as I'd hoped.

I talked with Laura that afternoon about possibly meeting up that night and it turned out she was just heading out the door on a camping trip. Perhaps the timing of that wasn't meant to be, because next, as we sat in line for the ferry, we realized we weren't going to be getting on anytime soon. With the onset of the Wooden Boat Festival came a deluge of travelers that aren't normally there. Due to this the ferry fell behind schedule. So far behind schedule that we waited about an hour past its intended departure time, just barely didn't make a loading, and decided that getting to Anacortes was more trouble than it was worth. Instead, we turned around and had a nice evening at the drive in watching District 9 and (500) Days of Summer.

Sunday was a very different day for me. With all my website updating chores done I piled in the car with the crew after breakfast and we made our way back to Mystery Bay where the sailboat had been moored before. Matt had brought up a wide surf board from Seattle that, instead of surfing on, you stand and paddle around on. It seemed like the most absurd thing to do. When we got to the beach I watched as Matt just grabbed a paddle, pushed out into this serenely calm bay, and just stood up paddling around. It kind of reminded me of the pictures you see of poor Asian folks paddling around standing up crossing rivers.

I laid on the beach relaxing for a long while, then finally decided to give it a go. It was surprisingly really kind of fun in the most simple way. You just stand and paddle, literally, maintaining your balance the whole while. It was so relaxing just roving around the bay that way on the quiet of the water. I took it out twice, slid under a few docks just as something to do, and took some pictures out there on the calm. For the most part, though, I spent my time laying on the beach in full rest.

At one point a little girl, Paris, wandered over to us with her baby pug, Lucky. Her family had just gotten in from boating and were relaxing nearby, though out of sight. She was a funny one because she was surprisingly really social. Mostly she talked with Wendie and Daniel as they played with her puppy, but as I watched I was just so surprised by how easily she hung out with us.

As we got to know more about her we discovered she was 6 and from the area. It dawned on me then that my surprise at her sociability probably came a lot from being used to watching little kids growing up in a city. Out here in the more rural towns it seemed the parents were able to let loose the reins a bit more than in a city and kids were able to wander farther out of sight than a city kid would be, and so became more used to being off on their own. I don't know if that's true or not, but it seemed to fit in my head well.

Later in the day, we headed back into town and met up with some old friends of Daniel's for coffee. Matt stayed one last night after that, and Monday morning my work week would begin.

9/11- Hoist the Sails

2009-09-12T15:43:00.000-07:00

At dinner the night before Wendie let me know that Daniel's friend Matt was coming up the next day to go sailing and would I want to go. Fuck yeah I do. In my first two days in Port Townsend I get go tree climbing and sailing, that's a good run. On top of it, it happens to be the weekend of the famed Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival, so we'd be sailing with the pretty boys.

Again we rose early for more oats, Matt showed up and they consulted the sea charts, then off we went. There's no mucking about over here. We spent 7 hours out on that boat just roving around in Mystery Bay, then made our way out into Port Townsend Harbor where they were racing sailboats and showing off their schooners. Once again I neglected to use sunblock and by now my entire face is probably just a big skin cancer cell, but what ever, it was done in good fun.

Matt and Daniel are old sailing buddies from many years past. Matt is out of Marblehead, MA so he and Daniel were schooling me as far as what knots to do, how to hoist the sails, tacking, steering, etc. Daniel had also brought out his little dingy, which was what he used to get to the boat moored out in the harbor, and occasionally someone would decide to pull up along side the sailboat and get towed for a bit. Daniel even got in it and towed the sailboat with it over a sandbar into the main harbor.

For some while now I'd been looking to learn a bit more how to sail so this was quite a great day for me. By the end of it we were all knacked so we anchored it out by the town and rowed in for some coffee before going to get the cars. I volunteered to stay behind and watch the dingy as they would likely be gone for an hour or so.

While sitting on the beach watching the boat, I got to talking with quite an interesting guy. He was another unplugger. James was an older guy out of Denver by about two weeks. He was a builder who lived down by the Tech Center back there and did work for the governor and mayor. In the past month he got burnt out on feeling like "a bureaucrat" as he put it, pulled everything, and left. He got a ticket to San Diego and has been hitching his way up for the past two weeks until he got here. He too is interested in picking up a sailboat, knows nothing about it, and wants to learn how to sail down to Belize. Along the way, he'd picked up a companion, Amber, who was out of Pennsylvania, though they met in San Francisco.

We talked a bit, and he was still in the throes of feeling that energy of cutting free, but he was full of it. He was loving not being bound down anymore and agreed that this was the kind of living he needed. Meeting him was more impressionable to me just that I was meeting yet another one breaking out in this past year, and got me wondering to myself again why it is that this breaking free from these constraints seems to be increasing, or is it just that I've put myself in those path ways with breaking out myself.

Anyway, soon enough Daniel showed up and we returned home for dinner. Matt stayed over as well that night and I got access to the computer and spent way too long editing photos into the night.

9/10- String Him Up

2009-09-12T15:31:00.000-07:00

Wendie and Daniel run an early rising house and I'd asked them to wake me so I could have breakfast with them in the morning. The standard here is oatmeal, so I fit in well. So in the morning I woke up to Wendie yelling out the side window for me to rise and shine and that breakfast was ready. Toss the bivy in the garage and hunker in for a meal.

Wend and I were going to head out to Sequim and Port Angeles for the day. She had an appointment in Sequim for an hour, so I occupied myself with her computer in a coffee shop for that, then later in the afternoon she has a Challenge Course that she's qualifying to be a facilitator for. As part of the qualifications she was going to learn how to do a high altitude rescue with ropes and things. I had volunteered to be the "victim" for her to practice rescuing on.

We spent a good while after her appointment in the coffee shop on the interwebs geeking out over Google Calendar. Both of us being gadgety, systems, organizational nuts we spent quite a while looking that over, then we went off to Port Angeles for the course. Trudy, the lady who runs the course, was quite pleased to have such a willing volunteer to be strung up in trees and rescued by novices. I liked her a lot as we chatted over our childhoods that were both spent dangling from trees and such things. She had that same glint in her eye of really wanting to do something adventurously stupid.

The afternoon was just fucking awesome. I've never been belaying on ropes before, or anything like that. Generally when I'm climbing things its usually illegal and unsafe, but I have no problems throwing on harnesses and safety hats for another excuse to scramble up something very high and dangle from a rope. That's what I did all afternoon with Wendie and another guy, Nate, learning how to cut me down.

Wendie gave me a tour of the Challenge Course afterward and I desperately wanted to play on it. Cargo nets, big wooden walls, rope swings, tight wires, it all calls my name. The point of the whole project was right up my alley as well. It is designed to encourage ingenuitive thinking and problem solving for seemingly impossible tasks. AA groups come through it using the walls as symbols for their issues with staying sober and children's groups come through teaching leadership, group cohesiveness, and outside of the box thinking.

We headed home after a good day of play and stopped in for groceries on the way back. I got a nice giant block of cheese and a big box of ghetto crackers. Chris happy. The hour ride home also gave Wend and I a good chance to really catch up on what's really going on with us these days. After a nice dinner with Daniel at home it was time to retire again to bed.

9/9- The Sibling Pick Up

2009-09-12T15:16:00.000-07:00

Lawrence helped me figure out the bus system the next morning as Wend and I coordinated how she was going to get me. Port Townsend, where they live, is on the other side of the Sound and about an hour and a half up from where the Bainbridge ferry drops off. As it turned out, though, Daniel had business in Sedro-Wooley, due north of Seattle on this side of the Sound, and could scoop me up if I could get to Everett. All very complex.

He and I went out for coffee and chatted a bit more, then I helped him unpack his Burning Man stuff a bit and settle into his house again. We exchanged numbers and I figured I'd give him a call when I came back through town for my real Seattle visit of all my other friends there. From there, I walked downtown to my old coffee shop in search of my friend, Trish, before jumping on the bus north.

I was barely able to catch her. She no longer works at the shop, but I spotted her boyfriend across the street and he lead me over to the Merchant Cafe where she works now. I got a quick hug and a brief visit before I had to run off to catch my bus to Everett. I was quite glad I got to see her though before running off.

For the next two hours I sat in the Everett bus station. I did get a little entertainment when I noticed two very cute European girls, Sonja and Maria, who turned out to be Finnish, trying to figure something out with Greyhound. Being quite a Greyhound aficionado I struck up a conversation with them for a bit and gave them some travel tips while they too jaunt about the US. After a little while, though, the girls were long gone and Wendie and Daniel showed up to get me.

Wendie had complained to me, via text, that I should be warned because she was tired and cranky. When she showed up, however, they were both full of life. I'm not sure what she was talking about. We drove off and took the ferry to Whidbey Island, then got in line for the ferry to Port Townsend out of there while holing up for the wait in a burger joint nearby. Of course we visited the whole way in, snapped pictures, the whole deal, but by the time we got to town we had decided on having a relaxing night to a movie and conking out after that. That's pretty much exactly what we did.

Wrapping up the night, however, Wendie had asked me if I'd be fine with camping out on their lawn before I'd arrived due to the lack of space in the apartment. I was totally fine with that, but when it came down to me heading outside to go to sleep the reality of it all suddenly hit her. She had envisioned me nesting in a tent with my back pack explosion in there giving me a sense of my own space. Instead, I had my bivy and had neatly tucked my pack away in the garage. Seeing me settle down out in a bivy with no back pack explosion set her feeling like a poor host thinking she'd cast out her brother after his sojourn to see her. I was totally happy down there, but suddenly she was asking if I wanted to stay on the couch, etc., but with Daniel's sleeping pad, and a nice big pillow complimenting my usual entourage of sleeping gear I was quite content out under the stars. Eventually it all worked itself out and the house fell quiet with slumber soon enough.

9/8- Ride the Burn

2009-09-12T14:28:00.000-07:00

I woke up somewhere around noon. When Todd and I had split ways the day before he had given me some MRE heaters that Michelle Montana (hi, Michelle), one of the ladies reading along here that he'd gotten in touch with, had given him. With him not being much of a cooker he gave them to me figuring I'd probably get some use out of them, and I was curious so I took them. Trying them out that morning I realized that MRE heaters are best used with MREs of which I had none.

Being the crafty little dipshit I am, I was curious to see if I could finagle something with some of the last bit of rice I was looking to eat up. I've been getting tired of all the slow cooking, clean up, and all the water consumed in eating rice so I've been trying to use it all up quickly. With these little things I figured I'd try using my ziplock bags as an MRE pack and hope the heating process would work in a way that burned slow enough to absorb all the water into the rice, but with out all the hassle of moving things around and clean up time. It failed miserably.

I ended up with some weird, soggy concoction that was leaking everywhere with crunchy, potentially chemically poisoned rice inside. It was worth the effort. Instead I scrapped the whole thing and ate some oatmeal. I like a good experiment even if they're failed ones.

By one or so I was back on the road to see Mt. Hood's snow capped visage hovering far off at the end of it. To my right was the stark jagged peaks of some lower mountains, and to my left the backdrop was lined with more snow caps like Mt. Jefferson and the Sisters. It was back to being a hot day, and again I neglected my sunblock, so as I hoofed my way toward Madras, where US-26 intersected leading off to Portland, I continued cooking my face for the afternoon.

It was another day where I'd doubt myself then be struck with great luck on rides. It seems whenever I hit that point of conceding to walking the distance then a ride comes by, but I first need to go through the facade of conceding for the ride before genuinely conceding. Its a weird process, and perhaps all in my head, but it seems consistent which is why it takes so many miles to get around the fake concession. Its not so much genuinely needing to lose hope of a ride daily, as much as it is genuinely needing to be happy with just walking daily.

Tom was my first ride. He picked up me up about 4 or 5 miles from where I started on a ramp sloping down off a bridge. I was getting a rock out of my shoe and randomly looked up and threw my thumb out only to be completely surprised when he pulled over. As he drove me 20 miles up to Madras we talked about the divorce he's going through and his concern for the kids he has and how they'll handle it. He was kind enough to go off the main street once in Madras and drop me right in front of the library once he heard I was interested in heading there.

After some internet time there I set off back out of town again with a decision ahead of me. Now this one was a weird one. As I mentioned in the last post I had no idea why I was drawn to Bend, but I was and I picked up a great ride with Luego heading that way that took me 250 miles, 309 for the day. At the north end of Madras was another split, US-26 that went around Mt. Hood to Portland or OR-97 that went to The Dalles. I was having another weird draw to The Dalles and had no clue why.

When I hit that intersection looking at the hill taking US-26 off and the curve bending OR-97 out of sight I was completely perplexed as to what to do. Here I was reminded of Todd and his concern for me about using these studies in intuition for manipulation of the universe rather than genuine self exploration. I was literally standing there, stuck in my mind, as to which way to go despite the practical road being somewhat obvious. OR-97 took me back east a little ways while it went north where US-26 was laid out in a direct north western way that pleases me so much in a geeky way when I come across it.

I thought of Todd with his concerns of me trying to manipulate fate or "guidance" because I found myself wrestling with taking OR-97 to be "on the right road" for who ever is supposed to pick me up there to give me the big ride all the way to Seattle. Or taking US-26 for the direct, less faith based, approach and finding myself walking the whole way missing that ride on OR-97. It was a really weird debate.

Turning right, I started down OR-97 toward The Dalles. The reasoning in my head started kicking in that it did make sense because of all the warnings not to hitch in Washington. According to Tom they'll simply throw you in jail, which I didn't quite believe, but figured from The Dalles I had I-84 to walk a bit to catch a ride up into Seattle. Where as in Portland I'd be stuck right there on the edge and find myself walking into Washington state and have even more of a rough time. Basically I was conjuring up horror stories for myself about not tuning in to "the right road" creating fear which is exactly opposite of the whole idea of having any kind of faith or intuitional guidance.

Anyway, I got around the bend heading north and realized I needed water and was passing a Safeway. I went in and filled up which gave me a bit more time to relax on this completely self made situation. When I walked out of the store US-26 was right in front of me and OR-97 was back behind the store from whence I came. I decided, fuck it, if I'm afraid of being out of tune with listening to my inner voice then I've lost contact with it anyway. The intelligent and obvious thing to do is take US-26 for the direct route, so that's what I did.

As had happened the day before, I walked many miles over many hours, this time in constant second guessing about my decision, before I connected with something again. It was about the same time as well, I'd walked probably 7 miles and had finally wrestled myself out of my second guessing for the most part, when I noticed a car half a mile up pull into a dirt lot.

The dirt lot was the only pull off, other than the shoulder of the busy road, and I got the notion in my head that perhaps that might be for me. I had been dragging me feet, but I quickened my step now to put myself in a position of seeing what was going on there before he pulled out and left the lot. Keeping my thumb out as I walked, I kept my eyes on him watching as the guy was moving things about in his car and appeared to be clearing out room. It was a big SUV so I wasn't sure if it was a family taking a pee break or something, or if it was just a guy on trip on his own. As I got up to him, and was just about to pass him, I was still watching him and finally he looked up and waved me over.

Lawrence was coming home from Burning Man and the playa dust all over the inside and outside of his car was testament to it. It had been his first time going and he seemed quite consumed with the impact that it had left on him, enough to have me a little concerned when I first got in. He was from Seattle and intended to be there that night by midnight. It was my second several hundred mile ride in two consecutive days, something was looking out for me and I'm guessing it didn't want me going down OR-97 in the end.

Lawrence turned out to be a really great ride. Like I said, he was coming off Burning Man with this huge experience still unprocessed going on in his head and he was struggling hard to get it out in words. He picked me up because he needed someone to talk to, because the impression was so deep. We clicked perfectly though.

As we drove I told him exactly what I was up to, the intuitional wander, some of the sit down and shut up philosophies, and just relayed a bunch of my thoughts on spirituality and the world at large. Despite all of that sounding like a mouthful, he was the one who actually did most of the talking, working out how to articulate the major adjustments he was thinking making in his life, and what had just happened to him in this past week down in Nevada. It seemed to take maybe fifteen or twenty minutes before we were divulging very personal aspects of ourselves, concerns for ourselves, and such things as we cruised toward Mt. Hood.

By the time we were driving under the looming peaks he was saying he wanted to stop to eat letting me know when we got there that my coin was no good there. It was a really incredible experience riding up with him. We scoped out a little mountain town diner for some burgers and coffee. He was explicit with me that he was in no hurry to get anywhere, as I was reaffirming to him that neither was I, but he was also hitting around about me staying at his place when we got to the city around midnight. I hadn't been concerned for where to stay since I knew once Wendie and Daniel knew I was up in town that I'd be able to stay at their place, but there was definitely something here with Lawrence to explore and I was excited it wasn't going to end with the ride.

We took off again, riding up I-5 with a few coffee stops along the way to grease the wheels and keep us awake. When we arrived at his place around midnight, we were literally down the street from Wendie and Daniel's Beacon Hill home that they rent out. That was a back of the mind ease, though everything was going really well with Lawrence, that if something should come up I only had to walk up a hill to be inside again. By then I'd called Wend to let her know I was in town already and she'd offered up the house, so it was all official.

Instead, Lawrence and I chatted a bit and he let me use the computer when he went to bed so I could let people know where I was. In the morning we planned to have coffee together and figure out something from there. By 2am I had a bed and slept in it like a rock.

9/7- The Tortoise & The Hare

2009-09-12T13:25:00.000-07:00

In the morning hours of 10, or 11, or noon we rose. I got up a little earlier and made myself some oatmeal for the day. Todd rose a little later and enjoyed some canned beans. I was smiling over all of this because I was really enjoying how our styles had really defined themselves clearly by now. No more of this hodge podge weird mess of trying to mix our ways leaving one of us in a strange control balancing act.

While walking last night, from the moment we were dropped off at the Flying J until we settled into our nest of weeds there had been brief hints back and forth at questioning what it was we were doing and whether we wanted to do it together or not. The Tortoise and The Hare idea had come up quite a few times, but as I said in the last post, neither of us wanted to split ways so soon. Today was a new day.

I liked that we were able to talk so casually about whether Todd wanted to stay at the ramps while I walked on or if he even wanted to go up north since his calling seemed to be saying south. We were individual partners, rather than bound comrades this time, and I smiled over that development too. Over breakfast we finally decided to attack the question.

It was clear if we kept walking west I-84 would get farther and farther away. After the little jaunt of that night Todd was quickly defining in himself that he had no shame in loving his method either. Sure he wanted to break in his boots and walk a bit, but not 300 some odd miles. Despite our quick success with the pick up, we got no other rides last night, and wondered if that was a fluke and that we would be walking such stretches through this Oregon desert ahead. I was also suddenly feeling a strange draw toward Bend, OR which dips away from the path to Portland, and suddenly both of us were wondering what the hell it was that was driving us to Portland in the first place. It had been huge to us back in Michigan and Iowa, but now it was a wonder.

I clearly was excited to see my sister in Port Townsend, WA. Todd was intrigued by the notions of crossing a serious desert. The Portland excitement seemed to only be there because of us being together there, but for no other reason. Suddenly we saw a huge struggle to get there for maybe a night roaming the streets and splitting ways then. It seemed a bit out of sorts.

We talked for about an hour as we decided that he liked his ramps and I liked my back roads. There was no judgment here now, finally, from either of us, where there had been a few months ago. We decided then, that if we're going to split up again it why not have a coffee back at the gas station first to do a proper goodbye. It was good, because this time it was devoid of the under spoken animosity that hung over our friendly departure in Omaha.

A mile back east for me was also no big deal. As we both pointed out, my walking was strictly for scenery. Walking is my meditation, it doesn't matter how far I get if I'm hitching, because the theory is that someone will get me eventually and bring me much farther than I would have walked. So we returned to the Stinker, the gas station of the previous night. Immediately the manager-apparent got to talking with us and offered us squash... because that's what you do in Caldwell I suppose. We accepted joking we could trade it for rides, but later I left it with the cashier there.

We hung out probably 45 minutes while we sipped coffee and settled into our decision, then after a picture in front of the place and headed off. Maybe about five minutes walk before I got to where we'd crawled out of our bivys that morning a very attractive young lady spun around and offered me a ride.

Initially I thought Zaine was from Canada after she offhandedly made a point to say that in her country people don't think twice about picking up hitchers, that's just what you do. She had a very slight accent as well, but what threw me was that it was definitely not from up there. As it turned out she would set the Central American theme for the day. When she was 14 she had moved up to America from Belize and eventually got married and nestled in. She was full of energy and I loved just chatting with her. When we got to the little town she was going to drop me in at the library I quietly thanked the strange holiday of Labor Day because the library was closed. Seeing that, and having a good time talking, she decided to take me further down the road, out of her way, and drop me over the border in Nyssa, OR.

It was a great way to kick off my solo return. Here it was a half an hour after parting with Todd and I'd made it to Oregon already. When we split off we'd said we'd text each other if either of us went to Portland to see if the other was there or on their way, but neither of us knew if we were going to bother with it or not. I figured if we were on the Tortoise and the Hare race, then I just got a good head start.

I said goodbye to Zaine as she returned to Idaho and I made off toward Vale, OR where 20 and 26 split ways. Vale had personal meaning for me as well, as this would be the first time on this trip that I'd be re-walking any part of my old walk in '04. Five years previous I had come through Ontario, OR and walked the stretch to Vale, past Tattle Tale Ln., and turned up US-26 toward Baker City and La Grande. This time I'd be taking the southern route on US-20 toward Burns and Bend.

I walked probably three or four miles past some nice country, and as usual, as my brain started readjusting itself to thinking I'd be walking the whole 20 miles to Vale a car pulled up behind me. Being Labor Day, once again, this couple were out for a joy ride heading to Ontario, OR just to be out for a drive. I hopped in and asked if they could let me out just before Ontario at the split off to Vale. Instead of obliging me that request they just took the turn and joy rode to Vale instead.

These two simply hit the technical mark of my Central American theme for the day since the guy was of Mexican heritage I believe, but we mostly spoke of religion. It was all talk of the weather until half way to Vale when we hit on spirituality and their Christianity. I explained to them my beliefs of reincarnation and a higher power and all of that, and I was happy to find it opened a relatively nice dialogue on the subject rather than an attempt to be saved. The last time I was on this road I was taken in by Mormons to learn the story of Joseph Smith over juice, but these guys were quite nice about it. In fact he specifically said he would never try to dissuade someone away from a faith they already have. He did leave it lingering there though seeming to silently say that he wouldn't be satisfied leaving someone he met with no faith at all though, but that's a guess.

I had to laugh when I got out in Vale because I stepped out across the street from another hitcher. The unnamed couple drove off and I crossed over to hear what this guy was yelling to me. It turned out he was just griping that he'd been stuck their all day with his sign and a thumb out. He pointed down the road to another hitcher about 50 yards down also trying to get out of Dodge.

It was a short conversation as I strapped on my pack to hoof it out, but he was sure to tell me that once I passed Burns, which was over a 100 miles down the road, there was absolutely nothing for another 100 miles passed that to Bend. Essentially telling me if I walked I was screwed.

The other hitcher, Abel, was much more optimistic. He'd only been dropped there 20 minutes ago and seemed in good spirits. I wished him luck as well, and gave him a card to the site, then sauntered on by. I got about 30 feet from him when I noticed a car had stopped for him and he was negotiating a ride. He turned it down so I threw my thumb out as the car pulled away, reeling him into me.

Preston was only going 10 miles down the road, but if you're walking then 10 miles ridden is 10 miles not walked. I also theorize that the more you're "in the middle of nowhere" the more likely people are to stop. He was a high schooler starting his senior year in the next town up, and in the ten minutes we rode together we didn't really say much more than the superficial things people say to each other when they first meet. Nevertheless, it was a good boost for a long road and I hoped more would come just as quickly.

They did not. It was a long stretch of open rolling highway through that farm land and those expanses tend to seem to take eons to cross on foot. My mentality was back to that of the Walk of Olde. Trodding along, staring at the horizon, letting my brain wander as it cooked in the sun. In good tradition, I'd neglected to put on my sunblock again.

Three hours and 7 miles later I had just risen from a rest on the side of the road by some sunflowers. I had just climbed a long hill and the sun was about an hour from setting. I was sort of giving up on the idea of getting picked up again, and was starting to rearrange my thinking into the long haul mentality of walking 20 to 30 miles a day. Once again, as this thinking solidified a little pick up pulled up in front of me.

Luego was heading to Bend... Holy Shit. Bend was still 233 miles away from me at the time, so I strapped my bag down in the back and jumped in the cab for a nice long ride through the night past that desert I'd been hearing so much about. He pulled out on to the road, sputtered a bit, then pulled right back over to the side as the engine seized up and conked out.

Luego and I got along pretty well. He was an immigrant up from southern Mexico, some 20 years ago, who came up in his late teen years just to check out California for a year and see what it was like. He ended up getting a girlfriend, who turned into a wife, and had two daughters there. Once work started drying up there, he followed his brother north to Bend, OR where more work could be had. By the time I met him he had moved over to Payette, ID with his wife and five kids and was on his weekly commute back to Bend where the work was good for the moment. Sadly, the little truck he'd gotten two years earlier was not holding up quite as well as he was.

A great sign for the friendliness of Oregon is that not more than two minutes after pulling to the side of the road broken down a guy and his grandkid pulled over to help. He spent a good 20 or 30 minutes working over the engine, troubleshooting the carburetor, fuel injector, spark plugs, and so on until he got it running again. All the while we were just shooting the shit learning about engines. Soon enough, Luego and I were back on our way and trucking like nothing ever happened.

It took about an hour or so before we got around to Luego's story of coming out of Mexico and his nestling in up here. He and his wife both had gotten citizenship, and his kids were born here so they were obviously natural citizens. These were facts he was quite proud of. With my interest in heading south next year, I kept asking about his hometown, what life was like, what the temperatures are like year round, but for the most part we talked a lot about his achievements in becoming an American. It had me reminiscing a lot on my Dad's side coming over just 100 years earlier.

As the trip wore on we got a little into language. He loved talking to practice his English, which was quite good, and I would occasionally get him to oblige me in practicing my Spanish. A lot of that, though, can become mentally exhausting, so the last hour or two of the trip we just stared off over the road.

In that last hour, though, we did liven up some as the truck started acting up again. About 80 miles away from Bend the truck sputtered once more and had us jolting to the side of the road. Once again, a testament to the people of Oregon, not only are they incredibly friendly and helpful, but they all seem to know everything about engine trouble. The truck crapped out three times in that last hour, and every time someone was there for us within five minutes, fixed us up, and off we went again.

I still hadn't figured out what my draw to Bend was, and realized, maybe there wasn't one, maybe it was just a draw to go this way for whatever reason. Either way, with the truck bucking us like that, particularly toward the end, and Luego having to be up at 6am the next day, I offered to skip Bend. It was a win/win for me because, sure I skip Bend now, but again, I had no idea why I was going there anyway, but Luego was actually going to Redmond and if he didn't need to stop needlessly, risking the truck dying again, than that was fine by him.

Redmond is 20 miles north of Bend, and on my way to Portland and Seattle anyway, so for me I got extra mileage out of it. He was able to take a short cut there, so by 11pm we pulled into a pay phone for him to make a call to his brother, and I thanked him and went on my way. All I had to do now was clear the city and find a place to bed down, but now the temperature had dropped to 44 degrees.

I walked a good three miles out of town to find a nice spot to bed down in. I had dug out my wool hat and hoody but was still a bit cold and tired. Finding a nice little hill with soft dirt in it I nestled into a nook and passed out for the night.

Click here for Todd's perspective.

9/6- Boise Departure

2009-09-12T11:51:00.002-07:00

Sunday was an odd day. I sat up into the wee hours of the morning editing photos and uploading them in preparation of leaving that day. Todd passed out on the floor with the cat while I did so. When I woke up the next day I was all geared up and ready to roll back out on to the road, but I had forgotten about Todd's time management skills.

Todd and I communicate relatively well. We travel well together because of that, but we obviously have very distinct methods in which we arrange ourselves. Luckily, we had the Michigan experience (as its now dubbed) to draw on as to how to employ these good communication skills we have between us. As you can see, by where I'm leading this, I did start to have my doubts that day about us traveling back together again.

I knew there were odds and ends to take care of, and I was completely happy reclining in the lap of Lynn and Dave's hospitality while I waited. Mike, on of Dave's kids visiting for the weekend, invited me to a few rounds of Halo and Ben joined in with us. As we rounded noon, word got out of a ham roast lunch in an hour which both Todd and I jumped at staying through for. I was a bit surprised to learn it was only 1pm-ish when we ate since we both rose early that morning. So all in all I was having a grand time as Todd wrapped up posts, reorganized his pack, and assessed what might possibly be missing. I don't want this to sound as if I was waiting by the door tapping my fingers impatiently.

The tinge of possible regret for our upcoming tandem Portland hitch trip seeped in after that amazing lunch, 3pm was wearing on, and Todd popped his head in on Mike and my Halo bonanza to see if I wanted to join him on a jaunt to Staples. That got me nervous. We had talked of trying to be out the door by 3pm at the latest and I was starting to see our departure drift into Monday.

Here I'd like to stop and be clear on something as far as this go, go nature of mine goes. Leaving Monday was not the problem, nor was lingering in Michigan for five weeks back in June. The problem taps back into ancient childhood issues of my Dad and his inability to get anything accomplished on time. That sense of lingering in a place, bored out of your skull, for no other reason than because he could not physically pick me up on time, leave a place on time, be anywhere on time. This was something, in regards to my traveling with Todd, that I've only come to realize now. To dive into ego and all that crap, I believe its tapping that vein from childhood of feeling a complete lack of control as to where I can go and when.

Returning back to the game room with Todd saying he's heading off to Staples to check on something, I suddenly see a four hour trip, running all over the city for a trinket or two, and watching the sunset saying, "oh well, we'll try again tomorrow". This then would conjure the aforementioned unresolved Daddy issue along with the drama of Michigan's exodus, and I would instantly find myself back in that same state of frustration and aggravation all by the workings of my own head. How's that for street side psychology?

In the end, none of this happened. I did become frustrated and no longer wanted to chill out to Halo, but was suddenly infused with an incessant need to get going now. I managed to catch myself enough to sit down with Pocketmail and write up another post for Saturday, and by the time I was done Todd was back, excited to go, and I was just the temporary dickhead who had worked myself up over anticipation of something happening rather than something actually happening. Shall we all say it together now. Sit down and shut up.

When Todd and Lynn returned he packed up his bag and Lynn suggested dropping us off down the road in Star where she was dropping Ben off. All the timing worked out perfectly. We scampered out to the front yard, took some giant family photos, and piled in the car for the ten mile ride.

Among them all I think Dave's look on his face was the most precious to me as we got out at a crossroads next to a cornfield. It was as if he hadn't really believed until now, when he was leaving us in the middle of nowhere to wander further in to this land called nowhere, that we actually were going to do this. He looked concerned, somewhat darkly amused, but most of all in throes of thawing out of a disbelief he knew might be coming but hadn't prepared for. I wish I'd gotten a picture. As we hugged and shook hands saying our "thank you"s and "good to meet you"s they both offered for me to swing by anytime I was in Boise whether with Todd or otherwise which I liked hearing.

They drove off and we walked west. We were on US-20/26 and aiming for Portland and there was a sign for it right there for us to take an inaugural picture together. About five minutes after our futzing about with pictures we started walking down the road together wondering what the comparison would be like in getting rides in tandem out here in the Northwest compared to the East Coast and Iowa. In mid-wonder a red pick up pulled up, told us to jump in the back, and hauled us off to I-84. That was quick.

Dumping us at a Flying J by the Interstate was the perfect spot for us to figure out what the hell we were doing. Todd had just gotten new boots, courtesy of Lynn and Dave, and we were expecting 10 miles of walking to test them out and hash out our plan as far as how we planned to get to Portland. Suddenly we were here in 10 minutes with no idea. The options were this:

- We could both adopt Todd's method and sit at the on ramps looking for a tandem ride on the interstate.
- We could both walk the back roads and hope for a tandem pick up off the side of the road.
- We could split up and finally have our Tortoise and the Hare Race that we conceived in Maryland where I hitch back roads walking (tortoise) and he sits at the Flying J waiting for the big haul down the interstate (hare) and see who gets to Portland first.

None of these options jumped out at us. I have become quite comfortable in my notion that I'm not a big fan of sitting and waiting for someone to get me. If no one is picking me up I at least like to see the scenery change and feel like one day I'll get somewhere if nothing else than by foot. Todd was excited to try out his boots for walking, but Oregon is a big state, and once you veer away from that highway then you've committed to quite a bit of walking if that method doesn't work out. The Race sounded like the best option, but we'd just gotten back together, we didn't want to split up so soon. So we had a coffee, thought it over, and set off down the back roads into Caldwell, ID.

It was a darn fine time. The sun was setting by now and small towns in sunsets are quite gorgeous. Even boarded up windows on a street of concrete buildings looks romanticized and adventurous when basking in the glow of a setting sun. It was finally time for us to be the intrepid adventurers we had wanted to be back east.

Entering Caldwell we learned a new method of evading the hassle of being IDed by cops. As we rounded a main street corner a cop rolled up on us and Todd let out his usual "here we go". We had been trying to figure out where US-20 went since we lost it crossing the interstate, so as he got out of the car I approached him quickly with a confused lost friendly face asking him if he knew where it connected. He didn't know, but he did know we weren't in anyway afraid to ask or evasive of him and his big blue uniform. We batted questions back and forth, ours to find 20 and his were more oriented around what we were up to. It was a friendly chat, he could see we were good folks, and because we had stopped him he didn't need to ID us to avoid looking like a fool for stopping us and doing nothing. Everybody happy.

We went through town and on the other end found US-20 and a short cut to it walking some rail lines. To get to them we had to get under a bridge, down a steep concrete incline, which was kinda fun. Then we walked under a full-ish moon for about a mile, crossing a long trestle over a moonlit river. A train also came once we'd found a dirt road to follow out, and we watched it pass with hungry eyes to hop it, but it was moving way too fast for us.

By 11pm we finally made it US-20/26 and began our trek west again. A mile on it lead us to a closed gas station we were hoping for coffee at, but instead we just took an extended break. We had a good conversation here about one of Todd's recent posts he wrote about being up in the Dakotas and Montana. It addressed the McCandless archetype, which he has become increasingly frustrated with, of the rich suburban pretender. When he wrote it he had been concerned about my reaction, because I too come from a wealthy suburb and a similarly decent home.

I bring it up now because I think its a very interesting topic. I have no major struggles in life, I know this, and oddly its taken me a long time to be comfortable with that. In fact, probably only in this year have I really become comfortable with the fact that I've had a very cushy and easy life. I know that many of these adventures in my past, these challenges I set for myself, are set to give me something to struggle over. I've always worked hard, but work has also always come to me easily. I've never gone more than two weeks looking for work and I acknowledge that that's a huge blessing I have. I also have the comfort behind me of knowing that if I completely fuck up in some way I have not only a good family that can afford to back me up and help me out, but I have several great friends who would likewise do the same. In that way I'm allowed to challenge things outside of my comfort zone because there is that irrevocable safety net that I've tried denying to myself but is undeniably there.

The interest in this for me is then, what is the best way to use this for everyone? My answer is obviously what I'm doing, but that was my hesitation in agreeing with what Todd had written. Its true, lots of rich suburban kids jaunt off to Prague, or South America, or Africa to challenge themselves under the banner of charity, but the question is always if its truly simply charity they want to give then why not help the nearby homeless in their towns, volunteer at a hospice, take care of the elderly, etc. I think almost all would admit that it is for the adventure and challenge as well, or the exposure to different cultures, but to do it while hoping they're helping too. I don't see anything wrong with any of this.

What I see as what seems to be the problem is the sophomoric attitude that tends to come with these experiences. Living in a hut serving Peace Corps for three years now suddenly makes an expert on what poverty is like, even though the true tyranny of impoverishment, in my observation, not my experience, is the hopelessness of being unable to live any other way. Again, I've always had good support, so this is coming just from what I've seen, not experienced, but I've seen this sort of impoverishment of spirit in more than simply the financially poor. I see these trappings in probably 80% of the people I come across, and it seems to be what Todd's battle is truly being waged against.

I've seen this sense of life entrapment in everyone from the extremely wealthy trapped by obligations and responsibilities to whole companies and networks, down through the upper middle class bound by mortgage payments and TV addiction, middle class mired by college loans, mortgages, and car payments, lower middle class clinging to job security and insurance hassles, and the completely broke both trapped by providing for their kids, keeping a roof over their heads, and doing their damnedest to put food on the table. Everyone seems roped in some way or another, and the ropes seem to be tied by not having the free time to even attempt to rethink a new strategy on how to take it all on. And these are all just financial in regards to work, housing, and families. There appears to be a much more vast web here under that financial skin, but that skin is thick enough to prevent so many from even considering getting through that to tackle the obstacles beyond it.

Maybe I'm just babbling on here, and as I said, this is what I'm seeing all from the side of the road, not in the hot seat. What I've noticed lately, though, is that more people these days seem to be working on reworking this dilemmas. I'm meeting a lot of people now, through rides and visits, who are at that point of being so fed up that despite that lack of time to reflect they're taking it anyway and rethinking all the bullshit bogging them down from being happy.

Maybe I should have put a rant alert on that one. I should probably reread it.

I got a little lost in my train of thought, but to get back to the crux of that conversation at the gas station my main wonder is what would be acceptable for a wealthy suburban kid to do that wouldn't be a charity vacation. I agree with my good friend Gela Bibs, its okay to fake it til you make it. To condemn those kids from going out and helping just perpetuates the class war, in my mind, and the class war is really what seems to be the ancient roots of all other social wars like racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on when you really bring them back.

When McCandless burned all his money that was done out of anger. Why didn't he give it to someone if he didn't want it? If you want to strike out of your little suburban lifestyle and give something to the world my advice would be start with the adventuring first. If you're looking to help some other culture, be it another culture in your home country or a foreign one, you probably don't know anything about the real troubles in it and it'd be best to just get there and listen first if that's what you want to do. I recommend reading about Jonathan Strange helping Wellington in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell.

Anyway, I've gone on long enough about that. We wandered on about a mile after that gas station and eventually found ourselves a nice little nest of tall weeds to crash in for the night. There was some barbed wire to cross, which tore up Todd's pants something terrible, but other than that we were snug in there safe and sound.

Click here for Todd's story.

9/5- Lex and Val, Dave and Lynn

2009-09-12T11:51:00.001-07:00

Waking in my pimped out hotel room feeling like I'm in the lap of luxury was quite nice. The plan for the day was also shaping up quite nicely. Another example of this serendipitous synchronicity was going to take place that day.

On our night out before I had told him I was bummed that I missed his dad and Val. It turns out that had I tried to make it to Bellevue to see them I quite likely would have missed them. They were coming down to Boise for the weekend and would be showing up that afternoon.

Glen had a plan for how I'd meet them so I stayed up in my room watching TV, making calls as it was a Saturday which is a phone day. Around 2pm they got into town and had no idea I was there. Glen was hosting them in the hotel as well and as a surprise brought them to my room to "show them what the rooms were like". When I opened the door they didn't place me at all, it was kind of hilarious.

I had wondered if they'd recognize me at all. Sure I'd befriended them recently on Facebook and they remembered me there, but as Val later put it, it was so out of context for me to be there and five years later it was quite understandable. Lex just stood there wondering why Glen and this guy in the room were beaming like they'd just pulled something off. Val was the one to get it first. Soon we were all sitting around catching up on what we've been up to for the past five years.

I didn't spend long with them as we all went to Glen's house to figure out where to go next. I just wanted to reconnect and say hi, but they'd just had a long trip over and were only expecting a quiet visit with their son. Glen was knacked from the night before, so while he took a nap Lex and Val drove me back to Lynn and Dave's so we could visit on the way.

I was also excited for Todd to meet them. I'd told him quite a bit about those two so when we pulled in we all had a bit of a chat out on the drive way. Lynn was home as well which was my first time meeting her, so it was a weird meeting circle out there for a few minutes.

Parting ways again we made arrangements to possibly meet up later in the year. Todd, Lynn, and I then retired to the back porch so I too could meet the last of Todd's lost family. Dave's kids were in town for the weekend and he was out with her kids, his kids, and the lot of them at the movies while we lounged and got to know one another.

After an hour or so he returned and the house erupted into the chaos that comes with 10 to 16 year olds. Dinner was served a bit later and the kids vanished to the TV and video game rooms as we four reclined.

It was a great evening. The two of them have been all over the world so we all swapped travel stories and general stories. Once they retired Todd and I stayed up a while longer making plans for the morrow.

Click here for Todd's story.

9/4- Living the Big Shot Life

2009-09-08T14:33:00.001-07:00

We woke and lounged in the house with a strange air of uncertainty among us. Here I was, the hitching friend of long lost wandering Uncle Todd, who showed up unannounced in the dead of night and our uncertainty was over the reception of my stay. Since I'd taken too long deciding whether to stop in Boise or not I didn't call Todd to inform him of my arrival until about 10pm, an hour after everyone had fallen away to sleep. Regardless, we spent the morning and early afternoon in half guarded relaxation on their back porch.

It was all for naught. Dave, Todd's brother-in-law, came home at some point to us reclining and chatting and showed no signs of feeling intruded upon whatsoever. On the contrary, he invited me to eat, have a drink, to stay the weekend, yada, yada, yada. It was a genuine and hearty welcome into his home. I declined the stay, however, because I'd gotten in touch with one of the folks I'd very much wanted to see while here.

Glen is Lex's son and lived right around the corner from Dave and Lynn's, where I was. I had found Lex by finding Glen on Facebook and he had offered to put me up in a hotel he runs here in town. When I let him know I'd arrived he made good on his offer. Dave's kids were also coming up for the weekend so I figured the house would be packed anyway, so it all seemed to work out well. Perfectly one might say.

Dave gave me a lift to the hotel, which was right at the off ramp Victor dropped me at the night before, and Glen was there, as promised, hard at work. He and I sat down and caught up for a bit, then I was debriefed about being a travel writer who was going to be writing a nice review of the place. All true if you think about it.

I checked in and dropped down on the king sized bed in my luxurious suite. It would be about an hour before Glen would be off so I zoned out to TV, shoes off and properly sprawled. When we met up again an hour later I learned of the night to come. Apparently he not only had a room for me in a swank hotel, but a "date" and spare ticket to a baseball game in town.

A quick run to his house and then we were out for drinks waiting for the girls to show up. Nina was a girl who had worked for him and was in some sort of process of trying to hook him up with her friend Peggy. When they called and were told a bit about me before their arrival Glen of course told them he'd met me on my walk cross country. This inspired the now far too familiar "is he like Forest Gump or something?"

When they arrived we had fish and chips and our mugs of beer on the table. As Glen introduced me I slowly, with an odd sense of peculiarity about me spent great time dipping my fry in the tartar sauce. In a slow speeched Southern drawl I looked up and introduced myself. "Hello, my name is Chris." Everyone wants me to be Forest, Goddamn it I'll give it to them. Glen had been prepared for this, but the look on Nina's face, a French Canadian city girl from Quebec looking for wild times at every corner, told me she was suddenly dreading this evening to come. I played my Gump bit off for a good five minutes, slowly dipping each french fry between every sentence until Glen lost it and I was internally debating how long I should play at this. The little act was a good way to kick of a really fun night.

After drinks at Iggy's we made our way to the game. Nina knew the guy seling cups of beer there so we were drinking at a buck a cup. Despite the home team getting slaughtered, Nina and I had a grand time yelling random words of encouragement much to Glen's chagrin. I'm not quite sure he realized what he was putting together that night.

He soon found out when she and I enthusiastically demanded an evening of kareoke after the game. There was a round of fireworks that we watched from the parking lot, then made our way to Sam's to continue our revelry.

Immediately upon entrance I ferreted out a song book and put in 4 requests. Glen backed me up with another. Peggy B-lined it to the shuffle board table and Nina, oddly, disappeared. Even now I have no idea what happened to her, but a nice thing about Boise is that the women are smokin' hot outdoorsy types and they were brimming in that place. Kareoke is also where I shine. Sadly, it was DJ's friends night.

I was able to crank out a rendition of Up Where We Belong to a hollering pixie blonde in the front row. Despite being the only one that I saw to get the bar shouting and a full room round of applause I was not returned to the mic that night. Glen was never called up and he had to work the next day. Alas, I returned to the hotel room alone.

Click here for Todd's story.

9/3- The Boise Express

2009-09-08T14:31:00.000-07:00

Montpelier, what a hoot. So I left the library wary that it was a bit late in the day and deep into wandering back roads near Mormon country. Wary because I've always heard it was a dead zone for hitching and figured I'd been lucky so far.

On my way out of town the landscape was stunning. I felt like I'd wandered into a Jolly Green Giant commercial the way these booming lush valleys carpeted the vast floor between two ranges on either side. Wandering along with the occasional thumb out one of the cars I flagged with it was black and white with little blue and red lights on top. When it turned around and pulled up behind me, however, I was pretty certain it wasn't for a ride.

The cop was nice enough as I chatted him up. I asked if hitching was illegal in Idaho and he said no, but policy was to check the IDs of all hitchers coming through. Sounds pretty illegal and descriminitory but I just smiled and complied to keep things friendly. I've dealt with the mob before and thats just what you do.

Five minutes later I had been approved as an American citizen and he drove off as I sent him a friendly wave goodbye. All of my niceties paid out brilliantly. Turning north again to continue my jaunt I found myself 50 feet from a truck stop. Pulling out of the place was a big ole semi and the driver inside was waving me over.

Victor had watched the whole cop thing go down, and he gave his acknowledgement as I climbed in that he knew that organization to be bullshit as well. He did concede, however, that incident had worked to my benefit. Though he'd debated giving me a ride when he passed me on the way into the truck stop if I made it there by the time he was pulling out, it clinched the deal when he saw me pass the ID check and handle the officer in a friendly manner rather than a raving road dog bearing my teeth. I chalk the whole thing up to another example of synchronicity the way it all worked out. A script couldn't have put me in that truck as fluidly as that situation.

We hit it off right away. Victor is known to be quite a chatterbox and he didn't disappoint. Some rides seem to take you to hear stories, others just to be helpful, then theres Victor's sort that want to tell stories. These sort I love, and we kicked the first 100 miles off talking about our restaurant backgrounds and the kinds of girls that make us go nuts. Victor is a self confessed horndog.

Originally when I got in I was a little uncertain as to where to tell him I wanted to go. I was aiming to reconnect with my friends Lex and Val, whom I'd met walking US-20 5 years ago and were among my favorite people to have encountered on that trip. I had recently rediscovered them on Facebook and they'd invited me to swing by if I was coming through on my travels. The problem was getting to them.

My options were to either get out in Pocatello and try to hitch through the INEL in this Mormon country. Having walked that stretch before it had taken me two and a half days of open desert under the very present watchful eye of that military installation. The other option was going to Twin Falls to go due north. This town is the first city just north of Utah and in an area that stranded Todd for days last year. I opted for Pocatello, but when we hit it an hour and a half later we were having such a good time laughing and chatting that I took Victor up on his offer to take me through to Boise. This also granted me a few more hours to debate accepting his full offer of bringing me to Portland the next day.

Now here's the strange part on Victor. As we rode along shooting the shit we got a little into my philosophies and beliefs on how the world works spiritualy. The notions of synchronicity, all the Sit Down and Shut Up stuff, and of course my ever growing faith in my guiding intuition. Victor not only whole heartedly agreed with these notions he was a Christian who followed the theological ideas, rather than the church's interpretation, claiming some important roles and predictions for the world himself. He made some wild proclaimations that I warily found fascinating, then lowered his sunglasses to show me his yellow eyes.

It was like something out of those mythologically laden modern road tales; Tale of the Trucker with Yellow Eyes. Telling people about this afterward enlightened me to the assumption that he may have liver problems of which a symptom is having yellow eyes where the white would normally be. No, this guy's irises were yellow rimmed with red. It was pretty trippy.

In the end I opted to get out in Boise. As efficient and fun a ride it would have been to get all the way to Portland four days after leaving Denver, I also could have flown to Seattle and been there in a few hours from leaving Denver. I'd passed the supposed Dead Zone, Todd was in Boise at his sister's, and there were a few others I also was excited to see that I'd met on my previous walk. I've always liked Boise anyway.

Victor dropped me on the off ramp in Eagle, a suburb of Boise and we bid our goodbyes. We exchanged numbers as well and both figured we hadn't seen the last of each other. From there I was on the phone to Todd and he guided me in the three miles to his sisters in the dead of night.

It was quite a late hour by the time I walked into this very swanky neighborhood, dirty, stinky, and with a big pack on my back. It was a geek fest when Todd welcomed me into his garage guest room and we lounged about the couches with sodas catching each other up on our many tales from the past two weeks.