An intentionally arranged series of words

By Zachary Kyle Elmblad

The Long Road Home

Scribd Pre-release edition

1
 Copyright 2010 by The New Scum Productions

http://www.thenewscum.org

This is the free version, which I have sent out to be professionally

edited prior to mass-market release. It is ridden with grammatical

errors, and it will be different than the printed version. I'm into

open-source, open-culture, and open-minds; so please read this- and if

you like it, visit thenewscum.org and buy it when it becomes

available! Some rights reserved, please visit thenewscum.org for more

information and other works by the same author.

This book is dedicated to and written for the people I’ve met and

the times I’ve cherished with them. Good and bad. You yourself and

the people you choose to keep around you are the only things in this

world worth fighting for.

2
3
Preamble

Part One – The Past

Chapter One – The Doldrums

Chapter Two – California

Chapter Three – The Open Road

Chapter Four – Montana

Chapter Five- The Fall of Rome

Chapter Six – History

Chapter Seven - Transgression

Chapter Eight – Let’s all go to the Apocalypse

Part Two – The Present

Chapter Nine – I Make Burritos for a Living

Chapter Ten – A Renaissance man

Chapter Eleven - Love

Chapter Twelve – A Citizen of the World

Chapter Thirteen – A Life Raft on Stupid Sea

Chapter Fourteen – When the Lights go out in New York City

Chapter Fifteen – A Destination

Chapter Sixteen – The Long Road Home

4
 Preamble

Remembering things is really fucking hard sometimes. Take, for

example, remembering to set your alarm clock, remembering your

parent’s anniversary, or remembering that although you may sometimes

feel invincible under the influence of alcohol; you are not actually

God, nor Jesus. Deities are figments of mankind's imagination;

stories for us to remember in times of trial, in times of wonder. You

are not a god, gods exist for humans to look up to and fear.

I’m totally in love with myself because I’m the only one that I

can ultimately control, and at a minimum because I know I can get away

with it. Egoism is a necessary asset. It's nothing close to a bad

decision, and it can definitely benefit you to think about yourself

every once in a while. I watch people make bad decisions all the

time. Not like driving home from the bar, not like snorting a line of

cocaine from the toilet of a bar, but more like spending every day at

the bar because they can’t force it within themselves to actually

attempt a sober conversation with someone who is just as smart as they

are. Wasting their time on a cheap escape when the real answers are

staring them right in the face. Competing with one another, trying to

decide who's the better man. I’m not afraid of competition, as long

as I know I can win. That’s the thin razor line we balance on when

we’re trying to actually relate to each other. Especially while

intoxicated. Remembering is a competition for truth.

Remembering, for me, came in the form of writing a sappy novel

about my life called Whatever Happens, Happens. I laughed, I cried, I

5
beat dead horses with sarcasm and the whimsical wallowing in self pity

of a hopeless romantic teenager. It still hasn't sold a single copy.

What I remembered, was that I had become an egotistical, emotionless,

vain, and debauched ball of potential energy yearning to become

kinetic – and I didn’t really mind that much at all. After all,

that’s what I had asked for. I just didn’t expect it to be what

actually happened. I always figured someone or something would just

swoop in and “save” me. That’s how most of those stories end. Either

you find love, you find religion, or you find the bottom of a bottle.

I found the bottle. I fear in some abstract way that alcohol may

actually be my savior some day, which may or may not be laudable.

If you think you’re right, and people always tell you that you’re

right; you probably are. There is such a thing as right and wrong,

but it’s only a personal choice rooted in a personal perspective.

Right an wrong are not things, but ideas. The external interpretation

may be to the contrary, but as long as what you’re doing and thinking

is right for you, and you can decide it for yourself in the context of

you as a part of “them”- you’re never going to fall back down.

There’s a huge amount of idiots around this wonderful planet of

ours, and it’s really hard to get away from them sometimes. I’d be

willing to bet that it makes you sick to you stomach to go out in

public sometimes, because it sure makes my blood boil. You can't get

a break from them, even just for a second.

The asshole that cuts you off on the highway, the shit-head

taking your order at a fast food restaurant, the person that tries to

6
tell you how to raise your kids, the bum you give a dollar and asks

you for a five, the degenerates that tag gang signs on your business

bathroom walls. They’re everywhere, sucking up our precious oxygen,

and living for free for being worthless, garbage human beings that

we're stuck taking care of out of some society-induced sympathetic

illusion.

I can’t take it anymore, and I won’t let my wonderful world get

torn down by the people that don’t deserve to live in it. I invite

you to take a journey with me down a road you may never have traveled.

It’s a long road out, and a long road home, but in the end- it’s

better to have gone somewhere than nowhere at all.

7
Part One

The Past

8
 Chapter One – The Doldrums

So, I worked at this place called The Big Burrito. Pathetic, I

know, but you really can't make these things up. They just seem to

happen. After all, you have to make money doing something if you want

to eat. After nearly eight years of my life spent being a slave to

burrito manufacturing; I hate the service industry, I hate the smell

of fryer grease, and I most especially hate being stuck adrift in this

horrible sea of idiots encroaching on my brains like a zombie attack.

Sometimes it seems like a joke. I don't even like Mexican food. It

gives me heartburn. I’m not talking about hating the people I work

with, I like them – we're all working for the weekend, but the hate

lies along the lines of people queued up in front of me like cattle

waiting for slaughter by brain spike. They don't even seem real.

They're caricatures of people, like bots in a first-person shooter.

I don’t feel that there is anything more indicative of your

mental capacity than how you order at a restaurant. It does not take

a rocket scientist to order food. If you walk in and start reading

the menu out loud to no one in particular- we will not assume you are

talking to us, nor will we engage you in conversation. You get one

chance for eye contact, and if it doesn’t happen we will not look you

in the eyes, because you have no respect for us. If you don’t respect

me, I have absolutely no reason whatsoever to respect you. I owe you

nothing. I want nothing from you, but you want something from me -

your dinner. Did you forget? Which one of us has the power position

9
in this struggle? We have things you want, you pay us for the

pleasure of having them- this is how business works. You trade money

for goods and services. This is America, and this system has done us

well for hundreds of years. Thank you for ruining that.

If you walk right up to the counter and start demanding things

without a traditional conversation-starting word like “Hello,” “Good

Morning,” or even a casual “What’s up?”, I will not acknowledge your

presence. How can you do that and expect a pleasant response?

Interpersonal dialog begins with a salutation. We're supposed to

learn that in pre-school. You do not start a conversation with

someone you don’t know with “Lemme git one of dem…” That’s a dead

giveaway that you did not graduate high school. You never got the

“look the principal in the eye when he gives you your diploma, because

that’s how we show respect” speech either, because you were too busy

cooking up meth with your sex slave sister. Or maybe watching a

football game, either way- it was time well wasted. So I'm an

asshole, huh? Tell me something I don't know, and while you're at it,

order your fucking burrito.

I can see everything. Do you think we're blind? Deaf? Dumb?

We hear what you people talk about on your cell phones while we're

patiently waiting for you to order your cholesterol-ridden multiple-

thousand-calorie burrito. It’s easy to order food while on the cell

phone. You say “hold on one second so I can order food,” look me in

the eye, say hello and order like a human being that can speak the

language of an adult.

10
 If it is the first time that you have been at a restaurant, then

by all means take a moment to browse the menu, we're here for your

grazing after all. In fact, most menus even list commonly asked

questions like “what's in this?”, “how much does that cost?”, or “dat

cuh wit unyuns?” One minute, max. It’s a menu, you have to have seen

one before. It's there to let you know what we have and how much it

costs. Read it. If it’s Chinese food, don’t ask for a burger. If

it’s a pizza place, they don’t have burritos. You are all so god

damned stupid it makes me physically ill. It actually hurts. Where

did common sense go? Where did literacy go? How can you be so stupid

in a world that made everyone else so smart? Where did the rest of us

go wrong by not teaching you? When did you go wrong and turn into a

fucking moron? Was there a switch involved? Can we flip it back?

I’m not saying every single person I pass on the street is an

idiot, far from it, although it certainly feels that way sometimes. I

have lots of friends, you know, other people that don't drool on

themselves. They're nice enough, I guess. I know they have friends

that are equal to or above my intelligence. That’s a good thing. We

live in a society. That’s what I think makes it so hard for some of

these people. There’s just too many of us. Way, way, way too many.

I first came to realize all of this one day when I was, you

guessed it, slaving away at Big Burrito. I got in an ideological

fight over the cost of her tostada. As you may know, a tostada is a

round, flat, fried corn tortilla topped with various Mexican food

ingredients of your discretion. You can argue with me until you’re

11
blue in the face about whether or not the tostada is Mexican,

American, Texan, or a mere corporate creation. As far as I cared, it

cost $1.99, plus 6% Michigan sales tax, which comes to a whopping

$2.11 2007 USD. That’s roughly 35% of one hour’s worth of work at

minimum wage in Michigan, which we’ll say was $7.00 per hour. That

means that this tostada would have cost exactly 20 minutes of work at

a pet cemetery shoveling dirt and dog brains.

An African American woman in designer clothing walks into my

restaurant upon getting out of her decked out Lexus. She could have

been anyone, with any face. I've noticed that no racial or socio-

economic distinction dictates an idiot-free environment. A rich black

bitch. Are you offended? She orders a chicken tostada with no

extras. Hot sauce on the side. Easy. Should take less than a

minute.

“That will be exactly two dollars and eleven cents,” I say, with

my pleasantly high pitched “I’m friendly to everybody that tips me”

voice. She says nothing, chomps loudly on gum, and whips out the

Prada bag. She digs through it, cracking saliva bubbles of gum the

whole time until she pulls out a brand new touchscreen phone. Way

back when a touchscreen phone was the type of thing people like me

looked at and went “Holy shit! That thing is capable of multi-point

touch? When the hell did that hit the market?!” She half drops, half

sets it on the counter like a useless and invaluable paperweight.

Pulls out the matching Prada wallet- same ugly print as her purse. I

hope it gets stolen. Finds an Abe, and a Washington. She tosses the

12
bills on the counter, although my hand is open, face up, and less than

a foot away from her sunglasses-indoors and faraway gaze. I looked

at the woman, puzzled, saying “out of… six?!”

“Well, I went to college, apparently you didn’t.”

That was her response. She said it. She said that, after she

handed me six bucks for a $2.11 bill. I couldn’t believe she had

actually said it. I may be a college dropout, but I’m no rube. I

know there’s no sensible reason to pay a $2.11 bill with six even.

Maybe three one dollar bills. Maybe a five and eleven cents, but no

way in hell should there be six dollars in my hand. No rational

possibility of the event. Maybe eight, now that would have made even

just a little bit of sense, in a world one year later where she could

trade the old five in for a new one with a bright purple numeral on

the back and a spiffed-up color background for good old ironic Abraham

Lincoln, great sayer of the Emancipation Proclamation. Like I said,

she was black- but she could have been anyone. It's happened just

like this a thousand untold times to a thousand cashiers every minute

of every day in every country on Earth. Common sense, people. If you

make a mistake, just admit it.

Anyway, this bitch looks at me like I am the great Satan, and

proceeds to explain to me exactly how she graduated with a degree in

accounting from MSU, and she can tell that I don’t know a god damned

thing considering I’m employed at a place called “the Big Burrito.”

13
 I typed $6.00 into the computer system I programmed, with my own

self-attained set of knowledge- no college involved. What’s the

change? $3.89. There are no computational errors on machine, or in my

head, is that correct? Get a calculator, do it in your head, whatever

you've got to do- the math is right. 2.11 subtracted from 6.00,

according to the mathematics that I know and understand, leaves a sum

of 3.89. Allow me to check my own calculator… 6.00… - … 2.11… =…

3.89. Ok. I am not hallucinating. She holds out her hand, like I

had- but I drop the change and the bills in front of her. Like she

had to me, minutes ago.

This bitch says “I want to talk to your manager.” I now assume I

have the upper hand. I smile, wryly, and turn around, walk five paces

and about-face. I walk forward and look her in the eye again. I put

my hand forward and say “Zachary Elmblad, General Manager. How can I

help you, ma’am?” coy as a fucking virginal and unblemished fit-for-

sacrifice, totally white lamb.

This woman is infuriated. By this time, her tostada is finished.

I calmly bag it, add the requested side of hot salsa, and hand it

over. I smile, wryly again, and say “here you are, miss, all set- hot

sauce and all,” and nothing else.

She stares vacantly from beyond the designer shades. I maintain

my smile. Not a word is spoken as she turns around and marches

angrily back to the Lexus, pulls back the convertible top and drives

off post-haste with an angry and crudely dumb look on her face. I

14
knew what was coming. I had mouthed off to the wrong people at work

before, and I had accepted the consequences.

I fucking refuse to be treated unfairly. What better example

than some bitch black lady to epitomize my total hatred towards what

the human race has become. You want to talk about being mistreated?

Yeah, so your mom's mom's mom's dad's mom was a slave way back in

fucking 1886 when germs were demons. Let me play my violin while you

sing the world's saddest song for shit that happened 200 years before

I was a one-year-old, diaper-shitting, ground-crawler. I didn't do

it, ok Lady? I am a fucking burrito slave, OK?

But.

I.

Am.

Not.

A.

Fucking.

Racist.

I won’t accept the racial injustice of the past as an excuse for

someone who accuses me of being a racist simply because I could

perform simple mathematical tasks in a superior manner to her after

four, no five, years in a college I couldn't dream of affording. Not

only was I accused of being Racist, but sexist as well. Do read on.

15
 I was working the night shift. Wednesday night. That meant I

wandered in around six at night or so, sometime late in the summer of

another year I've since repressed. The foul year of our lord, MMVII.

Any hope of leaving less than eleven hours from then was a lost cause.

Any hope of having a meal less than eleven hours from then was a lost

cause. Any hope of seeing a friendly face or a cigarette in the next

eleven hours was a lost cause. I was beginning to think my hopeless

fucking life was a lost cause. I worked alone up front helping

customers, with two very nice but tragically English-inept Mexican

matriarchs cooking up the savory vittles in the back.

I figure it was about eleven o’clock in the evening when she

pulled up. Big Burrito closed at four in the morning. I wasn't even

halfway through my shift yet. There’s no one to talk to at that place

with a word worth hearing coming out of their mouths at that time of

night. I’m a well trained restaurateur, but this was a dilemma-ridden

situation from the start. I finally got a second to sit down, and I

sparked up a delicious Camel Light to take the woes away. Not two

puffs in and her fucking Lexus speeds up as she slams on the brakes

nearly missing the curb in the process. I knew what was coming. It

didn’t matter that she was black. Or “African-American.” That still

seems to matter to people for some reason. I wouldn’t have given a

fuck if she was a Southeast-Asian burn-victim paraplegic ex-nun post-

op tranny. She interrupted my cigarette happy time, which blows.

You know, maybe I was an asshole to that lady- but I don’t think

it matters. I am who I am, and she is who she is. Anyway, I got

16
woken up at eight in the morning the next day (Thursday.) It’s the

boss. The owner. I hear a familiar black woman screaming in the

background, while he’s gulping out “Dude, Zach, this lady is screaming

at me about how you’re a racist, sexist, man-pig that insulted her

intelligence last night and she says you discriminated against her

because she was black, and because she was a woman- and she says she’s

going to call the Better Business Bureau if you don’t call her and

apologize. I can’t have that happen, will you please do this for me?”

I was suddenly struck with a conflict of interest. I had to work

in less than eight hours after working a twelve hour shift the last

however many days in a row- it doesn't matter. I had been awoken

after three hours of sleep to be called a racist woman-hater while

wandering around the living room of my parent’s house in my boxers. I

love chicks, of any race, so long as they put out and don't piss me

off. I'm no better than the rest of you. I was not only confused,

but I was beginning to become defensive. I said, “Oh, that bitch.” as

I slowly remembered the previous evening's interchange.

He laughs, albeit very quietly. He knew what she was doing, but

what could he do about it? Mouth off to her like I had supposedly

done and risk having her actually call the better business bureau?

She had left now, with her phone number on a piece of paper and a

standing threat to inform the “authorities,” if there really even is

such a thing. He was beside himself. He says “you’d better call her

right now and apologize.“

17
 I said, “I really don’t feel comfortable doing that. I feel like

she should apologize to me. I’m not a racist. Why would I work for

you if I was a racist? 66% of the crew that worked last night was a

different race than me. That makes me the minority in this

situation.” That makes one black woman, two Mexicans, and one white

guy that didn’t make nearly enough money to be accused of being a

racist when that word carries such a horrible stigma. Let alone a

lady-loving guy being called a man-pig.

I called her. I fucking did it; I'm not satan. I sucked it up.

I took one for the team, even though altruism disgusts me.

“Hello.”

“Hi, this is Zach from the Big Burrito.”

“Yeah, I’ve been waiting.”

“Marty gave me your number.”

“Yeah, I’ve been waiting, and you’d better have something to say to me

considering what you put me through last night”

“I’m sorry. I just wanted to smoke a cigarette, and I just didn’t

understand why you gave me six dollars for something that cost less

than three, and I couldn’t figure it out. I was confused.”

“That’s not what this is about. You had an attitude with me, and you

need to lose it. I don’t think your apology is sincere.”

18
 I was throwing things across the room at this point, and biting

on a bandana I found in the corner in order to keep from screaming

every single racial epithet I could think of at this woman, if only

to make there be a reason for her to be laying into me with such

voracity. I took a deep breath, counted very fast in my head,

backward from ten to one. I was trying very, very, hard not to become

a nuclear bomb of bigotted rage. That shit's inhumane. No need for

it.

“I swear to god [I figured I'd bring him in for good measure], ma’am,

I meant no offense, I am sin-cere.”

“I will accept your apology, but don’t ever insult someone because of

their race or gender again, or I will find you”

Seriously. This happened to me. I am not telling you a lie. I

have a notebook with this woman’s telephone number in it. I will

fight this to the grave. I felt like I busted up this woman’s

chiffarobe and never found Atticus Finch. Oh well, damned if you do,

damned if you don’t. Right?

I am not a racist. There really shouldn’t even be such a thing

anymore. There really shouldn’t even be a notion of “race.” To

everyone these days, you’re nothing but a screen name with a bunch of

numbers after it and a weird character in it that no one can name that

looks like a little “a” with a circle around it. “Commercial At” is

the technical term. What a sham. Commercialspeak. Orwell should be

proud of us. You don’t have a race, you have an ethnic background.

19
Euphemism. You select it from a drop-down list so that you can be

some kind of fucking statistic in our own 1984 come trickling down

twenty-some years late because of Reaganomics or something like that.

Racism was for the idiot drunks in the south that burnt crosses

in Martin Luther King Jr.’s lawn. I’m not one of them, I don’t think

like them, and I am insulted to have been accused of being like them.

I read about the civil rights movement in a textbook. I didn’t live

through it, my parents did, and they were only like eight years old

when Martin Luther King Jr. got shot. I grew up with people of all

races in my classrooms, and I never even looked at them as anything

but other human beings, which they are, and always were, until you

idiot media fucks told me think otherwise. Imposed diversity leads to

racial disparity.

These are the problems we face every day. Sometimes, we don’t

even know where to place our hate- so we have to take it out on those

who least deserve it. In my case, it was a rich black lady with

political clout that I mouthed off to because she made a dumb mistake

and I’m addicted to nicotine. In her case, she had to deal with some

long haired, pieced-eared white kid with a chip on his shoulder at the

burrito place when she was only trying to get a midnight snack. What-

EVER. So I'm a racist, then. Fuck you, R. J. Reynolds. Sexist?

You've all been nothing but cold and ruthless bitches to me thus far,

save for my mother the saint of all saints.

As far as a sexist, or a racist- I guess maybe some people might

think I am. I don’t have a problem with women, I don’t have a problem

20
with blacks, I don’t have a problem with Mexicans, Jews, Chinese,

Arabs, Japanese, Europeans, Africans, Liberals, Democrats,

Republicans, oil tycoons, demagogues, kings, paupers, bums, nobody,

and nothing. I've met them all, save the kings and tycoons, but I

arrive at a median demographic. What I have a problem with is Idiots,

plain and simple. There is a clear-cut difference. Race and socio-

economic strata do not affect your propensity to become a dumb-fuck.

But if you are a dumb-fuck, and I call you out on it- don’t call me a

racist, you’re just being stupid again.

Either way, we both underestimated each other, and we both over-

reacted. Ok, so which one of us is wrong? I don’t even think society

is equipped to judge which one of us is wrong. We’re all morally

bankrupt by now, right? If they thought Babylon was bad, I’d love to

see those Bible assholes take a walk down the Vegas strip and not blow

a line of coke and get their dick sucked by a stripper.

This is America. Anything goes here. This is the land of the

brave. The land of the free. The land of the burgers and fries. The

land of the “lets grab up all the oil we can at the end of the

twentieth century and fuck over our children before we make them cure

our Cancer and AIDS for us.” The land of innocent until proven guilty

in a court of law by a jury of your peers. The land of live free or

die, and the land of “we the people.”

Yeah, this is my big thank you to you, prick generation of dog

fucking swine that gave us the internet, but neglected to take care of

the wars, famines, poverty, and gigantic debt. Lazy self-serving

21
bastards, the lot. It’s the year 2008, I’m twenty-three years old,

and I am fucking angry. Economic Oil dependency, nuclear

proliferation, the Credit Crunch, the Mortgage Crisis, the doubling of

gas prices in four years, impossible to pay medical bills, robots

replacing factory workers, this is what we get to deal with. Fuck

you, you never had to worry about getting your fucking identity

stolen. How is that even possible?

I get so mad sometimes. I know no one could have seen these

things coming at us. I just recently started paying attention to the

news again, for one reason or another. The world has gotten really

fucked up. All my friends have gotten really fucked up, and society

has gotten really fucked up. Am I just a pseudo-adult in a drug haze,

or is there something more going on?

I also spend way too much time drinking. I am an alcoholic. I

feel it rather suits me. It’s in my blood. I’m not bad yet, but we

all say that. Give me a few years. The difference, however, is I

have finally accepted my fate. My fate is to have to become what I

am. I finally found out what it was. I have to be one of the people

who tries to band together with the other ones that haven’t been

struck drooling stupid over reality television and facebook. Yeah, I

have one. Social media is a new part of our cultural identity that we

have barely even scraped the implications of.

I’m immune to your sickness. Your stupidity sickness. It’s all

around me, but I can’t seem to catch it. I’m so happy! To think I’d

be able to stay alert throughout these years of alcohol and drug

22
abuse. Is it, now this may be a long shot, because those things don’t

make you stupid? I know I’m going out on a limb here, but for once in

our lives, can we accept the fact that stupid people make stupid

choices and end up ruining everyone else’s fun? Can we accept this?

Before I start spouting off on eugenics, I’ll step off my soapbox

for a moment and accept that maybe I’m being too judgmental. Ok,

we’ll give it a shot. Have I made mistakes? Yes, many. Have I

learned from them? For the most part, yes. Have I endangered any

other person but myself in making a bad decision? Rarely. Why is it,

then, that even though I regress at times and may lose sight of common

sense at times, that in no way makes me stupid? Is it a subjectivity

thing?

Is there a way to find the locus of human stupidity? Is there a

way to define it? What is it to be stupid? Why is it that some

people can just make you want to grind your teeth while smashing their

face against a brick wall? What is it that separates us “Normal”

people from them, the “Idiot fucks?”

A long time ago, I set out to try and answer my questions. My

own personal metaphysical questions. The questions that most people

equate to “do I really want to marry this girl?” or “what is the

meaning of life?” These are stupid questions with easy answers. No,

and nothing. One wrong answer will leave you with half your money

gone, the other will leave you with half your useful years gone. Most

people pick one of these two things, in one way or another. I don’t

like being limited to two options. My metaphysical questions are more

23
along the lines of “how in the living fuck can these people get out of

bed in the morning? What keeps them going? How do they feel

satisfaction in their lives? What is the source of this superficial

self fulfilling prophecy that people at bars and in restaurants refer

to as “normal?”

What the fuck is normal?

Really.

I seriously don’t know. Hasn’t “normal” become sitting around

yelling at the television, re-inventing yourself, eating fast food,

and resting in the comfort of our little white picket fence financial

disasters? What’s happened to us? Did we become morally bankrupt

after we started seeing horses fucking chicks in the ass on the

internet? Or were we, perhaps, morally bankrupt from the start

because we never defined what it is to be a human being? We stopped

with Aristotle. What is the good life? We never covered that. We

wanted the money, we wanted the hot chicks, we wanted the fancy toys,

and we wanted to fight for them. So that’s what we all did, and now

we have to pay for it. And it’s not my fault, It’s your fucking

fault. None of us ever asked to be put on this planet, we were just

kind of ejected out from your woman parts in a horror show of bloody

goop and screaming. It wasn’t a choice. And then they make smoking

illegal in the bar. I hate this place. I hate this planet, and I

hate every idiot fuck on it. Fuck you.

24
 Chapter Two – California

I still wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do with my life until

I went to California for the first time. Is that cliché? For me, it

happened a lot differently than a lot of the people that find their

calling out there in the wild west. I didn’t run away to California.

I was only there for like four days. I didn’t take the actor route, I

didn’t take the hippie route, I didn’t take the escape to the palm

trees and traffic route, hell I didn’t even intend on taking the

writer route at that time, but here I am typing away none the less. I

took the Kerouac/Climber strategy. Why go? Because it's there.

Anyway, I woke up in Redwood National Forest, which is probably

one of the coolest places I’ve ever woken up in. Aside from that one

time I woke up in a big bed with five chicks, a broken phone, and an

empty fifth of Jack Daniels. That was pretty sweet. It was late

winter, early spring, depending on how pessimistic you are. I’ll

settle for late winter. Kevin wakes me up by punching me in the leg.

He mumbles something I didn’t hear, and I realize we’re stopped, so I

grab the flashlight to go take a leak. Click. Flashlight shines at a

really, really big tree trunk. At the same time I figured out where

we were, the beam instinctively rose to the tops of the trees. I

stood in utter disbelief. A year prior, I had been standing at the

mouth of the Grand Canyon, wondering if I would ever see anything as

amazing ever again. Here I was looking right at it.

25
 Kevin has been my friend since I was seven years old, in second

grade when I moved to Kalamazoo. His first words to me, and I will

never forget, were “hey kid, want to join our club?” Other than my

family, no person on Earth has known me longer than Kevin. Sometimes

I feel sorry for him because I’m so crazy. Although our paths have

separated a few times since that day in Mrs. Enderson’s second grade

classroom, we’ve always managed to stay in touch. Kevin and I took it

upon ourselves to go adventuring in the way only we knew how. Enter

the American road trip psychodrama. Zachary Kyle “Kerouac” Elmblad.

This was right before gas prices started getting to be such a wreck on

our economy that you couldn’t turn on a form of mass media without

hearing about it.

We took two major trips. The first in 2007, which took us

through the southern half of the United States to the grand finale of

Las Vegas, and a second in 2008 which took us West by Northwest to the

root hub of the modern idiocracy, California itself. I’m not going to

take my California-bashing much further, because I think California is

a beautiful piece of Land. Until you hit San Francisco.

We had to leave town. We had to escape. That much was clear.

We spent the last few months of 2006 and the first half of 2007

sucking down cigarettes in a twenty-four hour coffee shop in Kalamazoo

called Fourth Coast. It’s a dive of a joint, and I’ve spent enough

time in there to notice how much of a culture-fuck it is in that

place. It’s near downtown, in the part of Kalamazoo now co-occupied

26
by the dregs of society and college students. For a while, I lived

down the street.

As likely as you are to see a drunken college fucker wandering

around, you will see the bum stumbling down the road talking about an

imaginary Asian hooker he fucked in the bushes last night sipping his

cheap vodka through a missing-tooth gap in his crooked smile. I see

them all. The transvestite with a fresh surgically-created vagina

hopelessly trying to attract a man. Fat middle-aged washout with

licorice in his pocket picks at his sweaty armpit before approaching a

sixteen year-old girl smoking cigarettes and wiping ashes off her

vinyl skirt to give her a piece. She smiles, puts the candy in her

purse “for later.” I always wondered if it was drugged or ridden with

razors. He’s there all the time. A stranger with candy. In real

life.

There’s the chick against the back wall wearing too much

patchouli and stinking up the place. The text-book alternateen

flipping through some modern vernacular bible translation and Chicken

Soup for the Teenage Soul. There’s the strung out couple arguing

about the direction of their relationship at the one lonely table

across the room near the payphone that doesn’t work. The punky

looking blonde with patches all over her messenger bag, and gagues in

her ears nodding her head to the garage band on the radio and writing

in a notebook. There’s a rapper making beats with an MPC and some

cheap over ear headphones nodding his head and furiously punching

buttons. There’s a greasy dude with tattoos all over his face sucking

27
down hand rolled cigs at a rate that would put me to shame. The

businessmen come in early for a cup of coffee and a copy of USA Today.

The college kids study for their exams and show each other flashcards

at the bar. A hipster mac user uses photo shop filters and checks out

his hair in a pocket mirror. The poor baristas split their tips and

complain about how much their laptops cost them.

I always sit in the corner seat, the one with the windows all

around it. It's easy to conceal the Jager you're pouring into the

coffee. That spot that’s always taken unless you show up at four in

the morning. It’d been eight cups of black coffee, a pint of Jager,

twelve hours since I started working on my book, and forty eight hours

since I’d last been asleep. Ah, the life of an artist. Kevin strolls

in, taking the seat across from me. Transvestite waves hello. The

barista knows us by name, He’s Ben, one of my ex-girlfriend’s best

friend’s ex-boyfriends. That’s life in Kalamazoo. It starts in high

school and never ends. You’re always running into people you know.

We had to get out! We planned our first road trip so well. We

worried about how much time it’d take to get to each place, tried to

budget out the gas exactly, talked about what kind of food we’d bring,

and how much time we'd spend at each stop. Where we wanted to go,

what we wanted to see. It’s the first time I realized how big this

country was. I’d been to Egypt, but never really got a taste for the

vastness of what three thousand miles actually was. When you’re

flying over the Atlantic Ocean, you don’t get much of an appreciation

for how humongous some of these spaces are. I’m not even going to

28
bother trying to put into words the majesty of some of the scenic

roadside stops along the road in America. This place is absolutely

beautiful.

The Redwood National Forest rests just shy of Oregon at the

Northwesternmost point of California. Away from all the people. That

place is magical. The green of the land leaks out into the road as

nature makes one last vain attempt at getting rid of our dominance.

The Pacific Ocean smacks up against the rocks with the giant old

growth trees in the background. We haven’t managed to fuck that place

up yet.

We were only there for two days. It didn’t matter, all it took

was ten minutes on a rock watching the waves come in for me to make it

all click. There it was, right in front of my face. The answer to

all of my problems. I was in some totally foreign place to me,

digging the fuck out of the scenery, pocket full of cash, a thousand

some miles behind me, and several days away from home.

I finally knew what I wanted from life. I remembered. I just

wanted to see everything I could possibly see. I can keep going with

this charade of burritos and button pressing I call a life if I can

keep seeing things like that. I can keep up with the constant demand

of whatever thankless job I’m performing if I can sit on a rock and

stare at the ocean for two hours every year. I can get through

whatever problems life throws at me if I can just know that I can be

walking the streets of New York City in less than a day. I can keep

going if I know I can escape.

29
 I knew right then and there that I could never go wrong. As long

as I kept moving forward, and as long as I always remembered that I

can always escape. I may not always have the money, but I will still

be able to keep going just knowing that the chance for me to see

something new is out there. I will never be happy just sitting in

front of a T.V. waiting for a phone call. I may as well just be

sitting there and waiting to die.

I’m frustrated with what society asks us to deal with. I’m

frustrated with the way people chose to approach their defiance. I’m

frustrated with everything I see around me, but at least I know that

there’s a rock in Northern California where I never had a worry in the

world. I still know there’s a cave in eastern Kentucky that’s really,

really, quiet inside, about a mile back. I still long for the

comfortable anonymity of a large urban sprawl. I still know that

there are millions of things for me to see and hear about in this

life, and I can get up in the morning and be at peace with the fact

that I’m on this planet.

I do not want all of these idiots ruining it for me. I’m not a

preachy hippie. I’m not an environmentalist. In fact, I really don’t

want to be an anything-ist. I just want to keep seeing things like

the Redwood National Forest kept away from the reaches of spaced out

shit heads that will fuck it up for the rest of us. I want to be

alive. I want to access all this world has to offer me, and these

people keep getting in my way.

30
 Maybe this is a clue. It’s a step on the road to understanding

the differences between myself, the people I keep as company, and all

of my other varied Earthly co-inhabitants. Could it be that we’re all

just looking to escape everybody else for just a second? That doesn’t

explain why some people are idiot fucks, but it’s going to get us

started. I can’t assume that everyone should think like me. That’s

out of line. I want you all to listen to me very carefully, because I

think I might be on to something.

It starts here. We’re all stuck on this fucking rock together.

It’s getting more and more crowded, and it’s getting harder and harder

to escape. We’ve gotten a good start at destroying this rock,

especially in places where there happens to be a lot of us, or there’s

something we want. I’m not just talking about obvious things like the

trees, the oil, the water, and the ozone layer. I’m also talking

about the other things. We robbed all the graves of our ancestors.

We charge money to look at the public buildings of Greece, the

Pyramids, or pretty much anything we can throw a value on. Tickets to

a funeral, right? Not that I disagree with people making money, not

at all. Not that I believe artists and architects should create

things without being compensated for it somehow, not at all. Not that

I even really disagree with grave robbing.

We have commoditized everything that we could for so long. Now

that we have the Internet, all of that has been blown to bits. Art,

Music, Literature, News, Socialization- it’s all there, and it’s all

free. You can’t keep us away from it anymore. It’s over. There are

31
like six something billion people in the world this year, and now

we’ve all got a reasonable chance of talking to pretty much anyone

else on the planet. And we’ve all come to the consensus that

something is terribly wrong.

Some agree more than others, but I hope that everyone can see the

signs. In the past, we’ve always had something to blame for our

problems. Think all the way back. Egyptians blamed the gods. Greeks

blamed each other. Romans blamed pirates and rival nations.

Europeans blamed fellow land-owners for about a thousand years, and

then everyone started arguing back and forth until we all had the

United States or Russia to blame, depending on which side of the

argument sea-fence you were on. Now we have China and India knocking

on the door, the Middle east pointing nukes at each other, Europe

uniting into some kind of nation conglomerate-slash-commune called the

European Union, settlements on Antarctica, and population crisis in,

well, just about everywhere except the polar caps. South Americans

feeding the drug abuse of the United States, Japan covered in

concrete, hell we’re even driving over ice roads in Canada to get

supplies out to the idiot fucks up there.

Why? We just kept running away from each other until there was

nowhere to run, and nothing but people everywhere. Then we started

building up walls and roads so we could have little horse-driven

carriages, then cars to drive in and avoid people and homes and

businesses so we could limit which people we ran into most of the

time. Then we stopped talking to each other accidentally. Then we

32
all started to develop regional differences, and started to fear each

other. Then we started having all sorts of differences, and invented

free speech to cover all the brilliant new ideas we were coming up

with. Unfortunately, that let the Idiots have free speech too. Then

guns got involved, and the guns got really big. The guns turned into

rockets. The rockets turned into nuclear weapons. Then everyone got

them, and here we are. Totally fucked.

Traditionally, the people that were smart and built things were

kept separate from the people who worked and made things happen. Not

until these last few centuries has man been able to both be smart, and

get things done. Power is not placed through a crown to a teenager in

a ring kissing ceremony with swords anymore. Power is given to a

leader, if not by the people themselves, then by the graciousness of

their begrudged agreement. The source of the power can be

questionable, but even the inner ranks of a corrupt administration can

be counted on to act corruptly. People need to be predictable

sometimes. We can’t all break the mold all the time. That’s what

normal is.

So maybe being normal could be as abstract as not being normal.

Shall I make a categorical syllogism? Acceptance of “norms,” in the

sociological sense, implies that norms are counterpointed by what

isn’t acceptable to a particular society or culture. If normalcy is

determined by its inverse, or what’s not normal, then to be normal is

equal to the state of being non-normal, by a rule of balance. In that

respect, anything is really dependent upon its inverse. Love and

33
hate, black and white, rich and poor, light and dark, agony and

ecstacy, life and death, and all the stupid concepts we invented

contingent upon the existence of each other. Are you confused yet? I

don’t think Aristotle would really like that one, but I don’t think it

really counts as a categorical syllogism anyway. Oh well, you

probably wouldn’t have known anyway. We’ve come full swing back

around, this time with much bigger toys. Society exists as a

constantly changing mass external reaction to opposing conceptual

forces.

The Greeks were the first to start seriously asking metaphysical

questions, and they did it mostly for the right reasons. Times were

great, everyone had a bunch of wine, slaves, money, and time on their

hands. They got together, drank a bunch of wine, fucked little boys,

and then started asking questions like that stoner kid that thinks

life is nothing but Pink Floyd and smoking blunts. “Dude, but what if

the way I saw blue was, like, the way you saw red? So, like, maybe we

all have the same favorite color, but I just see it as blue. Wouldn’t

that be trippy, man?”

Fuck you, you stupid hippie. Blue is motherfucking blue. If you

want to start talking about philosophy, read a six foot tall stack of

books and get back to me in a few years. You have to read them all

the way through, not just put them on a shelf and tell everyone you

read them. Stop telling me “fuck the establishment” while you drive a

Jeep to your two hundred dollar fucking Phish concert. Tell me who

the product of fascist consumerism is, you idiot fuck that bought up

34
all their live albums with the special binder, and followed them

around for years because Jerry Garcia was dead and you couldn’t suck

his big money cock anymore. You know what? Patchouli smells eerily

similar to dog vomit.

This brings me back to our topic and matter at hand- California.

The great golden state of California. Governed at the time by Arnold

Schwarzenegger. Not only is he not an American-Born citizen, he’s

also a meat head movie star. Not that I have anything against movie

stars turned politicians, or even transplants, but come on- only

California would elect Arnold Schwarzenegger as it’s governor. I

think, however, that this particular joke has been played to death, so

we’ll stray away from that one.

How about the Haight district, the hometown hotbed and breeding

ground of the hippie culture? I drove through it. Nothing but the

very same consumerist garbage they tried so hard to escape fifty years

ago on the east coast. Fuck ‘em. I hope they die in a patchouli

fire. Sissy rainbow loving crap it is, nothing but new age crystal

gripping mystical magic mumbo jumbo. Bad Vibes, Bad Karma, Bad Aura.

Maybe these people just don’t like me, but for as much as they talk

about not labeling people they certainly seem to have plenty of labels

for me. Especially when I fuck their girlfriends, god how they hate

it! You know what, dude- you’re girlfriend is pretty hot naked after

a shower and a close pussy shave. Save your recalcitrant complaining,

new age hippie movement, you are all a bunch of lazy pieces of shit

35
that make bad music, bad art, and bad smelling incense. Leave it to

the Indians, theirs smells much better. You are also idiot fucks.

I was even more shocked to see Big Sur, which I heard so much

about from Jack Kerouac. It would have set us back eight bucks to

walk down a flight of stairs and look at a waterfall. I didn’t even

bother trying to see the rest of the place after that, I just kept

looking out at the Ocean, wishing I was back on my rock. I’m sorry

for what they’ve done to the place, Jack- but I’m sure you saw it

coming.

There’s a man to look up to: Jack Kerouac. Isn’t a lot of this

shit his fault, too? Beat culture? I wonder if that isn’t part of

the reason why The Beatles is spelled that incorrectly. Isn’t that

where modern Jazz and poetry came from? The first time blacks were

accepted by popular culture? Possible precursor to the civil rights

movement? Jack Kerouac is the shit. What happened to him? Drank

himself to death because he couldn’t escape anymore. Fucking sad.

Hunter S. Thompson? Holy shit. Yeah, he’s dead now. Been a few

years. You might as well be looking at a caricature. John Lennon,

Martin Luther King, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Robert F. Kennedy,

Kurt Vonnegut, Jim Morrison, George Harrison- all of your heroes are

dead, parents of our generation. All of your heroes are dead.

What did we get? Larry the cable guy, Paris Hilton, and the

nameless dog fuckers on American Idol. I hope you all get nuked to

bits. We got youtube, a way to publicly share all the visual

capabilities of the planet, and you film yourselves kicking each other

36
in the nuts with boots on and eating each other’s shit out of an ice

cream dish. God I fucking hate all of you. Dig your own fucking

graves.

How did we get ourselves into this mess? I wanted to know, I had

to know- I decided I would roam around the country a little bit and

see if it was the same everywhere, or if I lived in some kind of idiot

bubble. It’s a shame it didn’t turn out to be the bubble, because I

could have popped a bubble, but there was something more going on.

California was just a destination, as good as any other. It’s

one state out of fifty, and I had never really even had a reason to go

to California until I realized where and what the Redwood forest

actually was. It was near Humboldt county, home of some of the

greatest weed our country has to offer. I had suddenly become very

accepting of Kevin’s plans for our road trip to end in San Francisco.

As long as we made it through Humboldt and I could find some weed,

everything would be great.

So after I realized where we were, and that the trees were really

cool, we had to bide about two hour’s time before sunrise. Kevin

napped in the front seat while I sorted through the last few days

worth of pictures on my laptop.

Once we could see the sun peaking through the tree tops, I hopped

in the driver’s seat and started my first experience driving on the

Pacific Coast Highway. Fucking gorgeous. Every few miles, the curves

break from the forest and rock cliffs to provide you with a

37
breathtaking view of the Pacific Ocean, complete with waves crashing

up against the rocks about two hundred feet below. If you ever get a

chance to drive the Pacific Coast Highway, take it- you won’t regret

it.

We stopped at the National Forest information center to talk to

the rangers about the possibility of rock climbing, seeing as how that

had been a major impetus for our road trip wanderings anyhow. Our

first trip had started in Kentucky where we tried sport lead climbing

for the first time in the Red River Gorge and really gained an

appreciation for the sport, and for the experience of going to the

middle of nowhere, climbing a rock, and staring off into the distance.

I’ll never tire of it. I redpointed my first 5.8 sport lead in the

gorge, got to the top, and realized I didn't know how to clean.

Bummer. I had to back-climb a clip and risk life and limb to escape

the 40 foot whipper. Wicked.

As it turns out, there was a bit of a problem with climbing here-

you can only boulder, and the Native American people living in a

reservation there don’t take kindly to climbers slapping chalk all

over their sacred rocks. Shotguns were rumored to be frequently

involved with the eviction of climbers. We decided to respect their

wishes. It didn’t really an issue that we couldn’t climb there,

because the scenery was good enough that just walking around the place

seemed to be fulfilling enough as it was.

We spent most of that day wandering about the tide pools, looking

at the foreign ocean creatures there. It was the first time I had

38
seen the Pacific Ocean, and the first time I had been to the Ocean

since I was in Sharm El-Sheik back in Egypt.

That brings us to my rock. I smoked my last bit of grass inside

a cave near a waterfall. As I was appreciating the view, I was

wondering how I was going to make it through another week of being

stuck in a car without weed to smoke. I was on vacation, and I wanted

to vacate. That meant lots of weed, and a considerable alcohol

regimen. I have developed a taste for fine tequila. I had already

gone through a quarter of the best weed in Kalamazoo, but I was nearly

two thousand miles from home, so that meant I couldn’t call Kenny to

score a bag. Bummer.

At least the scenery was pretty good. I emerged from my cave

after a cigarette. Kevin was about a mile down the beach, poking at

rocks with sticks. I walked out to a cyclopean rock with waves

crashing up against it, and climbed up to the pinnacle. After

reaching the top, I sat down and brushed the ocean creatures from my

pant legs. I happened to glance out to my left to see the distant fog

rolling out from the green hills into the cliff face and through the

tops of the redwoods out to the sea. I had never seen anything like

that before. Everything seemed so perfect. There was little wind,

and no sound but the gulls and the waves crashing. Suddenly reading

“Some of the Dharma” made a little more sense.

I figured out why it’s so cliché to walk along the beach and

listen to the waves. There’s something uncannily soothing about that

situation and those sounds. The fresh ocean smells, the beautiful

39
land, the captivating fog, the total lack of wandering idiots.

Walking on beaches is for fags, I'd rather play Call of Duty.

I don’t have a clear idea at how long I sat at the top of that

rock just vacantly staring out into the Ocean. It was one of those

moments that you refuse to end voluntarily. You need something to end

the moment for you. A wave caught my foot and stirred me back to

life.

All of a sudden, I felt an incredible urge to drink. Not because

I was depressed, and not because I wanted to celebrate anything, but

more because I had all of a sudden begun to feel very heavy. Heavy,

here, in that hippie washout kind of mental way. I had remembered

that I was finally doing what I wanted to do. I was free from my

taxing mental burdens for that small sliver of time on that rock. I

had totally been lost there staring at the ocean, and I had forgotten

what it felt like to just let myself go free and relax.

My life has always been a non-stop party. Party in all aspects-

good and bad. Sometimes there’s that point at the party where

something bad happens. The cops show up, some chick starts puking all

over everything and dying of alcohol poisoning, someone drives home

after one too many and hits a tree. There’s always a chance of

something ruining the party, but as long as you make it home- or to

the nearest couch (or bed if you’re lucky,) you’ll be fine to party

another day.

40
 I don’t want to get into the “live life day to day” mantra

bullshit, but this is a good analogy. If I’m sitting around at home

without a purpose, I feel dead inside. I always need to be going

somewhere, writing something down, getting ready for work, recording

music, driving somewhere, checking my Email and facebook, or doing

anything other than sitting around doing nothing, really. Idle time

breeds ignorance.

That was the first clue I had. That’s what got the ball rolling

in my head. I suddenly felt uneasy on my welcome back into the world.

I had always felt like something was wrong with the world around me,

but now I felt closer to figuring out what it was. I felt one of

those “urges” or “callings” that people always talk about, but can

never really nail out a good explanation of what it is. That’s one of

those things that you can’t read in a book. You actually have to take

an active part in living your life to really appreciate what it means

to be alive. You can’t just sit around and watch other people live

theirs on TV. Maybe too much idle time has turned you all into idiot

fucks.

41
 Chapter Three – The Open Road

My biggest personal problem has always been my tendency to over-

think. Usually it helps to be constantly analyzing the situation

you’re in, but sometimes you honestly just want to sleep. Probably

the best place to contemplate things of a purely mental nature is a

long stretch of highway in the small hours of the morning.

When Kevin and I road trip, we treat it like it should be

treated: like an adventure! The trip involves going as far as we can

with the allotted time, visiting as many places as we can, and

sleeping as little as possible. There’s no hotel rooms, no fine

dining. We eat ravioli out of the can, shop at gas stations, and

sleep in the car while the other is driving. It’s a rite of passage.

Anyone who hasn’t involved themselves in the American road trip

psychodrama has surely missed out. There’s something so appealing to

me about driving great distances in a car.

You know you can go pretty much anywhere, yet you’re confined to

the safety and familiarity of your car and the road. You can feel at

home while you’re abroad. It’s a great feeling. Any time you feel

uncomfortable, you can just escape to the open road and be gone in an

instant. The best time to experience most of the long highway hours

is to drive at night whenever possible, and stop at as many truck

stops as you can.

There’s always some colorful characters in a truck stop.

Obviously, there’s the truckers. Those guys are quite a bunch.

42
Chewing tobacco spitting, drunken rambling, cigarette smoking, foul

mouthed, womanizing sons of bitches. My kind of people. I love

truckers. Although they appear rough and unmannered, at least they

aren’t idiot fucks. It takes a high enough level of intelligence to

operate a giant truck barreling seventy miles an hour through the

rocky mountains and not get yourself killed. That’s why I love

hanging out at truck stops. You may run into some strange people, but

you will rarely run into an idiot fuck. They have no business being

there, unless there’s a McDonald’s inside the truck stop. Idiot fucks

are for the city. It’s our own special sociological breed.

The single best thing about truck stops is that no matter if

you’re eating, sleeping, coming, or going- It’s only temporary.

Temporary and extremely forgettable. There is no sense of

permanency at a truck stop, unless you’re the poor fucker who has to

ring us up. I don’t envy you.

If the truck stops are the best place to forget, it makes sense

that the open highway is the best place to remember. And on this

trip, remember I did. I had a lot to remember. Life has its own

little way of reminding you it’s there. Especially when you have a

head full of Acid.

When we left for California, it was exactly one half vacation and

one half escape. I had been diving headfirst into a nice couple of

months of moderate L.S.D. use. It happened to be the first time I

could ever find any, and I had always wanted to try it. As with any

drug, L.S.D. has the potential to be both very good and very bad.

43
For me, it wasn’t really either. It was a catalyst. Some

psychologists say that using heavy psychedelics can trigger psychosis

or exacerbate pre-existing mental conditions. I didn’t go crazy, I

didn’t have a “bad trip,” I didn’t turn into a maniac.

The strange thing about L.S.D. that I’ve noticed is that there’s

no real way to place the feeling you’re having. Your brain can’t

sense itself. It’s really weird. For all the good it does us, you

can’t feel your own brain. Even while tripping on Acid. It’s

disappointing. When you smoke pot, you can feel your lungs burning.

When you snort a line of cocaine, your nose burns and you can feel it

mixing with mucus in the back of your throat and dripping down. When

you eat mushrooms, your stomach feels like its being eaten from the

inside by weasels. When you drink you feel like you’re heavy and the

ground is waving around. When you eat some acid- it comes out of

nowhere, and never hurts. You just kind of slowly fade into it.

The first time I tripped on Acid was at Ken’s house. Kenny was

this guy I had gone to high school with, lived with for a while, and

was in a band with. It was a long Tuesday at work. I had worked a

ten hour shift, and I was ready to go smoke some pot and play my

drums. When I got there, Ken looked at me really seriously, and threw

a piece of tin foil at me and said “eat this.”

I’m like… that hurts your fillings. He says “No, Idiot- open it,

carefully, and eat it” I do, and see three little pieces of what

looked like a cross between dead skin and the inside of a jelly bean.

Gels! I said “dude, is this Acid?!”

44
 I threw two of them in my mouth right away, without thinking

about it that much. I had spent so much time wishing I could try Acid

that it didn’t take me more than a second. I left one, because I

didn’t know how much it would cost. I set it down on the table and

said “how long do I have?”

“I say let’s listen to some music, and when you’re feeling fuzzy,

it’s working.”

“How much do I owe you?”

“Twenty, doesn’t matter anyway- I don’t need it ‘till next week”

“Right on, let’s start drinking”

So we went across the street and grabbed some beers. About an

hour after I ate it, I started feeling what I can only agree with Ken

and call “fuzzy.” We listened to Camel’s Mirage, which is this wicked

British prog from the seventies. Around the time “Nimrodel” came

along, I had the distinct feeling that liquid was pouring down my

spine, and then everything started to shift and quake and I knew that

it was happening. Throughout the second half of the album, I was

hearing the flute parts dancing around the room, and hearing the

lyrics come from the middle of the room. Ken says “eat the other

one.”

The feeling of “tripping” is impossible to describe. One must

experience it first hand, and it is not for the weak-minded. L.S.D.

is real drugs. The kind of drug that can fuck up your life really

fast. I try to do as little of these drugs as I can get away with,

45
but there’s just something about tripping on Acid in that you can’t

live without doing it at least once. It’s not necessarily in the

actual peak of the trip itself, which is more mind boggling than it is

anything else. It’s the recovery stage afterward that serves as the

Timothy Leary kind of “spiritual” thing. I find that part of the

experience the most worthwhile and rewarding. Seeing the walls move,

and having super sensitive hearing is pretty cool, but the best part

is laying in your bed trying to sleep after the fun is over. This is

where I can imagine people get lost in the psychedelic haze.

To me, it feels like after a good ripping Acid trip you have to

lay in bed and listen to your favorite music while you put your mind

back together. So many strange thoughts seem to just pop up out of

nowhere. Thoughts you hadn’t had in months or years just sort of

appear out of nowhere. It can be very damaging to your psyche if you

don’t know how to handle it, but internal mental affairs have never

really been difficult for me. The concept of putting my mind back

together piece by piece isn’t nearly as daunting as it sounds.

Acid is like living really, really fast in a world you’re

familiar with, but everything seems to look, taste, sound, and feel

just a bit different. You feel like you’ve gone on a trip, and that

must be why that’s the colloquial way to phrase it. Tripping balls.

For sure. There’s nothing like it in the world. Not to sound like a

drug addled maniac, but there’s just something about a good session of

psychoactive substances that makes me feel more alive. It’s a form of

enhancement and satisfaction. Not for children, and not for idiot

46
fucks, but totally useful for adults who are in control of themselves

and feel like exercising their mental abilities. Drugs are all in

your head. Literally and figuratively. I find it hard to explain to

others what it is I like about drugs so much. I’m intelligent, I have

a good job, I haven’t fucked up my life anymore than anyone else has.

I just happen to like drugs. I am not a criminal, if you don’t count

the drug use. I don’t think I’ve ever broken a law that didn’t

involve a plant or chemical. I can eloquently express myself in a

state of intoxication, and I harm no one in the process of my chemical

intake. I’ve never been pulled over for speeding, I’ve never been

formally arrested, and I’ve only been in a few car accidents, mostly

involving snow or animals.

But, still, there’s something “icky” feeling about being a drug

user. I don’t even like to call myself that. To me, a drug user is

someone habitually snorting cocaine and selling their furniture to buy

a new hypodermic needle set. I do not do cocaine. That one’s a bad

one. Herion, even worse. Methamphetamine? Disgusting. All of those

should be illegal. Acid, that one’s on the fence because although

it’s really cool, I can totally see how someone’s mind could be

completely destroyed by taking it. I don’t have a problem with these

things being controlled like nuclear weapons. I agree. These things

should not be in the hands of idiot fucks that will ruin their lives

or other’s.

And now, on the other hand, I would like to personally kick in

the head the idiot fuck that decided marijuana, a plant that used to

47
grow on the side of the road in much of America, needed to be illegal.

How do you make a plant illegal? Why did we let this happen? It’s a

plant. You smoke it and it makes things go slow for a while. No

problem, right? Wrong. Some guy named Anslinger got it up his ass

that it made you go crazy and rape little girls? I’ve never felt the

inkling to rape a little girl – EVER. Especially when I’ve smoked a

lot of marijuana, when my mind is generally focused on whatever I’m

doing instead of maniacally seeking a rape victim. What a load of

psychobabble horse shit.

What it is, is blame placing. No one wants to accept that some

people just suck. It’s time for us to get over it. Some people are

walking stereotypes, and you know exactly what I mean. We always have

to blame it on something: alcoholism, depression, post traumatic

stress syndrome. We’re always hiding the fact that some people can

handle themselves a hell of a lot better than some other people.

That’s not good or bad, it’s a fact of fucking life. When you walk

down the street and feel better than a bum, you are. When you walk

down the street and some slick dressed business mogul walks past you,

he’s probably better than you. Those people at the Olympics flipping

in the air and shit are better than all of us. Maybe not at anything

but flipping in the air, but that’s still something. Maybe you’re

really good at baking bread. Maybe you’re better than me. That’s OK.

It’s good to know where you stand in life. What you are, and what you

can expect. Learning new things, dreaming outside of your reach, and

making goals are all good things, and so is climbing the socioeconomic

ladder, but don’t ever think for a minute that everyone is the same

48
and everyone is good, because it’s just not true. People are really,

really fucked up.

Did you ever have the urge to fuck a horse? Me either. Dude,

just go on the internet and type “chick fucking horse” into Google and

see what happens. Everyone is different, you have to accept it.

There’s no way of getting around it, and there’s no way of convincing

yourself that you’re right about everything because you aren’t. There

are billions of different people living billions of different lives,

and you can’t control them. It’s impossible. No matter how much you

want to try, and no matter how much it would benefit you, you

ultimately have no control over any human being other than yourself

unless they give it to you or you take it by force. You will not

take my mind from me unless you are prepared to fight for it.

I have an interesting little example of all of these concepts.

For about two months before I had left for California, I was living in

a house in the student ghetto of Kalamazoo with my buddy Seth, who I

had known for several years by now. We were living it up, going out

to the bar and keeping the house clean. It was nice to have a

respectable place to live for once, without roommates that would

rather throw their dirty dishes into the kitchen from the living room.

However, Seth was moving to Washington D.C. to take a good paying job,

so his little brother Will was going to take over the spot on the

lease.

We didn’t really have a lease, because I was living in one of the

rental properties a landlord buddy of mine couldn’t fill. We were

49
just paying him to stay there, without much documentation. Maybe

fraudulently, but that’s not my business. Either way, I had a nice

little house to keep me warm in the winter.

After Seth had been gone a week, I began to start seeing more and

more black people at my house, which didn’t really bother me at first.

As we’ve discussed, race doesn’t affect your propensity to be an idiot

fuck. Some of the guys were really cool, and I could have a

conversation with them. I had to listen to a little rap, which I

wasn’t accustomed to, but when people know me they have to put up with

death metal, so I can’t hate on rap. I can, however, hate on cocaine

dealers. Especially those that take over your house, turn it into a

crack store, and start filming trashy porn in the empty rooms and

fucking up your guitars with their greasy fried chicken hands. At

five in the morning.

It started out innocently, with a few of them snorting lines in

the bathroom. I was alright with it. I didn’t really want it in my

house, but if that’s what Will was into, I couldn’t tell him how to

live his life. I just stayed upstairs and left them alone. I figured

they would respect that, and follow suit. They did for a while, but

slowly they began to filter upstairs over the weeks of constant

partying that was going on in my house. I would leave for work at

five in the afternoon, and there would be three guys in my living room

snorting lines off the coffee table. I’d come home at four in the

morning and they’d be right there, but this time there’d be fifteen of

them. All drinking cheap cognac and snorting cocaine. Disgusting

50
human beings. I’d try to go to sleep and hear nothing but the “bump

bump bump” of rap music through the floor, and the random screams of

belligerent idiot fucks.

I couldn’t take it anymore when one night, a shirtless man came

into my room without knocking and just started yelling “hey” until I

woke up and asked him what he wanted. I got out of bed, and looked

past him down the hall to see two black women (it hurts me to call

them women) with gap teeth and horribly colored weaves on Seth’s

mattress, naked, on all fours, one of them getting pounded in the ass

by a naked black man. There was a video camera on the ground, and a

giant pile of cocaine on a mirror in the middle of the room. He says

“You wanna get your dick wet, homie? You wanna get fucked?”

I started screaming at him, “what the fuck is your problem, you

degenerate piece of scumbag dog shit? Why are you fucking hookers in

your friend’s house at five in the morning while he’s out who knows

where doing god knows what while I’m stuck here trying to get sleep

with your disgusting sex acts going on down the hall from me. Stay

the fuck out of my room, and stay the fuck downstairs if you have to

be here!”

He starts getting falsely apologetic, and backs away, but this

time I’ve had it. I go down the hall to the room where I kept all of

my records, and I see my first pressing copy of Nirvana’s Nevermind on

the floor with a straw and a razor blade. I had bought that record

for twenty five dollars near mint, and now there was cocaine residue

all over the back of it, and fade marks from having coke ground up on

51
it and into the label. Motherfuckers. Goddamn pig fucking swine.

Disgusting idiot fucks. My blood pressure shot up so high I’m

surprised I could see colors other than red.

I walked downstairs, out the door, and down the street to Fourth

Coast to call the police. I hate cops. Not the people, but the idea.

I don’t like to call the cops on other people, because I don’t want to

get involved in their affairs, but I couldn’t take it anymore. I

called Kevin instead, who helped me rationalize and not call the cops.

It would get messy, and the dudes would have a vendetta against me. I

didn’t need that in my life. When you call the police on people like

that, you’d better hope they get put away, because if they don’t-

they’re coming for you. Just what I need.

I decided I would just move out. Very quickly. If they were

gonna take over the house, they could have it, but the person with all

the money and all the expensive toys was leaving. I didn’t want my

drums, guitars, computers, thousands of dollars of audio gear, and

hundreds of CDs and Vinyls getting destroyed or worse yet stolen by a

pack of cocaine thugs and their gap-toothed whores. We left Fourth

Coast, which was exactly 187 steps away from my front door, if you

were to include the three front porch steps. I counted one day. As

we were walking back, I could see the front door was open and all the

lights were on, but the cars were gone. I started to get scared, and

ran up to the house. I looked in, and every single knife, fork, and

kitchen utensil with a blade or long handle was stabbed into the

walls. A piece of art that Seth had made with our friend Katie was

52
ripped into a hundred pieces after being stabbed repeatedly with

knives (there were hundreds of knife marks in the wall where the

poster had been. On the chalkboard was scrawled the esoteric message

“yall don unastand an yalls neva wil.” I called the police.

After loading up the most important and expensive of my

possessions into my car, I drove to my parents house at four in the

morning to get some much needed sleep. Later, when my dad came

downstairs to wake my brother up for school, he found me passed out on

the couch with another ridiculous story to tell him. I was completely

moved out of the house in less than twenty four hours, and more than

ready to leave town for a couple weeks to hit the open road.

That made our trip to California even more of a top priority in

my mind. I was sailing through the winds of change again, hardly a

surprise, and nothing sounded better than a good old road trip across

the belly of America to the eponymous crescendo of Manifest-Destiny

expansion. Sometimes, when the shit hits the fan and everything

around you starts going bat shit, you just have to leave town for a

while. I called my friend Glenn, the owner of the house, and let him

know what was up. At that point he didn’t really care, because the

economy of the State of Michigan was totally fucked anyway, and his

mortgage on the place was essentially worthless and he was desperately

trying to avoid bankruptcy. We waxed poetic about how both of our

lives sucked so bad sometimes, and we tried to get Will to kick out

the coke heads. He tried to get Glenn to let them move in. Mister

Glenn, as I liked to call him considering he was my parent’s age,

53
headed straight up to wherever you go to issue an eviction notice the

next day. Poor, Poor Mister Glenn. I’ve put so many unsuspecting

landlords through hell as a result of my idiot friends.

I was sitting in my parents basement looking at a giant pile of

my belongings. A familiar sight by then, I’ve since forgotten how

many times I’ve moved out and then right back there. They just kind

of laughed and said “welcome home!” I’m really glad my parents are

cool, because I totally would have gone insane by now if it weren’t

for them just laughing with me through all of life’s day to day

bullshit problems.

Gazing on my bulk of possessions, I thought about how many times

I had packed them up and spread everything out in another house only

to take it all back down again and stack the boxes in my parent’s

basement. They say that home is where the heart is, and I couldn’t

agree more. Home may as well be some ex-girlfriend’s couch, or the

backseat of your car. It really doesn’t matter where you live, it’s

what you’re doing with your life that’s important.

For two weeks, home was my parent’s couch while I waited for my

little brother Josh to move out of my old bedroom and back to his.

After that, it was going to be the back of my PT Cruiser. We took one

of the seats out of the back so we could lay down our bouldering crash

pad to use it as a bed. In some climbing communities, this is called

dirtbagging. It’s an adequate description of what it’s like. There’s

dirt everywhere. From your boots, from your clothes, from the

climbing gear, from everything.

54
 Our first stop was South Dakota to see the Badlands, Mount

Rushmore, and hopefully do a bit of climbing at the needles. It was a

nice drive out of town. The snow had just stopped a few days before,

and we made it west through Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and

Minnesota. I drove through the night from Kalamazoo halfway through

Minnesota while Kevin slept in the back. We pulled over in Blue Earth

because we thought it was a pretty cool sounding place. We were

filling up the gas tank when I gazed across the parking lot only to

see a giant Sprout statue (the Jolly Green Giant’s son or sexpot or

whatever it is) holding a giant foamy beer. On a sign nearby, it said

to check out their hundred feet or something tall Jolly Green Giant

nearby. We followed the signs and found the giant and took some

tourist pictures. It was like four in the morning so no one else was

around for us to be embarrassed in front of.

I woke up in the great plains, which was the first time I saw

them. It was really cool, especially the prairie dogs. We like to

stop at all the scenic pull offs we can. You never know what you’re

going to see. Some crazy rock formation, a breathtaking view, an

animal habitat, a sandy beach, or a world war two monument. Usually

it’s something cool. I like cheesy stuff like pretty trees and rocks.

I’m a sucker for nature, despite how much I love the city.

After wandering around the rolling South Dakota hills, we made

our way for our first stop. The badlands, if you’ve never had the

opportunity to see them, look like what I hope hell would look like.

Literally. Imagine a square that was about a hundred square miles and

55
made out of grey plaster. If you were to just hit the plaster in

random places with a hammer for about a million years, you would end

up with an accurate model of the badlands. The rocks aren’t really

rocks, the mountains aren’t really mountains. It’s a dried up ocean

from millions of years before the dinosaurs or something, and as a

result of the sea bed drying or whatever, it became a big block of

tightly packed sand that has been eroded by rain and snow melting

since our unicellular ancestors. Pretty cool.

We spent a few hours roaming aimlessly around the Badlands taking

pictures and climbing to the top of giant piles of sand that, if we

were more “preservation minded,” we probably would have stayed off of.

I can’t help my urge to explore. Neither can Kevin. Ever since we

were kids we spent most of our time together wandering around being

mischievous.

After our romp at the badlands, we tried to hit the needles, but

it was still closed for the season. We weren’t too shocked,

considering there was still a couple of inches of snow in some places,

the sky was grey, and we could see the flakes starting to come down.

We figured our chances of climbing anytime before we hit California

were pretty much crushed. It was too early in the year, and too far

north to do any rock climbing that didn’t involve ice tools or

frostbite.

After the obligatory stop at Wall Drug, which everyone should see

at least once, we decided to take a snowy trip to Mount Rushmore, the

classic road trip destination. We had to be cliché at least once on

56
this trip, if the Jolly Green Giant wasn’t our first cliché roadside

attraction. Mount Rushmore is impressive, but not really that

amazing. Faces we’ve all seen in books and on TV since birth carved

on a mountain that probably looked nicer before there were presidents

on it.

Our next stop was supposed to be Yellowstone, but almost the

entire park was still closed for the season, so we decided to head

straight to the next destination, Portland, and prepared ourselves for

a hell of a drive through Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Washington.

Kevin drove from South Dakota through most of Wyoming, where we

stopped to get some gas in some scary bilge water town at the foot of

the mountains with not much more than a road and a gas station, where

I took over driving. After finding a highway rest stop with a good

view, I listened to the weather report on the radio while smoking a

bowl. Snow in the mountains. Wonderful. We were going to be driving

through the mountains for the next day and a half. Rockies, then the

Cascades.

As we gained in elevation, the light rain turned heavy, the heavy

rain turned to slush, and the slush turned to ice, and then it got

nasty. I didn’t stop to think about how sparsely populated that area

of the country was, and we made it to a Wal-Mart about a hundred miles

south of Montana with one squeaky windshield wiper, a shot of gas in

the tank, five hundred miles over the oil change mark, and one barely

awake driver with white knuckles and a full bladder. We gassed up and

57
headed to Billings, Montana to sleep in a parking lot until we could

get an oil change.

Around five in the morning, or so, a knock at the window rouses

me from a restful sleep. Cops. I punched Kevin in the shoulder,

grabbed the keys to turn on the battery, and rolled down each front

window to greet the police officers at either one. I kicked the bowl

under the seat, and grabbed for my wallet- which was under the knife I

used to eat my can of ravioli. The officer at the passenger window

puts his hand nearer to his gun and says “Please do not grab that

knife, sir,” as I showed him my empty hands. Walgreen's called the

cops on us, the suspicious vehicle from Michigan occupying the shady

spot near the dumpsters. Kevin had chosen a bad place to park.

They let us go after they checked our ID's and all of that.

“We're just trying to make sure you're not drug runners or serial

killers is all.” Fair enough, right? We asked them directions to the

nearest wal-mart so we could get an oil change.

58
 Chapter Four – Montana

We woke up around nine in the morning in the back of a Wal-mart

parking lot in Billings, Montana. After getting a quick oil change we

gassed up once again, grabbed some food at the truck stop across the

street, and made our way for Idaho. We enjoyed a scenic trip through

the mountainous stretch that makes up western Montana and the Northern

strip of Idaho. Beautiful snowy mountain passes, and a heavenly

descent into Eastern Washington. After Kevin’s drive through the rest

of the Rockies, it was my turn to head to the end of our seemingly

endless trip from Indiana on I-90. The western terminus of I-90, in

case you ever wondered, is a not-so-ceremonial fork in the road in a

mass of intersecting highways somewhere in Seattle.

There’s something unnaturally calming about Montana. There’s not

much there but open space, which is probably why they call it big sky

country. Most people that go there are probably just passing through,

most of the people that live there probably dream about leaving if

they aren’t in the position to come and go as they please. It feels

like it’s not real, it’s only a temporary place that exists when you

go there, and doesn’t exist any other time. Even if you go back to

the same place, it never looks the same. As I was smoking a cigarette

and mindlessly chatting about my earrings with a truck stop employee

in Billings, I looked off into the early morning horizon and saw

nothing but blue sky and endless possibility both in the terrain of

Montana, and in the terrain of my mind.

59
 Here I was, again, far away from home and lost in the endless ebb

and flow of life. Surfing the tides of change, wishing I knew where I

was going in life. Sure, I had my life planned out years ago. Music,

Art, Rock Climbing, dreaming, and mind altering substances. That’s

what my life has always consisted of, and hopefully always will

consist of. I can’t help but find solace in the uncertainty of where

I’ll be in five years. I could be a destitute wandering vagabond, or

a successful writer and musician. I will most likely fall somewhere

in the middle.

The only thing that’s really ever stayed consistent in my life is

the uncertainty of the future, which has led me to wonder if the

future is really even a real thing, or just some idea that we came up

with so we could put off things we really wanted to do until we had

“time” some “other time.”

I don’t give two shits, nor a fuck about the future. As far as

I’m concerned, there’s only the past and the present. What happened,

and whatever’s happening right now. I can make plans to hang out with

you tomorrow, but if your drunk driving ass wraps your S.U.V. around a

tree, that won’t work very well will it? Time moves in a straight

line backwards from right this second to back when some asshole

decided to divide into increments the movements of the sun from East

to West relative to a fixed position. Long before we knew it was a

giant ball of gas thousands of miles away spewing out the nuclear

waste of hundreds of atom bombs every second, we thought it was a

60
chariot of fire being driven across the sky by flying horses and some

giant man who knew how to make it so.

When you don’t care about the future, what “will” happen becomes

what “might” happen, and once you get over the need to put things off,

it becomes “what’s gonna happen that you don’t care about today.”

Call me a pessimist, but it wouldn’t surprise me a bit to not wake up

one day. In fact, I wouldn’t even know I hadn’t woken up, because I

wouldn’t exist anymore. There’s no guarantee that I’m going to make

it home from Fourth Coast as I’m typing this.

You can’t change the past, you have little to no control over the

present, and if the future even exists, it isn’t here yet so you can’t

react to it- and you can’t promise that anything will happen just

because you said or thought it would. Maybe the future is useful for

the calendar industry, but if you don’t make calendars for a living,

then stop worrying about next week and start making today the most

important section of time on your mind. Everyone always tells us

this, but no one ever listens. If today is your last day on earth,

who gives a fuck if you broke a heel?

It’s kind of hard to keep yourself in check when you have such a

vivid imagination. I’ve imagined myself as thousands of things, some

attainable, some not so much. The first thing in life I ever wanted

to be was a ghostbuster. No ghosts, no ghostbusters. That one got

shot down real quick. The next was Astronaut, that’s a little more

attainable. Still, however, mathematics have not always been a good

friend of mine, especially those involving variables, or “letters” as

61
I call them. That makes astrophysics a bit out of my range. No

astronaut antics for me. After that it was musician, and I never

really gave up on that dream.

While all the adults in my childhood told me I could be anything

I wanted, I was always stuck with wondering how, exactly. What if I

wanted to be an animal? A raccoon, maybe. I’m about five feet taller

than a big fucking raccoon, I lack the requisite fur, and have a much

larger brain. If I had asked one of them, the response would have

been either “well, not exactly…” or “why would you want to be a

raccoon?” Endlessly debunking and questioning.

Suppose I was a little more realistic or cognizant as a child,

and I said to myself “I want to be an alcoholic restaurant manager

making only enough money to keep me alive but right where I am on the

socio-economic ladder with no hope of going up a rung, being

constantly berated by fools” and I probably would have drank the stuff

under the sink my dad drew a skull and crossbones on, waiting for the

sweet darkness.

I might have a little more faith in myself than that, regardless

of how much faith I lack in life. This is where I have to point out

the eerie correlation between “faith” and “hope.” Right now, I have

no fucking idea how to rescue myself from the peril of being far more

useful to people than my spot in life requires of me. Most people

seek less work, less responsibility, less thinking. I want nothing

more than to be pushed to the limit, accountable, and intellectually

challenged. Unfortunately, however, I’m stuck without a college

62
education for “proof” of my abilities, the finances to move out of

state and “re-invent” myself, and the financial support of friends or

family to financially rescue me from my college predicament. This

isn’t a world for glory-seekers.

Does that mean I need to lash out with temper tantrums, a hostile

demeanor, and vast reserves of self pity? No. It just means I have

to get back on the horse and keep trying. Challenges in life are

there to allow you to prove to yourself and others that you can rise

above the petty crap that keeps us from getting what we want or need

from life.

I know I’m no failure. The only people that fail are those that

can’t take things as they come. Hurdles are to be jumped over, and

limitation is just another way of saying “challenge” as far as it

comes to “life.”

There’s another one of those mystical concepts, life. What is

it? The status of being alive? Does that include consciousness?

Plants are alive, right? Ask any hippie. They may or not be alive,

but some of them sure are fun to dry, burn, and inhale. Are animals

alive? They eat, shit, fuck, and move around. Some of them are even

capable of showing emotion, like cats or dogs. Are they alive? As

far as I’m concerned, no. Plants and animals don’t have to wake up in

the morning and worry about being late for work. Animals don’t need

to worry about how they’re dressed and how great their hair looks in

order to get laid. They don’t go to court when the rent is three

months late. They cannot operate a computer, they cannot remember pi

63
to any decimal. Life is a concept we invented to refer to the

psychodrama that we create around ourselves as a result of having too

much intellectual capacity, and living in the same world as animals

that shit without wiping their ass with ground up and bleached trees.

When you’re driving through Montana, you are driving through what

separates us from all of the animals we gave funny names like

“squirrel” and “porcupine.” You see the road carve gracefully through

the snow capped rocky mountains. You see a gas station attendant

wearing a “USA” T-shirt with a menacing bald eagle on it that cannot

for the life of him figure out how my earrings work. He was

fascinated! I had two hollow gauges in each ear, #2, with captive

bead #10 rings going through them, all stainless steel. He just says

“did that hurt?” I said, “like a bitch, but I’m not a fucking pussy.

I drank a fifth of vodka and bit on a piece of leather.” I’m pretty

sure I convinced him they hammered out a cumulative inch of my

earlobes to put those gauges in. I can’t really say I convinced him,

I had just said it like I meant it, and he believed me. He didn’t

believe me because I was telling the truth, he believed me because he

thought I was telling the truth. There is a clear distinction between

people who make and understand facts, and people who hear and

interpret facts. This makes for an interesting epistemological

conundrum.

What if I told the guy that my earrings didn’t exist, that he was

slipped L.S.D. in his coffee, his wife is dead, and I am with the

I.R.S. coming to collect six million in back taxes before I inform the

64
D.E.A. and A.T.F. about the illegal gun cache slash meth lab In his

basement. Would he have believed me then?

What if it was all the truth, and I was just telling you a true

account? Fiction, non-fiction, newsspeak, political pundits, reality

television, national public radio, Harry Potter, and papal decrees are

all the same these days. Coming up in the RSS feeds while you chat on

facebook and sip coffee. We have so much of a hard time trying to

sort between what was reality two days ago and what was reality just

now before it changed again, that we didn’t even realize that there

was a difference until just recently.

We have all sorts of “concepts” like irrational numbers, the

grace of god, and the internet. They are nothing in the essence of

no-thing. They are linguistic and pseudo-visual representations of

ideas commonly held to be true, to varying degrees of “truthiness.”

God is a reason for us not to hate this life in hope for a better one

later “at some time”, irrational numbers are a way for us to poke at

the correlation between things we understand and things we don’t, and

the internet is a worldwide haze of charged particles flying through

copper yet connecting us all in this terrifying amalgamation of

zeitgeist window slash porn machine slash music store.

We live day to day with heavy concepts running through our brains

so much that we forget to say thanks to the dude that held the door

for us at the gas station, we talk about community action and never

show up to committee meetings, we call ourselves one nation under god

even though we have a thousand different interpretations of that word

65
and a good deal of people not even acknowledging its existence, we’d

rather watch sports on television than election coverage in a

presidential election year, we’d rather buy McFastfood than bake a

potato and grill a burger ourselves, and we’d rather pay someone to

groom our landscapes than learn how to prune a rosebush, much less

appreciate the history and people that brought you that money,

privilege, botanical knowledge, land, free time, and then not even

look at the god damned roses let alone smell them because you’re too

busy thumbing away on the old blackberry to notice the colorful plant

your gardener just put there. It’s her favorite flower, but you

wouldn’t care anyway.

But I digress; our social problems can’t be solved by an angry

twenty three year old in a coffee shop with a laptop, so let’s get on

with the story. Montana is beautiful. It also serves, at least to me,

as a “gateway” of sorts from what I knew (Michigan and the east side

of the country) and what I didn’t know (the Pacific Northwest.) It

served as a good metaphorical bridge between moving out of a crack

house and moving forward in life. I think I might put a little too

much emotional investment into my road trips, but I’m getting away

from town in more ways than just one.

A road trip is just the long road home. You’re only escaping.

You’re not truly putting things behind you. Is that what we’re all

doing? Running away from life slash reality and trying to escape it?

Is that both our desire and our demon? The desire to escape, and the

want not to have to? So is what’s keeping me going the same thing

66
that keeps me from getting where I want to go, or am I serving my own

destroyers by allowing my desires to be provided to me by mass market

advertising and people that don’t matter to me on a personal level in

the slightest? Will I spend the rest of my life in mental Montana,

somewhere on the northern border stuck in the mountains wishing I was

in Washington, D.C. making a difference by forcing my opinions on

others with slimy rhetoric and soft money, or in D.C. wishing I was in

big sky country without all the noise and people? Is there even a

valid point to all of this drunken nonsense I and we call life,

considering we just die at the end of it? What happens when the bank

fails? Did Hunter Thompson blow the last hope of the American Dream

out from the back of his skull? Who is John Galt?

67
 Chapter Five – The Fall of Rome

The bastardization of our wonderful western mindset of heroes and

success chasing has been solely at the hands of the people that didn’t

bother studying history because it was “boring.” Instead of having

values like an impressive vocabulary, we abbreviate words that don’t

need it. Instead of valuing athleticism, we’ve become a nation of fat

couch potatoes watching sports and daytime television. Instead of

gathering together to exchange ideas, we go to the bar and get trashed

on money that would have been better spent on books. Instead of

trying to better ourselves and valuing progress, we create the welfare

system and allow idiot fucks to breed more idiot fucks and spend more

and more of our tax dollars on housing and feeding a new batch of

criminals and miscreants. Instead of valuing our wonderful system of

capitalism, we seek any free handout invented by some asshole that

felt he should get something for nothing for being different in some

way from everybody else, be it his age, skin color, inability to pilot

a global financial entity, or stupidity-related, disability-causing

accident. Instead of valuing ourselves, we take every opportunity to

demonize others for whatever they’re doing that we don’t like, even

though it doesn’t affect or concern us in any way. Instead of valuing

the freedom our forefathers fought so hard to guarantee us, we seek

whatever means necessary to limit the freedom of others to worship

Satan, abort fetuses, and have gay sex while heading straight to the

authorities if someone tries to limit your freedom to worship god,

have your unviable child and hate it, breathe our second hand smoke,

or to protest what you don’t like or understand. Instead of having

68
our own values, we ask religious communities and mass media

conglomerates to tell us what’s important, how we should feel and act,

and what we should look like. Instead of valuing anything, we expect

some kind of artificial and esoteric morality that condemns us for

being who we are while demanding that we must think for ourselves. If

we have no access to our own freedom to live life, do as we please,

and pursue personal happiness, we are morally bankrupt.

We have no capacity whatsoever to decide what’s good and what’s

bad. If we have no freedom, to do what we want or say what we want

out of fear of “offending” someone, we have nothing. Nothing. When

they wrote “we” as the first word of the constitution, they meant all

of us. Not just me, and not just you. Limiting freedom is

impossible. Freedom is a means and an ends in itself. It cannot be

defined, contained, or limited because it is the essential lack of

definition, containment, and limitation. Freedom is to live free, and

any attempt to add an exception makes it non-freedom. You may not

like it if I say fuck in front of your children when you’re the one

that brought them to a bar after ten, but I don’t like it when you

tell me that god doesn’t approve of it. Show me the bible verse that

says I can’t say the word fuck. Fuck is an English word that didn’t

exist when the bible was written. In Greek. Back when America may as

well have been the Atlantic Ocean. Back when “to be free” meant to be

ruled by the Roman Empire.

For thousands of years since we figured out what freedom was,

we’ve been trying to keep it for ourselves and take it away from other

69
people. Freedom remains nothing but an ideal, a concept we spend all

our time citing as an impetus for our actions that destroy the freedom

of others. It’s the same shit that’s been going from the beginning of

human dominance on the earth to the minute the idiot fucks could get

on the internet at the library and post belligerently and illiterately

on message boards.

About two thousand years ago, mankind had its first major

struggle with one of its own. I am not talking about Jesus paci-

Christ. I am talking about Caesar Augustus. When our robed rabbi was

somehow miraculously sucking tit milk from a virgin in a stable

somewhere in the desert, Augustus was busy forming the largest

Mediterranean Empire of the western legacy. This came, more or less,

as a direct result of his own personal diplomacy, cunning, and

tenacity. Not until Descartes did we know the concept of “I” again.

I blame “love your brother” Christianity which at the same time

quelled intellectual uprisings and neglected the need to educate

ourselves about all the rotting buildings and manuscripts around

Europe while enabling the mass mobilization of troops for a “religious

crusade” to “convert the infidels” who busily developed algebra, the

concept of zero, and took the time to try to preserve the knowledge we

figured out thousands of years ago, and “god” told you was blasphemous

because it was made by pagan scum. Fuck you!

Soon enough, all it took was another “egomaniac” trying to take

over Europe again. This time, the big bad U.S.A. was around to smack

Hitler down, piss off Russia, bomb the Japanese, and create Israel

70
(and another century of problems,) with one great bludgeoning from our

continent-sized dick. Now it’s about 2000 years or so after Augustus

bit the dust. We have fixed most of the diseases except the really

scary ones, and we have much flashier toys than any roman emperor

could dream up in a million years. But here we are still, stuck with

2000 year old problems. How do we kill/educate/manage/feed/avoid the

poor? What is the role of religion in a society? How do we combat or

deal with nature in a megalopolis oil sucking economy? What do we do

with all the dead people? What do we do with the living ones that

piss us off? How do we punish them? What is Justice? Who administers

it? If our grandfather built a building, do we have the right to tear

it down? What do we do when we run out of a natural resource? How do

we manage natural disasters? Who decides which is right when we

argue? What manner of dress/speech is appropriate? Who decides? Who

will lead us? Who decides? These are all ancient questions, which

many have tried to answer, but all have ultimately failed. Without

question, we are bankrupt on the morality required to make such

decisions. What made us morally bankrupt? The sudden need of morals?

Is it because we finally have the ability to intentionally destroy our

planet? Do we? Have you ever even personally seen a nuclear weapon?

I sure haven’t. But we know they exist, because we (“America”,)

dropped a couple of them on Japan, a place I’ve never been, in 1945,

forty years before I was born. Yet here we are, here I am, in 2008 in

Kalamazoo, Michigan, fearing in some detached kind of way that some

Islamic Extremist is going to send one our way.

71
 Just flip a coin and say it’s us getting bombed by them. Are

Islamic Extremist terrorists just idiot fucks with guns and a head

full of Orwellian propaganda? I’m sure there are an equal proportion

of idiot fucks in the Islamic world to ours. I’ve known intelligent

Muslims. I lived with a few of them. I never felt threatened by

them, or their beliefs. How did our hate shift so easily from

communists and drug lords to Allah worshippers and oil tycoons? Did

our national priorities change outright, or did our national

priorities reiterate themselves into the new communists and the new

drug lords? Are we always just stuck perpetually hating those that

think differently than us, and those that bring us what we want but

won’t admit to wanting?

Blocking the citizens of a middle eastern country into “A-rabs”

is no more intelligent than calling all of us Americans “whitey,”

“WASP,” or “Yankee.” People are people. It doesn’t matter where

they’re from, only where they’re going, and what they take on

airplanes. What is the fucking point of devoting the entire

civilization’s intellectual efforts on bickering back and forth about

metaphysical afterlives and sucking our limited supply of precious

million year old organic material into S.U.V.’s that we drive to mega

churches. And if a loving mother wants to waive her right to bring

another poor innocent child onto this trash heap of a planet, she has

to get guilt tripped and harassed by the religious right. I’m not

going to start getting on a soap box about “the issues” like some

delusional politician that thinks he can somehow bamboozle the entire

body politic to think, talk, and act just like him. There’s a reason

72
we have a congress. Things like war, abortion, immigration, taxation,

and health care are things that have so many different facets it

becomes wholly impossible to settle upon some majority consensus.

That’s why we’ve been mired in legislation since the moment John

Hancock signed that god damned paper.

I’m not knocking on John Hancock, or any of those dudes. Not at

all. We all hang together in treason, right? I’m just saying it

didn’t smooth out all the kinks, and I think they realized that when

they wrote it. All of those papers. The articles of the

confederation, the constitution, the declaration of independence, the

bill of rights, and the emancipation proclamation, just to name a few,

were certainly not drafted by idiot fucks. These men knew exactly

what they were doing, acted mostly together, and left us with

infinitely customizable executive, judicial, and legislative branches

of government, all aligned in some renaissance golden triangle of

checks and balances. It’s supposed to work. It works like an injured

slave. It works because it has to, but can’t operate to peak

efficiency outside of the lash's reach. Our entire government and

political process is centered around debate and argument. We’ve been

customizing it ever since in order to perpetuate the continual fucking

of the everyday Joes on behalf of major corporations you've never even

heard of.

History, as they say, has a way of repeating itself. I recall

browsing a book store the other day and noticing the title “Are we

Rome?” in the modern issues section. I couldn’t help but laugh. I

73
didn’t even need to read the book. I know enough about the Roman

period to understand all the connotations of that phrase. There’s

another bromide I recall. It goes “what goes up must come down.” Or

how about “what goes around, comes around.” Maybe “Whatever happens

happens”

Romulus founded it after killing his brother and sucking wolf

tits, the families made it powerful after raping the sabines, the

republic made it great, Julius Ceasar made it all powerful, Augustus

brought it back together, and then Christianity destroyed it hand in

hand with the moral decay that Christianity was protesting. Now if I

say “Columbus found it trying to find a cheap way to get spices, the

immigrants made it powerful though continental genocide, the

constitution made it great, the westward expansion made it all

powerful, Martin Luther King, Jr. brought it all back together, and

then Christianity destroyed it hand in hand with the moral decay that

Christianity was protesting,” would you know what I was talking about

in 2000 years? Don't you people understand that the world exists how

we've made it, not how we wish it was?

If history is repeating itself, how is it that we can watch

television on our cell phones but we still can’t figure out that we’ve

been trying to figure out why Rome fell since it fell? We were

wondering about the fall of the Roman empire when “we” were still

“Romans” and “now” was 1500 years ago.

In the comic book Transmetropolitan, no one knows what year it

is. They just refer to “then” as “X amount of years” ago. I always

74
liked that little bit of social commentary. Does it really matter

what year it is? We’re counting off since “the birth of Christ” which

was arbitrarily suggested as the twenty fifth of December, but somehow

the year magically begins on January first. Seriously, we base our

calendar year on a fictional event that doesn’t even happen on the new

year! What is wrong with us?

75
 Chapter Six – History

Well, on the topic of the past, I shouldn’t limit it to my

own, or even just to Rome's. There have been a lot of people on this

Earth before we got it. They all had to get up in the morning just

like we do, they had to meet chicks and get laid, they had to find

food and money, they had to build nice places to keep their chicks,

they had to figure out their roles in society, and they all died just

like we will.

Before we had the ability to write down what we were talking

about with each other, we had to conquer a few things first: fire,

animal husbandry, agriculture, specialization, trade, language, and

socialization.

I remember hearing a lecture once that started “History begins at

Sumer.” This is commonly accepted, because we don’t have any written

record of what happened before the cultures that developed in the four

river basins: Nile, Tigris-Euphrates, Yellow, Indus. Notably,

Egypt, the Middle East, China, and India. Sound a bit more familiar

now?

These writings found somewhere around the Tigris-Euphrates, are

actually triangles poked in mud with sticks and then dried. These

people were the first to invent a way of tracking their thoughts in a

physical form, and thusly, the most commonly known example that

follows near the end of the “History begins at Sumer” in history

textbooks is the Code of Hammurabi. Laws literally written in stone.

76
We get writing, and what do we do? Figure out how to transmit useful

knowledge across generational lines? No. We map out how to punish

people that don’t do what we think they should. We fucked up from the

start, and we just kept pouring salt in the wound.

After the Sumerian’s descendants and neighbors made boats and

started calling themselves Phonecians, they crossed the Mediterranean

and found the Egyptians there building pyramids and were like “wow,

other smart people- that’s awesome!” They didn’t fight! They had no

reason to. The Sumerians had their river, and the Egyptians had

theirs. They didn’t even know about the other guys, and the other

guys didn’t know about them. Since they were both smart, they started

learning from each other and selling shit. Egypt makes money, Sumeria

becomes Babylon. They both built pyramids. No one really knows why.

After a while, people took their boats to different parts of the

Mediterranean and found a bunch of places to live where there were no

idiots and they could fuck their wives in peace. Also, dudes from

India started talking to dudes from China, and then the Babylonians

met the dudes from India, so now we all knew there were a bunch of

other people, and that we had a bunch of land between all of us. We

began selling shit to everybody! Everybody stacked money piles,

everyone fucked, everyone built buildings.

After a while, society wasn’t based on what river you lived

nearest anymore. We could tame the rivers with irrigation and flood

control. We had merchants, kings, farmers, blacksmiths, and soldiers.

Then instead of just trying to sell our stuff to people, we realized

77
we could just beat them up and take it. We moved, then, from being

innovators to brutes. It was more important to have a huge army than

it was to be smart and invent new stuff to sell. We didn’t want new

stuff, we just wanted more- and we didn’t want to pay for it, we

wanted to take it from other people that worked hard to make it.

Then Greece came along. Greece was a little bit different.

Instead of having rivers to deal with, they had mountains separating

them into little isolated communities we call “city-states.” They

feuded amongst themselves, allying and backstabbing. There were

several notable city-states, but the one we know most about is Athens.

That’s where a lot of the coolest shit went down that we hear about

all the time. Names like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pericles,

Eurypides, Xenophon, Thucydides, and Sophocles.

They decided that there were still questions to be answered, and

they developed things we now call philosophy, science, mathematics,

physics, biology, rhetoric, and politics. They invented this thing

called democracy, where they all tossed pot shards in a bucket to

decide which guy was right when they argued. Democracy, as we

understand it in modern terms, is very far from this. We’re talking

about a bunch of people who got together on a Saturday or what have

you, and just talked about stuff. Everyone could hear everyone else,

and it only mattered how good you were at talking if you wanted to get

something done.

Society became more and more stratified, but it wasn’t as bad as

what was going down in India- by that time they had already decided

78
that all the things Greeks were arguing about were decided by gods,

and that those gods dictated your life. Also, they had this awesome

thing called a caste system, where you were born into a social strata

that not only dictated who you were, what you did, and what you could

get, but you couldn’t escape! Bummer!

The Greeks figured out a bunch more shit, invented a few gods of

their own, and built some really cool looking buildings. They decided

that not only was writing words cool, but coming up with words for

things that weren’t necessarily real was even better. They wanted to

figure out what made the world work. They started “schools” to teach

younger people what they had figured out in hopes that the younger

ones would elaborate on it. Then what did we do? We killed Socrates

for making people think for themselves. That was the moment western

civilization turned into war-mongering and intelligence-fearing

sociopathic curmudgeons.

Greece wasn’t the only place full of people to start building

buildings and getting smart. People all over what we now recognized

as a big place, Earth, full of little places we named arbitrarily.

Like Kalamazoo. We really got into naming things for a long, long,

time. We named things like bronze, iron, spear, shield, sword, blood,

violence, foreigner, and war.

Then there was a brief glimmer of hope when some kid named

Alexander decided to take over what we then recognized as the world

and make everybody Greek. He didn't want to kill them, he wanted to

make them the same as him. He came pretty fucking close. He took on

79
his dad Philip’s fight to destroy the Persian empire, like the two

dudes we know now both called George Bush. The Persian empire, which

is what Babylon had become, was the bridge between Europe and India,

thusly China. The middle East. Instead of relying on Babylonians to

sell Greeks stuff, Alexander wanted the Greeks to have all of it- and

he wanted everybody to start drinking and having a good time while

getting smart and making cool statues. He got all the way to India,

but instead of taking it over, his soldiers were just like “eh,

whatever, fuck it- you guys just fight with the Chinese.” Then he

unexpectedly up and died, forgot to leave an heir, and his generals

split up the territory back into what it was before.

Egypt became perpetually ruled by Greeks named Ptolemy. Greece

fizzled out and got taken over by Rome, who now had the biggest dick.

Rome took all their cool ideas, renamed the gods, forced the smart

ones to teach their kids, and then inherited the legacy. Rome came up

with the republic, where individual people were elected by a big group

of people to represent them in government because everyone couldn’t

get together on Saturdays anymore. Some of them lived across the

ocean, some of them got too drunk on Friday, and some of them didn’t

care- so now we had politicians to “speak for us.” We just kept with

the frantic pace fucking up and shooting ourselves in the metaphorical

foot.

The Romans started by taking over the rest of the Italian

peninsula, and moving on across the ocean to Northern Africa, but

stayed away from Egypt. They needed Egypt to sell them food, and

80
their dick wasn’t big enough to hit Egypt from all the way across the

ocean yet. Besides, Egyptians were ruled by Greeks called the

Ptolemys, which were installed after the whole Alexander thing

happened. Egypt was hundreds of years old back then, and they took to

Hellenization like ducks to water. Alphabetic language? Whoa! After

spending a good amount of time arguing amongst themselves, and taking

over other societies, the Romans finally got too big to be ruled by

arguments between old men called senators. They needed a dashing

young man like Alexander to get them fat paid and fat laid. A few

dudes tried, named Marius and Sulla, but their dicks weren’t big

enough. Then came the biggest dick of them all, Julius Caesar. He

whooped ass on all of the hippies dancing around fires in what is now

France and Spain, and then butted heads with the other guy trying to

take over the world, Pompey Magnus. Pompey allied himself with what

was the faltering Roman republic and pussy slaveland Greece, and

Caesar took all of his soldiers, promised them a bunch of money, land,

and women, then proceeded to totally whoop ass until he got taken down

by those old men in the senate. Before he died, he adopted some kid

named Octavian he had paid to go to school and get smart, and left him

the keys to the kingdom.

Since Octavian was still a kid, Caesar’s general, Mark Anthony,

tried to take it all for himself. Octavian was a bit too smart to let

it happen. He was like “nah, how about we just team up with this guy

that has a bunch of money and political clout, Lepidus, and with our

three dicks combined, we can get super laid!”

81
 Mark Anthony was dumb as a post, so he was like “sure, why not-

one third king is as good as one whole king, right?” He was a

soldier, not a scholar. Octavian realized he could steal Lepidus’

money and political clout, that he was smarter than the old men in the

senate that hadn’t gotten such a rad education, that once he got money

and political clout he could totally whoop Mark Anthony’s ass, change

his name to Augustus, and then show that his dick was bigger than

everybody else’s. He won, and he did a pretty good job of leaving a

system that could support itself even if someone that was a total

idiot fuck was running it.

Then a bunch of idiots ran it straight into the ground, and

eventually they fucked it up bad enough that the smart ones couldn’t

compensate anymore, and after taking over a good chunk of the world

and getting a bunch of money, the Roman empire split into two parts.

All of a sudden, it was the Europe half, and the Babylonian half

again. The eastern half called themselves Byzantium, the western half

became the Holy Roman Empire. Both were still centered around

Christianity. By utilizing Christianity, and the belief in one god

that would punish you in an eternal afterlife if you didn’t do what

his earthly representatives asked, some idiot fucks in Rome suddenly

had a strangle hold on everyone. This is where Europe falls into a

state of feudalism, resulting in the dirt farming dark ages.

Now, instead of learning from the people that came before us, we

left it up to some concept we invented called god that told us what to

do via the people we paid to save us from him. After dealing with

82
this, somehow, for about a thousand years, people figured out how to

write down what they were thinking again, and some dude named

Gutenberg figured out a way to not just write stuff down, but to write

it down again and again and again. What’s the first thing we printed

on a mass scale? The fucking bible. Nothing but mistakes.

While the idiots around Europe tore down the cool buildings

because they had nothing better to do, and destroyed all the knowledge

we had because it was thought up by “pagans,” the folks in Byzantium

were nice enough to remember it all for us as best they could. After

we had a bunch of bibles printed up, we thought we were cool, so we

decided to go on a “crusade” to bring bibles to those Byzantium freaks

that had their own new version of monotheism. They didn’t want our

bibles, so they sent us back with spices, algebra, and reminded us

that there were other places called India and China that we could

bring our bibles to.

So we started building bigger boats to carry more bibles around

that irritating continent of Africa to get to the other places faster

than walking through Byzantium, because they wouldn’t let us take the

bibles through.

Then some ass hat named Christopher Columbus, from Portugal,

decided that instead of going around Africa, we should just go around

the world. Considering there wasn’t anything but ocean to the West,

he should just be able to hit India without having to go all the way

around Africa. Brilliant. He ended up finding out that there was

83
another two continents, both a shit ton bigger than Europe, that were

chock full of people to bring bibles to!

Turns out that not only did these people not know about Jesus,

but they didn’t even have huge buildings like the ones falling apart

in Egypt, Sumeria, Greece, Rome, India, and China. These people

surely needed bibles more than anyone else. They didn’t want our

bibles, either. Instead of just ignoring them like we did the people

to the East of Europe, we set about destroying them so we could build

big buildings on their land after we took it from them.

While the super Christians were out evangelizing in the new

world, there were a lot of smart people left where Rome used to be,

which they now had divided back into city states and took the books

the people in Byzantium had saved for them and started learning from

history, picking up the pieces where they left off with Augustus.

They figured out how to build cooler buildings, make cooler statues,

paint cooler paintings, and they started valuing being smart again.

Finally. A good decision. We call that the Renaissance. We started

making cool words for concepts again, but they all start ending with

ism. Humanism, secularism, altruism, and scholasticism.

While all of this was going on, there was still an ass hole in

Rome that was now called pope, who called all the shots. His

authority wasn’t given by having a large army, being smart, or having

a big dick. He just told everyone that he was the only one that could

talk to god, and since there were only a small number of smart people

around still, we all believed him and did everything he said.

84
 Sporadically, all across Europe, people began to wise up and be

like “yeah, whatever, I don’t know about all of this pope to god

conversation business. “ Then some guy named Martin Luther wrote down

some words on a paper that said, among other things, that the pope was

a charlatan, and he didn’t mean shit. Religion was just about god

again after that, and hopefully we keep it that way.

After this took place, some people in France decided that not

only was the pope thing a stupid idea, but so was the idea of having a

king or emperor there to tell everyone what to do. They called this

the enlightenment. Back to India and China, who had a bit of an

“enlightenment” of their own. Seeing as how they had spent most of

their time to themselves, not involving themselves with the two river

basins to the west of them arguing back and forth buying all their

stuff. While there was still a caste system in most of India, some of

the Indians and most of the Chinese came up with this idea they called

“Buddhism,” where there wasn’t a god to venerate, but a really smart

guy that showed everybody how to think for themselves. We, western

civilization, thought that Idea was ridiculous, but our dick couldn’t

reach far enough to hit them with it yet. How could those people get

by without god telling them how to live their lives?

After the French people had the French Revolution and got rid of

the king, they tried to use what the Greeks and Romans had used in

some weird combination. Instead of having the “senators” just be old

guys, they were elected by normal people, who had now become used to

having to think for themselves again instead of farming like their

85
parents had done for the last thousand years. Now they could be

elected senator if they got smart enough. But maybe they didn’t want

to be senator. They had other options. They could own a business.

They could make stuff and sell it to other people instead of taking it

from them. We started to get civilized again.

Then, all the smart people realized that the super Christians had

taken over this place called America, where there was a bunch of land

to be taken, buildings to be built, and idiots to take advantage of.

Perfect! Just a generation or two later, there were some very smart

“senators” that decided if we wanted to become really cool, we needed

to have our own place called America, not a bunch of colonies owned by

European governments. We asked the French to help us kick ass on the

British dudes who wanted to tax the fuck out our tea, wrote the

declaration of independence, and all those smart people in that room

signed it, paving the way for us to fuck it up again. We call them

the founding fathers. Really smart people like Thomas Paine, Benjamin

Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and other names you've read a thousand

times in American history books. These guys spoke multiple languages,

built things you couldn't imagine building, and thought about concepts

that don't get covered on American Idol or Monday Night Football.

They did a better job at making sure the government perpetuated

itself than Augustus did, because they were able to learn from the

past. They made decisions for an entire nation of people based on

asking metaphysical questions, and actually answering them. What is

the role of religion in society? Personal. It has nothing to do with

86
government. Who leads us? Somebody smart, in conjunction with

another much bigger collection of smart people that have the authority

to call him out if he isn’t acting smart. Who decides? Us! But

now, what if those people try to fuck us over? We added another

factor to the equation. The judicial branch of government. Now that

makes three. One to lead, one to question, and one to answer. A self

perpetuating, self balancing government. The people that designed

this for us were so awesome! We just fucked it up again like we

always do. We, the people.

After fighting with the British, and ultimately winning, America

decided we didn’t want to have anything to do with fighting between

each other like Europe did, so we expanded on the city state idea,

made them a bit bigger, and just called them states. Now instead of

having one law that bound the whole nation, we decided that we would

agree on broad issues at the national level, but then leave each

individual state to solve its own unique problems. Cool.

Localization helps manage local people locally in the broader context

of a conglomerate nation of nations. We began to have a national

identity as the people who figured out how to live the good life. We

called it the American Dream. Become what you want, because no one’s

going to stop you anymore. There isn’t some big ass hole in the sky

telling you what to do, there isn’t a dick pope in Rome with a million

dollar hat telling you what to do, there isn’t a king telling you what

to do, and there isn’t a feudal lord telling you what to do. Just you

doing whatever the fuck you please wherever you feel like doing it.

87
 We reveled in it for a while, but forgot to realize that the rest

of the world was still mired in the river basin fight over who had the

bigger dick and who got to sell who what. The smart people in

America, and also in Europe, kept inventing things that made life

easier. We called them machines. At one point, someone started

powering machines with the fire that we discovered at the beginning.

Talk about learning from the past. When things burn, they release

energy. Contain that burning, contain the energy -ergo- Internal

Combustion engine. Some things release more energy when they are

burned, and can power machines by converting heat energy into

mechanical energy by using pressurized steam. Then we got

industrialism, and the industrial revolution.

After the industrial revolution, it was almost clear that America

had the biggest dick. For some reason, we forgot about that for a

while and started fighting with each other over whether or not we

would have slaves, and whether or not the southern half of our country

would become a separate country. We killed each other for a while,

and then a badass giant named Abraham Lincoln steered the smart people

back to their senses, planted the seeds of the civil rights movement,

and brought our feuding nation back together. What did we do? Shot

him in the head while he was trying to watch a play.

After a few years of rebuilding our war-torn nation and our

relationship with the folks down south, we built a stone dick in

Washington D.C. called the Washington Monument so everyone could come

and see in effigy how big it really was. It took two world wars and

88
an economic crisis to prove it, but with one big swoop of that giant

American dick, we crushed Japan, saved Europe from total destruction

and sadistic genocidal occupation, and everybody started sucking the

big American money:power dick. Then Russia spat out the cum, which

naturally offended us. Communism.

They decided that it wasn’t selling shit to each other that was

cool, but that everyone should be treated the same. They didn’t

acknowledge that people were the same only in body and not in mind.

That totally didn’t work, but they were willing to try really hard so

we let them. Well, we may have let them, but we watched closely, and

made smart Germans we didn’t kill in the war build us dick shaped

bombs to shoot across the ocean, and across Europe right at them.

They were like “fuck that, our dick’s bigger and we’re gonna build

bigger dick shaped rockets.” Inter-continental ballistic deep

dicking. Remote-control dicking. Eventually, we made the dick shaped

rockets so big that we could shoot them all the way out of Earth’s

gravity. Then we got to thinking “let’s go to the moon.” What the

hell, why not, right? Our dick shaped rocket made it, and a few

Americans got to show Russia how big our dick was from the moon. And

Neil Armstrong was like “That’s one small step for man, on giant leap

for mankind” … so suck it.

Then America had a personality crisis. After all those guys had

traveled around Europe showing everyone how big America’s dick was,

they wanted to start fucking chicks with it instead of showing it to

other guys and arguing about the size. Fuck they did, producing the

89
generation we now call “baby boomers.” A few decades before the

second war, we had decided that women were actually pretty cool. They

had brains just as big as men’s, and were capable of doing everything

a man could do. The only real difference was, they didn’t have a

dick. That posed a very interesting question to us. If it isn’t the

big dick that makes us cool, what is it? That led to even bigger

questions, questions we had put off answering for a few thousand years

while we were busy looking at dicks. We started including women, and

then we realized that we were oppressing people based on race as well.

We always had been. After all, we had decimated an entire race of

natives in our land before we made it America. Our country had a very

large population of humans that happened to have extra pigment in

their skin, which we used as an excuse to make them subservient to

people who didn’t have as much skin pigmentation.

Those people didn’t like it, but didn’t have much of a way to

fight back – so they dealt with it by inventing a new kind of music.

The blues. The blues was an “uncivilized” form of entertainment off

the traditional road of oil paintings, poetry, and classical music.

It centered around a couple of dudes with some instruments in the back

room of a bar singing about what made them sad. Talking about the

sadness somehow connected with other people that were feeling sad.

That music turned into Jazz when it stopped just being sad and

progressed into a style of music that emphasized personal expression.

But if black people are sub-human, how can they express themselves?

It was music, I think, that ultimately convinced white America that

black people were indeed cool. For the late fifties on into the early

90
sixties, everyone was listening to black people make awesome music on

the radio, and then being shocked to find out they were black when

they went to see them live. Imagine going to a segregated concert.

Wild, but it existed within some of our parent's time. Less than 50

years go, man- black people were being treated like a sub-human

species. Second class citizens.

After the beat culture of white kids hanging out with black jazz

cats and writing poetry on Benzedrine, we got the Beatles, who created

pop music by having white faces playing black music. This was 1963,

one year before Martin Luther King, Jr. came out of the woodwork and

showed the idiot white guys that still couldn’t believe black people

could be smart that they were totally wrong. Martin Luther King

didn’t bring about a social revolution by sticking his fingers in

people’s faces and blaming them for what had happened for two hundred

years, he just wanted it to stop. Reason had begun to win for a

change. After agreeing with him, and taking massive steps in not just

understanding that black people were cool, but that everyone had the

equal propensity to be cool, we shot him dead in 1968. We keep making

bad decisions.

About that time, we decided that we wanted to take communism

down once and for all, but still didn’t want to touch Russia with our

dick, and we came up with this concept called “mutually assured

destruction” that meant if our dicks crossed, the world would end. So

instead of crossing dicks and ending the world, we decided to make

sure that Russia remained the only communist nation by sending

91
airplanes full of eighteen year old men into the jungles of Southern

Asia to prevent Russians from rubbing their dick on Vietnam and giving

them communist H.P.V. We didn’t have A.I.D.S. to worry about yet.

Everyone in America, including the blacks and the women, decided

that showing our dick to Vietnam, and thusly to the rest of the world,

simply wasn’t going to work anymore, so we got the hell out of there,

and started listening to disco and snorting cocaine. We kept fucking

each other, but now since the sixties blew social reservations out the

window, blacks were fucking whites, chicks fucking chicks, dudes

fucking dudes, and no one cared about who had the bigger dick, because

everyone got to play with one if they wanted to. The world caught up,

and most of the cool people decided that killing each other was

ultimately pointless, so we came up with the United Nations, which is

as close to ruling the world as Hammurabi, Alexander, all the Caesars,

Christianity, and the pope ever got combined.

After a few years of making lots of money, building cooler toys,

and making more music and art, everyone started to get closer to

answering the metaphysical questions we had been asking since we were

getting together on Saturday mornings at the acropolis. But we still

couldn’t get to the biggest ones. What is the good life? If it’s

not selling stuff to other people, taking it from them, showing them

our dick, or getting laid- then what the hell could it possibly be? I

would like to, jokingly, suggest smoking weed every single day. Or

at least drinking some whiskey. My dick does just fine hanging out in

my pants.

92
 Chapter Seven – Transgression

Growing up in the Catholic school system, I was always

forced to feel sorry for my transgressions. Forced to perpetuate my

own self-hatred. Forced to self-suppress my dissenting opinions,

forced to name by name the things I had done that the church didn't

agree with. When I thought impure thoughts about the chicks in my

class, when I said 'fuck' too much, when I stole beer from the keg

after the fish fry on Friday night during lent, or when I lied to my

teachers about sleeping in class. I was expected to confess before

god, but more importantly before the priest. In this case, Father

Mike, our parish priest. From early on, I had reservations about

standing up, kneeling, making gestures, and speaking openly with a

group of people in unison. Back then, I had no idea why, I just knew

it made me feel dirty in some way. This, coupled with my constant

fear of transgression, caused me to buckle and kneel before the priest

that I knew had a personal relationship with my parents, and to tell

him things I would never openly tell a middle aged adult male in my

adult life. You don’t need to feel sorry for aborting your rape

child. You don’t need to feel sorry for masturbating. You don’t need

to feel sorry for saying “god damn, I can’t take this shit any more,

fuck it.” You don’t need to feel sorry for feeling like you’re a

Nazi when you stand up and sit down like a sheep in church. You don’t

need to kneel before anyone.

I’ve always been a big fan of the History channel, if you

couldn’t have guessed. I remember noticing an uncanny correlation

93
between the marching Nazis in black and white and the uniform “sign of

the cross” making going on at mass. I couldn’t help it. There didn’t

seem to be much of a difference. Blindly following a leader just

because you’ve always followed him and everyone else you know does,

too. Then, when I wanted to do something stupid with my friends, my

parents or the idyllic “parent” would say something to the effect of

“if all of your friends jumped off of a bridge, would you?” Fuck no.

I wouldn’t do something so stupid. But shooting off illegal fireworks

in the middle school football field? That sounded a lot more fun

than jumping off of a bridge.

I have many transgressions. I could list them for you, if you

wanted me to. I harbor a small amount of that famous Catholic guilt to

this day. Everything I’ve ever done that anyone ever told me was bad

still resonates in the back of my mind like I should still care about

it. I guess this is supposed to be called a conscience, but that’s

just another concept invented by us to refer anything other than the

guilt put on us by others. I love to transgress. Illegal drugs,

drunk driving, sex before marriage, one night stands, obscene

language, blasphemy, pornography, strip clubs, lying, cheating,

stealing, gambling, anything. I’ve read the Satanic bible, and I

found it more personally fulfilling than the entire Christian bible.

I’ve broken every commandment with the exception of “thou shalt not

kill.” Unless you count small animals. All seven deadly sins, every

venial and mortal sin I can think of with the exception of the above

stated. I’m a proud, gluttonous, lustful, lazy, wrathful, greed

filled, and envious sinner.

94
 Any person who tells you how to live your life is a piece of

shit. That decision is yours alone. It is solely up to you to decide

who’s advice you follow, and who you tell to fuck themselves. Your

choice. Your mind. The only transgression is failing to decide

something for yourself.

That’s it. The locus of human stupidity is the inability to

choose for yourself. If you can’t think through the outcomes and make

a good decision for yourself, you are an idiot fuck. This is the

clear line that separates us. Those that can take care of themselves,

and those that need to be told what to do because they lack the

required intellectual tools to judge for themselves. This is what our

fore fathers intended the voting body to be, and that’s why we have

the electoral college. It’s an idiot buffer. If the presidential

candidate told you he’d give us all free pizza every day for four

years, a free line of coke, and a six pack of strippers, he might win

just for that- and that’s why we need smart people in the government

to act as a tidal dam for the flood of idiocracy that has taken over.

But this negates the claim that the government is run by the people,

for the people. How can we balance this without adding some sort of

public assembly outside of the three branches of government? We have

tried many solutions. Lobbyists, special interest groups, government

watchdogs, and vigilante investigative journalism to name a few. None

of these things seem to work. The problems are too big on a scale

that affects the lives of millions of disagreeing people with

individual problems and needs.

95
 You can, I wholeheartedly believe, teach yourself not to be an

idiot fuck. You can learn. It’s what we do as humans. You had to

learn enough to eat food and not die, you have gotten that far. Take

some time to notice what’s going on in the world around you. Instead

of drooling over the football stats on Monday night, and wasting your

life away at the bar the other six, flip the channel to a twenty four

hour news network. So it's slanted and biased, at least it's better

than sports statistics. Take a look at what’s going on in the

different places on your planet. You have to live here with them, you

should at least pay attention to what they’re doing. It isn’t a

transgression to think for yourself, it’s a requirement and a

responsibility that you have as an adult capable of having children.

I understand more than you know the need to escape. Maybe

football is your only love in the world. It makes you so happy to

watch those guys play a good game, and you feel like knowing the stats

inside and out makes you more equipped to talk to your friends.

That’s fine. At least you’re putting some intelligent thought into

something. Football isn’t a fool’s sport. It requires strategy,

athleticism, and a sharp wit. But there just seems to be an

overwhelming amount of idiot fucks that vacantly stare at a football

game because that’s what they feel like they’re supposed to do. It’s

no better than standing up and sitting down in church without truly

believing what is going on.

I also can’t knock anyone for their personal beliefs, no matter

how much they disgust me or I disagree with them. As long as you

96
chose it for yourself. With all the thought and decision making

required. If you cannot, you are an idiot fuck.

There are billions of people in this world. We’re all stuck here

together, whether we like it or not. We have to get along, whether we

like it or not. We’re all different, whether we like it or not. We

speak different languages, we have different standards of beauty,

different understandings of law, different takes on spirituality,

different cultural undercurrents, different customs, different dreams,

and different personalities. No amount of arguing is going to change

that. No amount of diplomacy is going to make large, diverse groups

of people over a broad geographical area agree on every little aspect

of life. This idea is tedious and retarded.

I’m not admonishing anarchism, or even moral anarchy. I’m just

saying that sometimes we’re not always going to agree. It’s both a

secular and religious law that forbids killing, but it happens every

day in our cities, and often enough on government sanctioned battle

grounds. We will never escape violence, we will never escape

categorization, we will never escape each other, we will never escape

the Earth, we will never escape death, and we will never escape the

struggle of dealing with a complex society.

I think it might be time for a new revolution. Not some stupid

“lets grow out our hair, rub patchouli on our bodies, and smoke pot

while watching a jam band” revolution. A real one. Like the

industrial revolution, the technological revolution, the sexual

revolution, the civil rights revolution, or the internet revolution.

97
This time, we need to get to the root of what’s been plaguing us all

this time: the god damned motherfucking intellectual revolution.

It’s not that hard, people. It’s time for us smart people to

stand up and say, “we’re not going to cater to you idiot fucks

anymore, we’ve had enough- and we’re doing something about it.”

Educating the next generation is the most important thing we need to

do. We can’t tolerate letting them turn our kids into glue sniffing,

hygienically challenged, date raping, society deteriorating psychic

vampires!

98
 Chapter Eight – Let’s All go to the Apocalypse!

I had a dream. One of those dreams. The dreams that seems to

permeate your waking mind for days and days after it occurs. The kind

of dream that would cause some guy named John to write the book of

revelations. The kind of dream that you can’t easily write off as a

figment of your overactive imagination. The kind of dream that seems

as if you’re telling yourself something.

It was another dream in a long stream of reoccurring dreams set

in a large city, seemingly in the present. During these dreams, I

would travel from my apartment to various destinations, usually

accompanied by real life friends. We would encounter normal things,

nothing out of the realm of real world possibility. Bums on the

street, a swanky uptown bar, a shopping mall, maybe a nice stroll in a

dream city park.

This dream, while beginning in the same city, took a bizarre turn

for the downright apocalyptic. I found myself in a new part of the

now familiar city. This time around, a dimly lit bar inside an

airport gate. This is obviously a special, privately owned gate,

because it has a distinct hunter’s lodge feel. Looking out the

windows, I can see a long sea of pavement where airplanes are taxied

down runways with a cityscape backdrop of high-rises and smog. There

is ancient-looking stained wood paneling on the walls, and various

sporting man memorabilia, much like a theme restaurant. There’s

antique fly fishing rods and bolt action rifles mounted near

taxidermies of a vast array of wild beast and fish.

99
 I’m sitting at a circular wooden table with five other people in

black hoods. We all drink gin from dark hand-carved wooden cups. I

can taste the gin, and feel the familiar warmth of it flowing down my

throat. I have an eerie sense of perception in this dream world, now

– as I am familiar with it and comfortable in it, even while in a

dream state.

I ask one of the hooded figures where we’re headed. One turns

toward me, face shrouded by a shadowy black veil, who calmly mutters,

“Belize” in a low, but oddly reassuring whisper. I look past him

through the window to see a 1930’s era prop plane with what seemed

like yellowing canvas wings and ancient engines sputtering thick black

smoke. We all silently stand and file out the doorway to the tarmac,

where we are motioned by airport personnel to climb the staircase to

the airplane. At the base of the staircase, we meet the pilot, none

other than Teddy Roosevelt, 26th president of the United States, long

since dead. I know by now that I am in for a hell of an adventure.

He’s not wearing a black cloak like us, he’s dressed in his

stereotypical suit and monocle, looking eerily similar to the monopoly

man.

After a long, bumpy ride low to the ground, which magically

lasted a short time in my dream world, we landed in a grassy airstrip

far away from any cityscape or natural feature I am familiar with,

though the terrain is obviously earthen. I’m used to having strange

dreams, and I’ve always taken extra care in noticing details so as to

broaden the experience.

100
 After getting off the airplane, we walk a few hundred feet down a

dirt trail to a horse stable, where we are told by Teddy to “mount and

ride” as we begin a single file descent on a dirt trail to the lush

river valley. There are wildflowers and long grasses growing

everywhere in this stunningly beautiful tract of land. We follow the

river to a delta, presumably now in Belize, where we are introduced to

a small, dark skinned, Spanish speaking man named Pietro, who motions

toward a small, rackety looking boat with a seemingly underpowered

outboard motor. Teddy politely takes his leave, with a graceful bow

and the tipping of his hat.

The figures and I board the boat, as Pietro sets off to sea from

the river delta, following close to shore. We bear south, with rocky

sandstone cliffs jutting up on our right side. The boat, although

sadly underpowered, makes its way slowly down the coast. Off in the

distance, I can see a canyon materialize from the fog on the horizon

that seems to be cut straight down by a narrow river. We turn into

the river, sailing down a corridor of sheer cliffs rising up at least

three hundred feet in the air. The river flows into a small circular

pool, also surrounded by sheer cliff faces with a small sandy beach

opening into a cave on the far side of the circle. Over the mouth of

the cave flows a raging waterfall, falling from the height of the rock

faces around us. I found myself wishing inside my dream that it

wasn’t a dream so I could take advantage of such a picturesque scene.

Pietro ties the boat ashore after running it up onto the beach.

He points, and for the first time speaks. His words come out as

101
Spanish, but somehow I understand what he’s saying perfectly. My

Spanish is alright, but not nearly as good as it would have required

to understand what he was saying to me. He says “only one may enter.”

Sounds exciting, and I’m willing to bet it’s going to be me. Dreams

have a way of working out like that.

The hooded figures all bow their heads, and Pietro points at me

and says “You have been chosen,” and moves his gesture towards the

waterfall. The dream is not lucid, as I don’t have a necessarily

voluntary control of my body and thoughts, but I feel extremely

compelled to do as this man says. As I walk through the waterfall, I

turn back to see Pietro sailing the figures away back down the narrow

channel we had just sailed through. I take a deep breath and enter

the cave proper, which opens up into a surprisingly large cavern, with

an obvious path straight ahead, through a narrowing passage that fades

into darkness.

I take a burning torch from the wall, and proceed down the path.

After passing, I encounter another large room, where I see three doors

with distinctly Mayan looking carvings all over the walls and on the

posts and lintels of the door frames are perched three different

figures and symbols. On the farthest to the left, there is stylized

carving of a sun rising with rays radiating from a half circle.

Inside the pediment rests the figure of a bird with wings outstretched

to the sky. On the center door, there is a carving of a setting sun,

with rays radiating downwards, and a jaguar figure waiting to pounce.

On the right door, there is a circle with a dot in the center. Inside

102
the pediment rests a crouched human figure with four faces, each

displaying an expression of excitement, sadness, happiness, and

ambivalence.

This is where it starts getting intense. I am compelled to

closely examine the door on the left. I press on the cold stone, and

hear a noise behind me. Wheeling around, I see Pietro standing in the

doorway, leaning on one wall. He calmly says, “witness the

beginning.”

The door fades away like a dissipating fog, and I see a grassy

hill on the other side. Stepping out onto the hill, I can see a

landscape that stretches as far as my eye can see. Gently rolling

hills and grassy fields reminiscent of the airstrip’s surrounding area

with one clear distinction. As I gaze above the horizon, I am

encountered with the night sky as it appears on Earth, just without

the familiar stars twinkling against the black backdrop of space. The

area around me is still lit somehow, and I can see as if it was

daylight, but the night sky seemed to be more clear and dynamic than I

was familiar with, despite the unnerving lack of stars.

As I focus my gaze on a nondescript point somewhere far in the

distance, a bright white dot of light appears, and rapidly grows

larger. I hear the shrieking scream of a giant bird as it swoops in

from the right side of my peripheral vision across my field of view

like a bolt of lightning. As it comes into contact with the dot in my

view, the universe seems to violently erupt and explode in front of my

103
eyes, and the bird leaves in its wake the familiar night sky, with

millions of tiny speckles of light permeating the darkness.

As the bird passes my field of view back on the other side of the

horizon, I hear the word “witness” resound through the hills and

seemingly through space itself. A great gust of wind nearly knocks me

off of my feet as the ground begins to crack and break around me,

tossing me violently and making a god awful racket. As the hill I’m

standing on breaks off and appears as if it’s going to sink into the

abyss, it turns into a giant wooden sailing ship as the blowing grass

and crumbling earth transform into a raging ocean tempest, with

powerful wind and driving rain coming from black clouds that have

quickly rolled in from my left, obscuring my view of the sky as the

ambient light fades away. I look up to the tallest mast to see the

bird, now gilded, perched atop the mast like a harbinger of

destruction. I am no mariner, and that bird was no albatross.

With a burst of lightning, and an immediate loud crack of

thunder, the seas calm and the storm clouds fade away, revealing a

bright blue sky. I find myself floating in Pietro’s boat, staring at

the waterfall from the center of the cove. Pietro asks of me, “do you

wish to continue?” I never reply, at least not vocally, but I can

sense at this point that Pietro is some sort of guide, not there as a

part of the experience, but merely an arbiter. I step back onto the

shore, cross under the waterfall, and head back into the cave without

turning back.

104
 Where the door I entered had stood was now a ruinous pile of dead

looking stone, and the stone bird was nowhere to be found. I notice

the eyes of the stone jaguar above the middle door have turned an

iridescent glowing jade green, glinting in the light from my torch. I

hear Pietro say “proceed” from behind me, but I already know what must

be done. As I approach the door, it swings open, smacking the stone

wall with a tremendous thud resounding as the world around me fades

away. The ground disintegrates, and I float in space like I’m

swimming in a pool with no water. A cobblestone bridge appears under

my feet, bridging nothing, going nowhere, with no supports or final

destination in sight.

I start running as fast as I can towards the fading lines of the

bridge far off of in the distance. I notice that I am no longer

clothed in a black robe, but stark naked. I turn to my right to see a

jaguar running next to me and keeping pace. As I look into it’s eyes,

I hear Pietro’s voice softly speak the words “Witness the end.” The

Jaguar immediately speeds up to an incredible speed and screams “I am

the end” as it becomes a glimmering black and jade streak fading into

the horizon. I can see land materializing at the end of the bridge

where the jaguar’s figure has faded into the black. The bridge

terminates onto the grassy hilled landscape of my previous experience

in the last room. I see the unrestricted view of the dazzlingly clear

night sky. The golden bird screeches in the distance like it had

before, but as it reaches its apex, the Jaguar leaps from somewhere in

the hills and grabs it by the neck in mid arc.

105
 Whoa.

Everything begins to rumble and quake around me again as the

universe begins to suck itself back inwards towards the point at the

center of my vision. I feel myself being pulled very quickly towards

the center along with the rest of the universe. The land around me

falls away as I begin to float past planets, comets, stars, asteroids,

nebulae, galaxies, and cosmic debris as I come to a stop, floating

just outside our own solar system. I arrive just in time to see the

golden bird burst from the center of the sun as the planets align like

pigs for slaughter allowing the bird to blow through them like a

bullet through glass. As I watch our entire solar system get

systematically destroyed one planet at a time, I start rushing with

the cloud of debris quickly toward the center of the universe

(apparently.) I hit it, which happens very chaotically with the

spaghettification and the whole nine yards, and everything turns

black. In the distance, I see the fading specter of a jaguar in the

distance carrying the now limp and stone colored bird proudly in its

jaws by the broken neck.

The cave rises above me in an instant, and the second door has

now crumbled to dust and the third door is left wide open, with Pietro

perched at the top. He’s crouched in the same position as the figure

had been previously. He looks me sharply in the eyes, catching me off

guard, and says “witness your true nature. You have no choice.”

With that, he jumps from his perch, walks coldly past me and through

106
the waterfall where he dives into the water and swims top speed toward

the river on the opposite side.

I reluctantly enter the room on the other side of the open door,

where I am confronted with a small circular stone room that seemed

like a castle tower. Light comes in through skylights in the rafters,

and the air seems musty and thick with dust that scatters the light

into visible beams stretching down to the floor. The beams of light

fall on various broken and fading musical instruments surrounded by

crumpled up pieces of loose leaf notebook paper. The floor is sandy,

but firm to walk on, and I pace about the room trying to make sense of

the crumpled paper and broken instruments. I glance over to a broken

half of a cello, as a puff of smoke rises taking the form of Pietro

who has a sad look on his face. He seems reluctant, yet determined to

speak as he slowly utters “We cannot go forward, it has been

interrupted.”

As he says those words, I am shocked back into reality by the

screeching yelp of my alarm clock next to my head. I rub my eyes in

angered disbelief, and violently strike the snooze button. I fall

quickly back asleep, and find myself in an obvious tourist shop. I

look around to notice that the shop décor is uncannily similar to the

décor in the airport lounge. I walk over to a map display, and pick

up a map that says “A sailing sportsman’s guide to the coastlines of

Belize.”

I tear open the map and frantically try to locate the cove I had

been occupying, to no avail. I feel a tap on my shoulder and turn

107
around to see a fat middle aged woman with graying hair and a camera

strapped around her neck. She flashes a friendly smile and says “Did

you take the coastal tour? These things always seem to end way too

soon.”

“You wouldn’t believe the half of it, lady,” I say with a movie

star smirk. As I look over her shoulder and across the room, I see

Pietro leaning against a rack of pastel shot glasses staring right at

me over the brim of a wooden gin cup grinning wryly as my snooze fires

up again. I tear the alarm clock from the outlet and throw it across

the room unable to fall asleep again as I’m forced to accept that I

can’t find my true nature in a dream, and have to get ready for work.

Dreams are very interesting. I’m not much for interpreting

dreams, nor do I believe that they necessarily have meaning. There

just seems to be some dreams that scream “I’m trying to tell you

something.” I remember watching a movie called Waking Life that

brought up the cool little pseudo-philosophical idea that you can re-

live your entire life, or have a different life entirely, in the dream

world in the first few minutes before your death. It was interesting.

Mostly avant-garde and artsy, but the point got across. There’s a few

sequences near the end about lucid dreaming and finding out if you’re

in the dream world. It’s worth a watch if you ever get the chance.

It just goes to show you how some people can find meaning in the

strangest parts of the world. There always seems to be some new angle

on an idea you’ve heard a thousand times, and as soon as you think

you’ve gained an understanding about something in this constantly

108
changing world, you’ll come to realize that you don’t know a fucking

thing.

109
 Part Two

The Present

110
 Chapter Nine – I Make Burritos for a Living

Oftentimes, standing behind a cash register for twelve hours in a

day makes me want to shoot the brains out from the back of my skull.

The dreadful barrage of mindless idiot fucks that can pour into a

restaurant is physically disgusting. Everyone has to eat, right?

That means we get everyone at a restaurant; every little stereotype,

archetype, and mongoloid personality prototype. Jung would have

gained a much broader appreciation for psychology if he worked at a

shitty hole in the wall restaurant.

I’ve seen them all. The guy that pretends to be an expert on

everything with the horrifically giant thing growing on the back of

his greasy head. The never say die hippie washout with the Tevas and

white ponytail. The drug dealing black guy with a diamond stud in his

ear big enough to put on a Stepford wife’s ring, rope thickness gold

chains, platinum tooth covers, and a six inch stack of fifty dollar

bills that walks out to a shit pile car from the eighties. The

crooked toothed bitch of a fat woman with body rolls leaking from her

sweat stained sleeveless plain color cotton tee shirt. The drunk Fed-

Ex guy that has such an unhealthy obsession with sadomasochism he

can’t shut up about it. The lonely balding thirty something staring

at the bartender’s ass wishing he had found the one before it was too

late. The immigrant, doesn’t matter where they’re from, fresh off the

boat visibly struggling to remember how to say “onion.” The

narcissistic spray tanned sorority girl loudly chomping on gum and

chatting away on her phone. The greedy yet thrifty business man in a

111
polo shirt who’s bumming about the economy and his wispy stock

portfolio, so uses a coupon and tries to talk me into giving him extra

meat for free. The well meaning, but neurotic frizzle haired lady

that’s trying to convince me the tomatoes in the salsa have “gone

sour.” The charlatan art school students with turtlenecks and berets.

The wandering schizophrenic that asks me if I had seen Santa Claus

just now because that motherfucker owes him money. The smelly

unshaven fat guy with the all your base shirt that you know just wants

to go home and spill burrito all over his keyboard jerking off while

he pretends he has a personality in an internet webcam chat room

account his mom pays for.

There’s always the nameless scruffy “rebel” face with the mall-

bought pre-torn khaki pants and a factory faded Che Guevara shirt.

The terrifyingly cute, yet tragically clueless blonde in the giant bug

sunglasses and a striped pink and white sundress that barely goes down

her thighs. The couple that argues with each other about whether or

not the wife has a hat like mine, which turns into an argument over

whether or not the husband likes hot sauce on his tacos. The

grandfatherly wise old black man with the classy hat to match his

three piece suit, with a soothing southern drawl that, although very

nice, is holding up the now very long line. The squirmy democratic

party weasel that drinks free tap water while reading newspaper

articles out loud standing so uncomfortably close that you can feel

his rotten breath on your neck. The sunken eyed bulimic that orders

something the size of her torso, and pukes in the garbage can instead

of the toilet. The balding middle management jackass that won’t stop

112
giving me cliché in-store marketing ideas. The flashy rich kid with

his pink collar flared up, too much gel in his short bleached-blonde

hair, and aviator sunglasses that might hide his bloodshot eyes but

can’t cover the white powder stains on his nostril. The stuttering

meat head that just wants meat and cheese, so he can drip another

stain on his fading NBA jersey. The cheerful blind guy with a wild

beard that comes in to chat it up with me about classic rock while

‘accidentally’ bumping into women’s chests. The spaced out soccer

moms way too fucked up on vicodin and xanax to be driving a two ton

truck full of children. The psychotic leather skinned cougar in a

tight black dress sucking down Marlboros and well whiskey like there’s

no tomorrow. The all too familiar “wishing for something better” look

in the eyes of a fellow restaurant slave in a food stained uniform.

The vapid stare of a teenage girl that doesn’t want a taco, but that’s

what abusively drunk daddy is going to buy for her, god damn it. The

groups of military recruiters who bring in fresh meat for preliminary

brain washing sessions. The wandering Jesus freak that tells me to

walk in the footsteps of the lord and have a blessed day. The chatter

jawed meth head that comes in and talks to me about Slayer albums, and

how bad Metallica has sucked since they met Bob Rock, and even though

the new album is good without him, they’ll never be the same again.

The gay old man with dangly earrings that calls me “sweetie” and “hot

buns.” The screaming red faced drunk idiot that met the owner at a

bar some time last March and demands a discount because of it. The

street kids that come in for a drink of water, then use the bathroom

to piss on the seat, wipe shit on the walls, plug the sink, and carve

113
“fuck” in the mirror. The “insert random face here” teenagers in

European soccer uniforms that make me turn off the history channel so

they can watch poker on the T.V. with audio. The guy in the decked

out Jeep that gets mad because the drink isn’t free with his burrito

on Wednesdays, only on Fridays.

Then, of course, there’s the long haired white guy wearing too

much stainless steel jewelry that’s behind the counter ringing you up

and wishing he could take a break just long enough to head out back to

the cooler and kill himself, but he won’t be able to step away from

the cash register for the next six hours. I could go on and on for

forever and a day about the people I see while standing behind that

screen and pressing buttons. One of them told me once, “it takes a

lot of people to make a world.” I guess so, huh? Some of them tell

me we’re all the same, and some people tell me we’re all individuals.

No matter what side of the fence you’re on, the next time you stop at

a restaurant, take a second to step back and see what that poor fucker

behind the cash register has to deal with for a change. Put a dollar

in his tip jar, because he deserves it. If he’s an asshole to you,

don’t take it personally- it gets really hard to tell who’s going to

treat you like shit and who’s going to be that refreshing face in the

crowd that says “hello” back to you before going ahead with making

demands to fill his stomach.

There’s a good side to this equation as well. Not everyone is a

piece of shit, saying that would be out of line. I’ve run into plenty

of perfectly pleasant people. People that return your eye contact and

114
greeting with a smile, a friendly hello, and maybe even some sort of

bland conversational bromide like “crazy weather, huh?,” or “how’s

your day,” or sometimes even “ooh! I really like your earrings!” The

lady that came in last week, and remembered the conversation you had

with her about your trip to California. The guy that asked your name

after you remembered his order, and then shook your hand with

respectful vigor while looking you in the eye and honestly saying

“pleased to meet you.” The family with children that stay

respectively silent when in line, order their food politely, and don’t

make a mess of the table. The strippers that toss a few free passes

into the tip jar with one of those winks that would sell her to any

joe six-pack stupid enough not to figure out what’s happening to him,

but can also tell a long story about the girl’s comfort level with

herself. The guy next door at the pizza place who just came upon some

killer weed and wants to spark one up after close. The people who say

“excuse me” before they interrupt what I’m doing to ask me to get

something for them. There is always the kind old man with a dear old

lady that wisecracks his way through the whole transaction with the

whimsy of wisdom beyond words. Anyone, really, that’s nice enough to

look you in the eye, speak politely, and show some small sliver of

respect.

That’s all we’re asking for. You don’t need to ask us about our

personal lives unless you’d really care to know. Just be pleasant,

and we’ll probably do the same. Don’t make ridiculous demands of us,

talk on your cell phone, leave your trash everywhere, hit your

children, or fight with your wife in front of us. We don’t want to

115
see it anymore. Keep it at home, America. Keep it at home. Your own

personal transgressions are yours alone to cope with, but

transgressions are only side tracks on the path. Just don’t involve

the poor guy at the restaurant in your personal struggle for

understanding. March from birth to death with your own god damned

feet. Jesus won’t carry you down the beach, and I won’t either-

unless you’re a chick and you’re going to suck my dick.

We’re all wondering what the hell the point of all of this is,

and we’re all stuck wandering around with our heads up our asses

thinking we know everything about whatever’s going on when the truth

is that none of us know a god damned thing in comparison to what we

all know together. It’s a world made for a nice ivory tower

philosopher like myself to lend a hand in the global misguiding.

There are so many avenues to explore as a human, so many different

circumstances you can be born into and rise above, so many different

people you can see and interact with, so many monuments that we watch

fall into disrepair and crumble to ruins as reminders of how great

some dude was that most people don’t care about anymore anyway.

So I keep beating around the bush with this concept of “the good

life.” What is it? This is where I climb to the highest part of my

ivory tower and say the good life is a life lived free from regret.

Free from fear of transgression, and free from fear of reprisal.

Free from random acts of mindless terror by idiot fucks. Free from

corrupt government.

116
 The good life is not a life free from pain, suffering, contempt,

reaction, disagreement, death, consequence, fear, and anxiety. There

are still things that occur out of random chance that we cannot

control or avoid. There is eternal uncertainty, but that’s a matter

for the future. You have got to take the good with the bad. The good

life cannot be lived without understanding the bad life. You can’t

ever know everything in your life time, but there’s no sense in giving

up the attempt.

The trying times in life allow us to enjoy the times we’re happy,

and sadness reminds us that we’re human. Anxiety reminds us we have a

limited amount of time. Suffering reminds us of all the other people

in the world that have things worse off than we do. Pain reminds us

that no matter how strong our convictions, sometimes it’s hard to

accept what happens around us. The death of others reminds us that

we, too, will die like everyone else. Contempt reminds us we can’t

always be right, and that everyone has a different opinion. There are

many conceptual forces that intertwine with reality to make our

surroundings a dynamic place where we are left to wander around and

try to find our way.

The good life, itself, might be the end goal that we’ll never be

able to reach as a society simply due to the fact that it can mean so

many different things to so many people. The good life functions as

both a distant point on the horizon, and a never ending ideological

quest to render some sort of ultimate realization of what we want but

can’t have.

117
 Can I live the good life while spending my life wanting more, and

making burritos for a living? I don’t know. Sometimes I can’t see

what the point of wondering, or even hoping for a better tomorrow is.

Any way you slice it, it’s going to be a long road home. And in the

end, whether we figure out ourselves and the balance between who we

are and what we want out of life or not, we’re all still going to die.

Fuck.

118
 Chapter Ten – A Renaissance man

We have a tendency to grow up really fast these days. We’re

subjected to the visceral images of an intellectually diverse world

from an early age. Some of us are born into strange circumstances,

but we’re all forced to come to grips with reality sooner or later.

It doesn’t matter how silver your spoon is, some time you’re going to

have to eat with it.

Mankind has begun a conceptual struggle with what its technical

makeup is. The ideological attempt at “diversity in unity,” and the

global crusade to bankrupt itself fighting hunger and poverty in rat

hole nations with corrupt governments has left us wondering if we’re

really doing any actual good. Are we right to interfere with their

ways of life? Are we right to question other people’s right to live

in, love, and lament their seemingly forced predicaments? What if you

had the misfortune of being born into some bombed out wasteland,

trying to pick up the pieces of other people’s lives while

simultaneously trying to create your own? Would you want someone else

coming in and talking about how great they have it and how they can

help you as long as you do what they tell you to do?

Why should we, as a nation, bankrupt ourselves interfering with

the lives of others? We, as Americans, eliminated racism and sexism

in our society with the exception of the few outliers and people no

one else likes anyway. A “man,” in literary terminology, as a member

of “mankind” has become an ambiguous, nameless, faceless, shapeless

119
pseudo-ideal that we all metaphysically long to become in our constant

search for what we call “fulfillment.”

Functioning in the world today requires a tremendous amount of

knowledge that some people just aren’t capable of possessing. Social

evolution has become so frantically paced that we find ourselves all

floating in a sea of technology, networking, interfacing, downloading,

uploading, communicating, searching, and classifying. How does one

represent his or herself as an individual? How does one receive the

fifteen minutes of fame we’re all supposedly granted? How does one

step out of line, think outside the box, or leave their mark? How do

we allow the ideas of billions of people become amalgamated into some

kind of ill conceived pseudo-philosophical collection of bromides in

inspirational self-help books?

Love your brother, do unto others as you would have them do unto

you. What the fuck are we talking about here? Accepting each other,

fearing each other, and avoiding each other? We should all be butting

heads and arguing, not pacifying each other out of fear of offense.

For so long, we feared divine retribution for our thoughts, actions,

and transgressions that we never learned the true meanings of the

words life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We’re so close to

having the good life that we’re willing to take any risk, any shot in

the dark that might offer some sort of solution to the problems facing

us as the human race. We’re all bound equally by our need to be

around each other, and our need to escape one another. That which

binds us is our desire to break that which binds us, forever mired in

120
ideologically frustrating conflicts of interest we escape by any means

necessary. Some escape, as I’ve said, through love, religion, or

chemicals. We’ve all got to cope with the same day to day stressors

that everybody else does. Seeking to be both united and different at

the same time, embracing logical paradoxes like a drunk hooker on

ecstasy. We divide ourselves into little sub culture sub group

pockets and try to forget that some people think differently than us.

No matter how desperately we try to forget, we can’t escape it.

We face, as a society, the choice between what we call a “melting pot”

where multiculturalism means altruistic acceptance of anyone doing

anything, anywhere, or a “salad bowl” where multiculturalism refers to

some kind of esoteric acceptance of different people that offend each

other perpetually in a battle for cultural dominance. Both of these

concepts perpetuate the belief that a cohesive “we” must be developed

by fairly representing the beliefs, traditions, rituals, thoughts,

convictions, causes, and desires of everybody, everywhere, all the

time. That is totally fucking impossible.

Realizing some sort of self-image is a simple function of

socialization these days with a “self” being constructed via a series

of embarrassing photographs and factoid summaries of your “key

statistics” on some stupid website like facebook. Age, sex, location,

favorite quotes, books, movies, music, marital status, race, name,

educational and employment histories, all adding up to paint some kind

of personality portrait. We’ve started commoditizing ourselves so

much that we feel like we are required to write all these things down

121
to prove that we are, in fact, a person; and, in fact, possess an

identity all our own. We’ve leveled the playing field to such an

extent that we have no motivation whatsoever to become “different,” so

standing out of the crowd is just another personality archetype more

than it is a desire to actually change things.

Self marketing has caused a widening diversion between perceived

self image, displayed self image, internet self image, intellectual

self image, and actual personal thoughts. With so many versions of

“self,” we create a personal history that is so complex that we find

it increasingly difficult to objectively define who we are, what we

stand for, what we want, and what we believe in. Our opinions change

by the minute with every fleeting passion and shattered dream. We’re

all attending a daily masquerade where we put on different masks

depending on who we’re around, where we are, what’s going on around

us, and how we’re feeling at the time. With all of these dynamic

facets of self and personal identity, how can we settle on a

definitive representation of who we are as an assembly of action,

reaction, thought, image, history, dreams, opinions, and

interpretations?

Descartes wrote “cogito ergo sum,” which means “I think,

therefore, I am.” Was he the first to learn how not to be an idiot,

or just the first to notice that to float around mindlessly without

thought was to, literally, not be alive in his understanding of the

concept. Surely Descartes wasn’t the first intelligent person in

history, but he certainly was one worthy of recognition. Descartes,

122
and all the people after him that have benefited from the Latin phrase

he first uttered so many years ago are intellectually indebted to him,

and that realization that helped society remove itself from the depths

of an economic, intellectual, artistic, and moral dark age.

To be a renaissance man, one needed to be educated, active,

creative, and enlightened to the perpetual discovery of knowledge;

both personal and in the framework of improving the world in which he

lived. To be a renaissance man in modern times means to have an

intimate understanding of the things that make people different while

at the same time learning from all the lessons taught us by the

countless people that existed before us and left their legacies in the

form of words, thoughts, actions, images, defiance, and sacrifice.

We have a lot to learn, but no one can learn anything if we don’t

teach each other. Why does the word “dream” mean both ‘what happens

in our minds while we sleep,’ and ‘what we wish reality and, moreover,

the world could be’? A funny concept, words.

123
 Chapter Eleven – Love

I am a man. I love women. Unfortunately, it seems to be rooted

in that biological, “my dick fits in them” way. Sex is one of those

things that we have to do, but have invented an entirely separate life

and identity devoted to its hunt and capture. I’ve never had a stable

relationship. By this time, I’m just beginning to think it’s a

pointless waste of time. I know this is hard for many people to agree

with. What I see people calling relationships are a waste of time.

Romanticism and Sex, however, are not. Men and women are entirely

equal except in the fact that the sex organs of one go out, the sex

organs of one go in. They fit together nicely, like puzzle pieces.

It’s fun to put the puzzle together.

For me, it pretty much ends there. I like to look at women.

Talk to them. Make friends with them. Buy them shots at the bar.

But at the end of the night, when most of them go home with other

guys, I’m headed to the coffee shop to write for four hours in a

notebook. I’m a social creature, but I can only take so much of the

garbage dialectic.

I appreciate balancing the fine lines of socialization. I like

to hang out in groups. I like to fuck chicks. I even like just

sleeping with them, it’s all good- sex and sexuality in the twenty

first century are nothing but concepts just like anything else. My

entire social life is nothing but a carefully executed production from

the second I wake up to the second I pass out drunk on the bathroom

124
floor of an unfamiliar house. I’d be scared to think that anyone else

thinks otherwise.

We get up in the morning (or late afternoon in my case,) clean

ourselves off, shave faces and legs, apply various lotions and

cosmetics, browse a large collection of clothing deciding which is an

appropriate costume for the occasion of the day, and we go around to

places that fit with what we’re pretending to take interest in, all in

hopes that we don’t end up sleeping alone our entire lives.

I grew up like every other guy, thinking I was going to marry a

barbie doll and have a nice house with kids and a dog and a bunch of

money to throw around on things I don’t need. My parents met their

junior year of high school, and have been cutely smitten with one

another ever since. I guess that’s kind of what I expected for

myself. Wrong. My parents come from a different time, when their

parents were members of the post world war two generation porking all

the time and settling down to newfound prosperity. My parents grew up

in the wake of the civil rights movement, were children in the

sixties, junior high for disco, and graduating from high school before

coke hit big. My dad played sports, and my mom hung out with the

other chicks and worked at J.C. Penny. My smart fucking dad got a

scholarship and graduated with a nice degree, married my mom, had me

and my brothers, and lived the American dream.

Then I was around to watch the whole god damned American Dream

thing fall apart like glass under boot. I woke up the other day to

MSNBC playing softly in the corner of my room. A cheery, yet

125
strangely distant voice says “and in the markets today, and

unprecedented drop in the Dow Jones Industrial average.” What luck.

Stock market crash. Not quite as bad as it was before World War Two,

but scary enough to make me sit straight up.

Our society has become this constantly changing, shifting,

boundless network of connections made and broken at whim. For about a

year and a half, I went to a bagel shop every Thursday morning at Six

Thirty A.M. for a salt bagel with plain cream cheese. There was a

cute girl that worked there that I think I went to high school with.

I barely recognized her, I’m sure she had no idea who I was. I smiled

at her, she smiled back, and I put a dollar in her tip cup. One day,

I just stopped going. I don’t know why, but I’ve never been back

there since. It’s not that I don’t like bagels anymore, in fact I

could probably go for a salt bagel right now. That’s beside the

point.

I still wonder sometimes if that girl still works there. I’m

sure she does. She’s probably struggling through college, bouncing

from major to major like she bounces from boyfriend to boyfriend.

She’s a cute blonde with piercing eyes. The kind of girl that looks

like she drew horses in high school art class. She was very cheerful.

She always knew my order, and yelled it back to the cook as soon as I

walked in the door. I liked that. She remembered my name. It’s

Zach.

I’ve had a lot of girlfriends, and fuck buddies (“friends with

benefits,” the chicks say, but “sex with a friend,” I say) over the

126
years but none I really cared about except a handful. They were all

unstable relationships at best, most were fleeting, and some were

adulterous and alcohol fueled. In Whatever Happens Happens, I wrote

about two of them. They added a nice literary contrast to each other,

one being an innocent high school fling, the other a full fledged

relationship trainwreck.

I’ve always viewed the stable relationship I grew up watching as

a fantasy. I listened to my friends tell me about their drunk

parents, abusive parents, divorced parents, step brothers, step

sisters, and heard news people talk about gays, teen pregnancies, and

polygamists. All of these concepts were completely foreign and

abstract to me until I left the safety net of my picture perfect

family and catholic school system.

Sex and sexuality are very interesting to me. I like to think

I’m a fairly perceptive person, and I can’t help but notice what’s

going on around me. I choose to take an active interest. When I’m

walking through a city, sitting at a bar, smoking cigarettes in a

coffee shop, or standing next to the keg at a party nursing a solid

colored disposable plastic cup that cost five bucks, I hear and see

all sorts of things that entertain, confuse, and interest me.

I’ve known so many people. I’ve seen their boyfriends and

girlfriends come and go. I’ve watched them soar high on that rushing

feeling you get when you meet a new person that adds some excitement

to your life. I’ve watched them get mutually and subsequently crushed

when the rushing feeling goes away. I’ve seen them get drunk and

127
fight. I’ve seen them cheat on each other, lie to each other, make

up, break up, and drag each other down. I’ve seen dudes get saved by

their girlfriends, and chicks get destroyed by their boyfriends. I’ve

seen people meet, marry, and have children. I’ve even seen a couple

of my friends get divorced already, and I’m only twenty three at the

time I write these words.

The only times I wish I had a girlfriend are when I feel like I

need to be showing one off. I feel kind of sick about that inside.

We crossed the line when we commoditized love, sex, and sexuality.

Now marital status has become a conceptual drop-down list just like

everything else. Straight, gay, bi, trans. Choose your own

adventure. Another fucking statistic, another demographic to be

marketed to.

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

“no.”

“Oh. Why not? You’re cool, you’re kind of hairy but not ugly”

“I don’t want one”

“why not, don’t you like getting laid?”

“yup.”

“got the HIV?”

“nope. Clean.”

“medical problem?”

128
“nope, healthy.”

“why don’t you want a girlfriend?”

“because it’s pointless”

“but don’t you want love?”

“I have it.”

“What?!”

I have romantic interests. I like sitting by a fire over a glass

of wine and laughing with a woman. I like holding hands and walking

down a city street at night. I like watching the snow fall in the

park. I like to sit under the stars. I like to walk down beaches and

listen to the waves. I like meaningful conversations, holding hands,

and walking in the rain. I like to go to the woods in the fall and

look at the colors of the trees. All that crap. I love my life, I

love being alive, and I’m happy that I can share that love with other

people. There's so much to enjoy in the world around us, I just don't

understand why people waste their time with people that drag them

down.

I am not callous, nor heartless. I like hugs, and passing notes.

I like pet names, I like the smell of fruity shampoo. If I get drunk

enough, I’ll dance. For every time I get angry or upset about life,

all I ever have to do is think of a moment like this in my past. A

brief memory of time well spent. A passing daydream of what might

129
come. A fading reverie of a time when things weren’t as bad as they

are now.

I had a girlfriend, once, that I wanted to impress with some

crazy gift on Valentine’s Day. I learned how to make fortune cookies,

which really wasn’t that hard, and I hand wrote messages to her. I

went out and bought a nice looking red heart shaped box, wrapped the

cookies in tissue paper all artsy and whatnot, and tied it shut with a

ribbon. We went out to a movie, and afterward, I handed her the box.

I said, “I made something for you, I hope you like it.”

She takes the box, opens it, looks at them, closes it, throws

them in the backseat and says “I’m not hungry, let’s go back to my

house.” I cringed as I heard the cookies break from the impact. I

brought her back, and she left them in my backseat. I was crushed.

Ever since then, I have hated Valentine’s Day. I thought people liked

to get meaningful gifts like that. I guess I thought wrong.

For all the benefits of a valuable relationship with another

human being, whatever level, I just can’t ever seem to be fully

satisfied. I’ve had, and still have, friends that I wish I could

spend every minute of the day with, but the good times never seem to

last. I’ve never felt totally comfortable with another person to such

an extent that I thought I could spend the rest of my life living with

them. It’s something I’ve begun to think is just another concept we

invented to keep ourselves wishing for something better while

accepting what we have in front of us.

130
 I don’t want to have a girlfriend just because I feel like I

should have one. I don’t want some girl hanging off my arm unless she

honestly wants to be there. How is that not slavery? Love is

something everyone seems to feel and know exists, but no one can

define it or control it. Love can mean many things. Passion, desire,

sex, friendship, dedication, commitment, charity, sacrifice,

salvation, comfort, safety. All of these serving as only a fraction

of the whole. I love this, I love that, I love you, I love him, I

love her, I love it, I love them, I love nothing, I love everything, I

love someone, I love my cat, I love something, I love chili cheese

dogs. All things I hear and say all the time. Words we use every

day. Concepts we throw around at each other, hoping the other has the

same opinion.

Love has just become another commodity to be bought and sold

through valentines, chocolates, prophylactics, flowers, and cheap red

things shaped like hearts. Love has become something that everybody

wants, everybody expects, and everyone feels empty without. But how

can you take away emptiness with empty love? Why do I see so many

people with such bright futures committing themselves to some person

arbitrarily just because they feel some weird need to be held by

someone? Why dedicate yourself and your love to a single person with

no intent whatsoever in staying with them on a long term basis? Why

would you dedicate yourself to anyone other than yourself?

You should be looking out for yourself, not participating in some

sort of courtship fallacy that obviously exists only in outliers and

131
story books. Want to have meaningless sex? Do it. Wear a condom,

take the pill. If you want to have kids, have them. If you can’t

raise them, don’t. These things are self evident. We’re supposed to

have sex. It feels good, but happens to ultimately result in

propagating the species unless otherwise thwarted by chemicals,

surgeons, or plastic barriers.

Want to have a boyfriend? Have a girlfriend? Make some bucks

rubbing your clit on the internet? Do it, why not? Want to get

married? Want to get divorced? Go for it. Kids make for great tax

write offs. They also must be a lot of fun to teach and watch grow

up. I just can’t imagine that I’ll ever find what I really want in my

lady fantasy, and even if I do she’ll probably be dating some idiot

fuck with a six pack and a healthy tan like always. We’ve also taken

to commoditizing the concept of the ideal. Ideal body, ideal house,

ideal job, ideal spouse, ideal gym, ideal neighborhood. If we don’t

have it, we want it. If we can’t have it, we rest assured knowing

it’s there to be had if we were only to wish hard enough to make it

so. Anything we invent about the interaction between us and them can

be commoditized in real life by some accessory or self help course.

We’ve grown to accept some kind of alternate reality based on

ideals and concepts, completely separate from the reality of life,

death, tragedy, inconsistency, truth, and ignorance. We’ve separated

ourselves on so many levels that we are identified by what makes us

different, all of a sudden seeking that difference as a definition

132
instead of perpetuating our traditional forms of family life, cultural

identity, sexual identity, and virtue.

All of these concepts dictate that we cannot feel “complete”

without a spouse, or in my age group, a “girlfriend.” What the fuck

does that term even mean? It supports some sort of committed feeling

to some other person that the other person may only feel to a certain

degree. Girlfriend has an ambiguous nature. I have always had a lot

of friends who were girls. I mean, they're half the population, you

know? I have close relationships with them, I care about them. I

don’t want them to get hurt. The same as any other friend I have.

They’re definitely not my girlfriend, but when I’m with them- we get

asked all the time. They explain, I lament.

I lament because I feel like I should be saying yes, I may wish I

was saying yes, but I’m not. Why should they assume? Why should they

care? Why can’t they just assume I’m trying to have a good time like

anyone else? Why do I need to be identified by my relationship status

with someone I’m just trying to party with and hold down the keg?

I can’t help but finding myself asking the question: “why don’t

you have a girlfriend?” I recall a picturesque late summer moment in

a park somewhere in Chicago not too long ago with a friend of mine,

being confronted to supply an answer to that question. I said I had

just given up. It was the truth. I’ve met so many people in my

wanderings around this planet, and specifically my country. I have

heard so many stories, seen so many people at so many different stages

in life. So many opinions, so many ideas.

133
 I guess there’s some biological urge to propagate my species that

makes me attracted to every woman that pays attention to me. I don’t

know what it is. I hold my female friends in higher regard than my

male friends, generally. I’m vain and narcissistic, and I love to be

seen with good looking chicks, even if they aren’t my “girlfriend.”

But that’s not even part of why I hang out with them.

I’ve found that some of my most meaningful friendships have been

with women. It never lasts, because they don’t want to be my

“girlfriend,” but we always have a good time while we’re together.

I’ve seen them meet guys, break up with guys, cheat on them, fend them

off, and cry over them. I see their boyfriends treat them like taken

for granted piles of meat. They take them out to the bar and show

them off to all of their friends, and then I have to hear the girls

talk late at night when the boyfriends are gone about how they don’t

give them orgasms and can only fuck for ten minutes. Years and years

I’ve listened to this garbage.

They move on, leave town, graduate, or stop drinking, whatever.

It doesn’t matter. They’ve moved on from life just like everyone

else, man or woman. Things come up. People come and go. You never

know who’s going to stick by your side.

You know what? The whole god damned process makes me sick. I

don’t spend my precious spare time wandering around looking to get my

dick wet. I absolutely love having sex. I just don’t feel the need

to pursue some other person and make them shape their life around mine

just so I can fuck them. It’s not that big of a deal to me. It’s

134
just one of many pleasures on this wonderful planet that we try our

best to keep each other away from.

I’m not into the whole twisted Hollywood sexuality either. I’m

not gay, for whatever reason I don’t really have any gay friends, I

don’t know any swingers, and I try to stay out of the affairs of

strippers and prostitutes because I learned my lessons with them.

Sadomasochism sounds kind of fun, but not really my thing. The

blanketing politically ambiguous yet sexuality identifying term

“alternate lifestyle” denotes two things; a moral, and a virtue. The

moral choice is what kind of people bring sexual pleasure, the virtue

is to vocally admit it.

Ideally, I would picture myself with a girlfriend, but I’m not

going to just accept any girl that comes my way so I can select “in a

relationship” in my drop down lists. If I’m going to devote any of my

precious time on earth into a relationship of any kind with anyone; be

it of a romantic, sexual, economic, or friendly nature, it better be

fucking worthwhile. I want to learn something about other people and

about myself by having a relationship. I don’t seek to spend all my

time devoted to one person that may leave me at any time. It’s

terrifying. I have plenty of love to give, and I feel loved from the

second I wake up in the morning. I don’t see love as something I only

give one person, it’s something I give and receive to and from many

people in varying levels.

For someone to make the demand that I would be only with them all

the time, or insist that they are attached to me when in public, would

135
only result in repulsion. I like being touched, but if I’m at a party

and I want to talk to my friends, I would expect my friends or

“girlfriend” to have them as well. I wouldn’t expect them to spend

all of their valuable time hanging off of me like an expensive

accessory that I keep around with presents and mind games. I don’t

have the heart to put into such a meaningless exchange.

I’m very selective in the people I choose to spend my time with.

If I don’t like you, you’d probably know it. I don’t waste my time.

I don’t believe in god, which means I don’t believe in an afterlife,

which therefore means that you can be fucking sure that I won’t be

wasting my precious time on fool’s errands. I will go to great

lengths to help out my friends and ensure that they have a good time

when they are with me. My friendships are the things I value the most

in my life. Whether they know it or not, or even care, all of my

friends have more of my admiration and respect than I could ever

communicate to them, even in a drunken stupor.

I guess it’s not that I don’t want a girlfriend, it’s that I

don’t need one, and I’m “picky” as they say. The reliable sex would

be nice, but it’s not necessary to me for a feeling of fulfillment and

completion in life. Honestly, it’s only spent ejaculate. Sex to me

is not something that requires total devotion and commitment. Sex is

not Love. It’s just something that people can do together that

happens to feel extremely good. I wouldn’t expect some woman to hold

me in some elevated regard, because I am not perfect in any sense of

the word. I can’t expect the same of them. I could perpetuate a

136
monogamous relationship, but only with a person that I honestly felt I

wanted to be around for an extended period of time.

I never know how to approach the whole thing anyway, and it seems

like every chick worth having is hanging on to some idiot fuck anyhow.

I don’t understand it, I don’t think I ever will, and therefore I am

giving up. I will never actively seek a girlfriend again in my life.

If I find some brave woman that naturally just assumes that position

by her own right and certainty of that right, I suppose that’s the

only way it’s ever going to happen. The love of another person,

whatever level, is not something that I take lightly. Treading

metaphorical water, afloat in some giant sea of stupidity, it’s

absolutely imperative to associate with other humans that you value

and care for. That’s what love is. Not some stupid fucking

valentine. It’s a two-way, mutually beneficial desire to spend your

valuable time with someone else. Its ultimate fruition is a marriage

in the civil union and tax sense that allows you to pool your assets

legally because you feel that you can rely on the other person to take

care of your old decrepit ass as it falls apart from too much

partying. Be it directed to a person, place, thing, animal or concept,

love is just another name for an idea we all seem to share. Another

concept depending on feelings and other concepts in order to be

explained.

I wish and hope for a love like that, but I don’t honestly think

it will ever happen. That kind of love is rare, and I spend entirely

too much time devoted to my own ends that I don’t think anyone could

137
ever tolerate being around me for that long. I can’t say I would

blame them, either. Forever is a long time. In the meantime, and

perhaps forever, I am content with myself enough that I don’t feel the

need to have a girl around constantly to tell me how cool I am. I

already know, I don’t need to be reminded. It’s a commodity I don’t

feel like I should have to pay for. I don’t want a woman as a prize,

I want a woman as an equal.

But what do you care anyway, John. Q. Public, you’re dating that

hot blonde behind the counter at the bagel joint. You are an asshole.

I doubt you care, Suzie B. Hugetits, because you’re getting stuffed

every night by a meathead with a middle management income and the IQ

of a promising toddler. Have fun with the three kids after the

divorce and inevitable weight gain. I hope you spend your forties

taking xanax and wishing you hadn’t married that piece of shit waste

of life that spends his time drinking beer, complaining, watching

football, and breaking things he’s trying to fix.

Don’t take yourself lightly. You’re all you’ve got. Don’t

dedicate yourself to some mindless charade, love life or otherwise.

No sense in faking anything these days, we all know everything about

everybody else anyway. I feel like if I got a girlfriend all of a

sudden, and I called my friend they’d just say “yeah, I got the update

from facebook on my phone in class… what’s her name?” But they’d know

already because it’s on the fucking facebook.

I remember being in law class back in high school and hearing the

phrase “never ask a question you don’t already know the answer to.”

138
That’s some really interesting advice. Doing dumb cartoonish shit

like stressing over who I was going to take to the school dance was

never in my bag, anyway. Tenting it up on the sunny face of some

mountain in the middle of nowhere? Now that's my cup of tea.

Never ask a question you don't know the answer to. I'll rephrase

it, and add a clause- Don't ask if you don't know, or have a really

good idea. Better to spend your life taking it as it comes, face

forward, as a citizen of the world. Know what you're getting yourself

into. The only other way is to be come a television dependent idiot

fuck with a dumb wife a dumb kid.

139
 Chapter Twelve – A Citizen of the World

What does it mean to be a citizen of the world? When have we

ever had that distinction in the history of the world? Is it really

possible to be a citizen of the world without understanding to a

certain extent how the world itself works? Is that even possible? What

could it mean, really, to be a citizen of the world?

Aren’t we all citizens of the world? I mean, we really only have

one of them. Is that really the top of the hierarchy? Is that the

ultimate form of society? Could that be a bad thing in the end? Is

that where we’re all headed? Down the funnel from the melting pot to

become a long line of blank faces dressed in ambiguous grays? Is the

concept of global citizenship a sign of the apocalypse? Is this what

Orwell and Huxley saw? If we have no lines to separate us, what

happens to the healthy and necessary debate? If everyone is allowed

to go wherever they feel, do whatever they want, say what they want to

say, and think what they want to think without fear of reproach, then

will we all just accept mental stagnation as we simply give up the

attempt to answer all the questions of the universe?

Will mankind ever reach a point where there is no frontier? No

new ideas, no new technology, no new conquest, no new destinations, no

new development, no desire, no fear, no need, no want? Is that

utopia? Dealing strictly with concepts again, what is the concept of

utopia? A perfect place where no one disagrees, you get everything

you want or need, and no one ever has to suffer? Would you want that

for yourself? No anguish to counteract your highs? No doldrums to

140
balance your winds of change? No ideological conflicts? Is that

heaven? Do we really want that? Wouldn’t that really be hell? Is

there any difference between the two? Is there really any difference

from any concept to any other? Is everything we hold dear just a

corrupt facade?

We’ve come to this juncture as a result of our own insistence.

We solemnly kept up the search for “truth.” We’ve got the possibility

to end the world sitting in the bottom of thousands of missile silos

all over earth, just waiting for our world leaders to have a nicotine

fit and press the proverbial button. We lost our innocence as

humanity the day America brought us all into the nuclear age. That

point has been argued to death, along with every other point any one

had, ever, since the whole fucking thing got started with the dick

face in the Tigris-Euphrates river basin that drew triangles in a

block of mud with a stick.

There’s something about being a citizen of the world, and our

communities at the same time. While relying on what divides us to

separate and stratify ourselves, we also use that very distinction to

recognize each other and identify ourselves. Every once in a while

you find a person you can actually relate to, even thousands of miles

away from your comfort zone. They do exist.

When we were lost in the Redwood Forest wandering around trying

to find a campsite, we came across a few descent ones, but nothing

that really caught our attention. There was one site we almost took,

consisting of a communal picnic table, six well groomed sites, food

141
safes to keep the animals away, and a wooden latrine all centrally

located around a fire pit with a metal ring. It was less than a mile

away from a paved parking lot with running water. We thought about it

for a moment, until we noticed a fat, wheezing group of teenagers

hiking coolers full of beer down the paths. Here I am trying to enjoy

the wilderness in quiet solitude, and I am still confronted with the

prospect of listening to idiot fucks bitch about their venereal

diseases in loud drunken yelps.

We left, and decided to find the most remote campsite we could.

We drove down a rutted out two track designated on the map as a cliff

line area near an old World War Two outpost. We barely made it back

there, dodging overgrown roots and foot deep ruts. We figured there

was little chance of human contact, considering the parking lot

dropped off three hundred feet to the Pacific Ocean, and the campsite

was a mile hike up the hill with barely a path and no lights at night.

Real camping. We brewed some tea on the camping stove we brought with

us, and got to setting up camp. Redwood is famously difficult to

burn, so as we were struggling with creating the fire, we hear a voice

call out from the distance.

“Hey!”

Being in the outdoor enthusiast community generally means you’re

going to find a lot of like-minded folks in your wanderings. When you

pass a fellow woodsman, you say hello. It’s common courtesy, and a

mutual show of respect and understanding.

142
 “What’s up?,” we respond immediately.

“Hey guys, how’s it goin?” we hear again, with the sound of

rustling grass and footsteps. A guy about our age approached, looking

fairly stereotypical for an outdoorsy type. Unshaven, long-ish black

hair, flannels, gleam in the eye from the overwhelming surroundings.

He comes up, shakes our hands and introduces himself.

“Hey, my name’s Nate – you guys from Michigan?”

We’re a little taken back, and I say “…yeah, how did you know?”

“Oh, there’s a car parked in the lot with a Michigan tag on it.

I’m from East Lansing, I moved out here a few years ago after I

visited. Got a job down in Arcata, and I’m staying with the logging

guys from Humboldt State. You guys smoke bud?”

Of course. Meet someone in Humboldt county, even if they’re from

Michigan, they’re gonna smoke bud. “Yeah, we smoke- but I just ran

out this morning”

“It’s all good, I’ve got a joint left that we can smoke after I

set up camp. I have some sausages, too, if you want them- I can’t eat

them all myself. Plus, if you guys are headed south tomorrow, I can

probably find you a sack in town if you don’t mind checking out

Arcata. We can get a beer or something and I can show you the city.”

Fucking righteous. Not only did we find a new friend a few

thousand miles away from home, but we had a few things in common, and

143
better yet he was going to solve my weed problems. “That’s fucking

awesome,” I say with an ear to ear grin.

Nate took his leave, marching back down the hill to get his gear

and set up camp. I began to feel a little under the weather, so I got

in the tent to take a nap. An hour or so later, I heard Nate come

back up, and he smoked the joint with Kevin, but I had a pounding

headache and just wanted to sleep. I know it must have been bad

considering I passed up a smoke, which I never do. In my light nap, I

heard Kevin and Nate talking by the fire. I listened to the sound of

the animals, the peace of the starry sky, the crack of the fire, and

the low chatter of two new found friends. Life at that moment was

good. Nearly as peaceful as my moment on the rock earlier that day.

I was beginning to feel a little more comfortable with myself,

finding some profound satisfaction that there was another person I

could relate to so far away. A life raft on the sea of stupidity

around me. A friendly face in the fog. Pick your metaphor, it was a

good thing to know we weren’t alone in our pursuit of intellectual

happiness and mental peace.

Nate went on to tell Kevin the story about how he ended up out in

California. I’m sure everyone’s heard a lot of stories about people

ending up in California. It seems to attract those types of people

seeking escape from the rest of the country. It must be sad when they

get there and find out it’s all the same no matter where you go. I

had already learned those lessons.

144
 I was having a hell of a time trying to get some sleep. My

heartburn was flaring up, my head was pounding, my mouth was dry, I

had no water, and I was in dire need of a lengthy piss. I finally

shook myself awake around two so I could go down the hill to the car

and find my TUMS and Aspirin. I grabbed for my headlamp and walking

stick, and headed down the trail for a dark and treacherous voyage

through the overgrowth toward the car.

As I step out into the clearing next to the road, I hear Nate

call my name. He tells me he’s about to head home due to the cold,

and gives me his phone number so we can call him in the morning and

get directions to Arcata. I thanked him, and told him we had a nice

fifth of Patron Silver to crack open if he didn’t mind. He didn’t.

He hopped in the truck and took off down the dirt road, and I went for

the meds.

Dwelling on the prospect of hiking back up that fucking hill in

the middle of the night, I opted for a warm nap in the back of the

car. After a healthy swig of water, some calcium carbonate, and a bit

of blood thinner, I was finally in a position to get some restful

sleep.

I woke up shortly after dawn, with a breathtaking view of the

pacific ocean from the cliff we were parked on. I couldn’t help but

smile, being in such a god damned beautiful place. I couldn’t help

but smile even bigger knowing I was going to be scoring some legendary

Humboldt grass later that day.

145
 After some personal time pondering what I was experiencing, I set

up the hill to the campsite to see if Kevin was awake. I found him

poking at the fire with a stick, brewing a cup of tea. I told him I

had slept in the car, and he told me about his conversation with Nate.

We broke camp and set out south in search of good food, hot coffee,

and cell phone service to call Nate.

After some breakfast and purchasing supplies in town, we put in

the call. Arcata was about two hours south of us right off the

Pacific coast highway, nestled on the other side of the ridge. As we

got off the exit, I noticed that there was no real sign of habitation

anywhere. Since we had been told, we figured it was the right way to

go, but if we hadn’t been told there would have been no reason to

suspect that any civilization was anywhere near that exit.

We took the exit, followed the roundabout, and drove about three

miles down the road as instructed, turned right, and found ourselves

descending into a beautiful valley town. As we rolled down the hill,

the sun poked out from beyond the broken horizon and punctuated the

quaint city skyline. I muttered, jaw agape, to Kevin, “I think we

have just stumbled upon paradise.”

We drove to the obvious center of town, as instructed, parked and

set out on foot to the pedestrian square. After a short walk, we came

to the statue in the center of the park, where we met Nate. After the

obligatory handshakes and hellos, we sat down on the bench to enjoy

the surroundings. He told us a bit about Arcata, some of the cool

places in town, about the college, about the beautiful women, and

146
about the perfect weather. Pacific Ocean less than an hour away,

surrounded by the Redwood Forest, a few hours north of the San

Francisco smog, nestled in the mountains, rarely snows, never over

eighty, never below freezing. Sounds like paradise to me.

It was about noon, and the dude with the grass didn’t get back

from logging camp until five or so, which left us with a few hours to

kill. We shot the shit a while, checked out a local donut shop with

some fucking delicious cake donuts, browsed the used bookstores, and

enjoyed the aforementioned female scenery. Paradise, surely it was.

Nate had to go to class for an hour or so, and left us with

directions to his house. We grabbed a late lunch waiting for him, and

I found an ATM to get the seventy bucks to get the quarter of grass.

Seventy a quarter was thirty less than I had been paying at home, and

Humboldt grass is rightfully legendary. Needless to say as it is

already obvious, I was delighted.

We drove down the dirt road to the farm that Nate was staying on.

It was a pig farm, and the farmer had allocated a small amount of land

for a small real estate venture, along with a few spaces for R.V.’s.

It was a nice place, just out of town. Rustic enough to call

peaceful, close enough to civilization not to go crazy. I found the

buried bottle of Patron from the back of the car, and we knocked on

the door.

Nate answered, and introduced us to his roommates. We all shared

a shot of Tequila, and talked about where we were all from and how we

147
got to Arcata, California. There were a lot of interesting stories,

as any experienced traveler can testify to. It seems like people that

live with the understanding of an entire world around them always have

good stories to tell.

After another round of shots, we headed out back to the R.V. with

the dope. The guy, I can’t remember his name, reminds me it’s seventy

for the quarter. I surrender the cash, he retreats into the R.V.

while I pour another round.

After he comes out, he takes the glass, we toast to great

adventures. He smiles, pulls the bag from his hoodie’s front pocket,

and says “this is a grip more than a quarter, welcome to Humboldt.”

In my had drops an entire ounce of the best marijuana I have ever

seen in my life. Had I not been three double shots of Patron down, I

would have ejaculated in my jeans. I just smiled, and said “thank

you” about ten times. We went out back to see the pigs and smoke a

farewell cigarette, and Kevin and I loaded up the car for the drive

south to San Francisco.

We took one last round of shots, thanked everyone for their

hospitality, exchanged numbers, addresses, and E-Mails, and promised

to stay in touch.

As Kevin and I pulled back on to the Pacific Coast Highway, we

were presented with a classic Pacific Ocean sunset to add a perfect

end to a perfect day. I left that city with a new feeling of

fulfillment in life, and a satisfaction that I wasn’t the only person

148
on this Earth that loved his life and yearned for the experiences it

has to offer.

Being a global citizen means many things. It implies an acute

understanding of how small one person is in relation to the global

expanse. It implies a level of intellectual awareness that allows you

to contemplate things outside your own frame of reference. It

requires that you understand the world has many faces, cultures,

opinions, customs, and ideas. It goes without saying that you would

possess the social skills to interact respectfully with people on a

personal level. It’s a strong bet that you yearn for the new, respect

the old, and take full appreciation of the time between. Being a

global citizen means you have reached a new level of existence, as a

child of history, and a recipient of its bounty. Global citizenship

is the next intellectual paradigm, and the progenitor of an

intellectual revolution.

149
 Chapter Thirteen – A Life Raft on Stupid Sea

When we were young, Kevin and I took a trip to Colorado. We were

thirteen or fourteen, I guess- I think it was right before high

school. His dad flew out there with us, rented a car, and drove from

Denver to a little town in the Rockies called Leadville. We climbed a

mountain called Mount Elbert, which is the highest mountain in

Colorado and the Continental United States. It’s not much of a

technical climb, there’s a path that goes right up it. There’s not

much glory to be had by conquering the mountain.

The point of going was never to climb the mountain, it was to go.

To enjoy ourselves in the mountains. We camped at the base of Mount

Elbert, in a nice campground called Half Moon. The scenery is

idyllic, and you can drive around the mountains and view a hundred

years of mining history. The town itself isn’t that big, but has a

nice downtown area with shops like any other American town. There’s a

main street that runs through the major business area, and out into

the mountains. Just before you leave town, there’s a small restaurant

called “The Golden Burro Café.”

It’s nothing special, just your normal American spread.

Hamburgers, chicken strips, soup, salad, meat loaf, fries, generic

desserts, all served up by a middle aged woman with a cigarette torn

voice writing your order on a pad of paper she took from her stained

apron. America. How I love it here.

150
 We ate there a few times during our stay, and I’ve always

remembered it. From where we always chose to sit, there was a

beautiful view of the mountain range we were staying at the foot of.

I’ll never forget the experience. It’s one of those moments I cherish

and keep in the back of my mind for trying times. I’ve been friends

with Kevin for so long that he and I have been able to share many

moments like this. Beautiful scenery, time well spent, and memories

to share and tell stories about.

There’s a guy that comes into Big Burrito named Bruce. He’s an

older guy, well traveled and well spoken. He orders tamales, loves

the hot sauce, and compliments me on my ability to make a margarita.

He usually puts a dollar in my tip jar, and when we talk he remembers

what we talked about. He knows my name.

One day, we were both on the subject of travels. He told me he

was born in a small mining town in Colorado. Out of the blue, I just

said, “Leadville?” He laughs deeply and says “Yeah, and I think

that’s the first time anyone I’ve met has known about that town.”

I immediately asked him about the Golden Burro Café. He laughed

again, and said he remembered the food not being so good, but recalled

it being a good place none the less. “Ah, the metal ass, I remember

it fondly.” It wasn’t that crushing to hear a different view on the

place. I had always revered it as some perfect place of my distant

memories. It’s just another trashy restaurant in the American

wasteland. A dick smack spot on the map with no significance but what

people make of it.

151
 Memories aren’t always so connected with the places as much as

the entire experience. Having a memory allows us to add so much more

value to our time spent on this planet and around all these people.

We remember what we like, and what we need to stay away from. They

say a picture is worth a thousand words, but a good chunk of time well

spent is incapable of being put into words. It exists as a memory

that you respond to emotionally and often share with other people.

Finding another person that you can spend valuable time with, and

a good place to spend it is like a life raft on stupid sea. Every day

we have to put up with so much shit that we don’t want to involve

ourselves with, it’s so nice to feel alive every once in a while. You

walk the city streets dodging beggars and idiot fucks, and you duck

into a coffee shop to see a guy in the corner reading Atlas Shrugged

with wide eyes flipping pages furiously. I love it.

You know, maybe it’s not so bad that all these idiots are around.

Someone has to mop the floors at night, right? Maybe some people see

me as just another idiot fuck. Wandering around, talking about how

ridiculous marriage is and how god is a stupid concept we invented to

hold shit above people, all while I make burritos for a living and

pretend to be an author. I don’t care. I have my life rafts, and I

have my moments of glory and my moments of pain. I wouldn’t trade

them in for anything, for any price. I love my life. It belongs to

me, and no one else can have it. My time on this Earth is very

valuable to me, and I refuse to waste it. What do you value?

152
 Life rafts on stupid sea are the escape we all desire. The

escape from the world around us as a whole. Our friends, our business

partners, our lovers, our houses, and our hang outs. The shelter from

the rain. This concept we’ve created in what we call “society”

rewards us with these dynamics. Personal highs and lows that are only

felt conceptually, but as real as any physical thing. Existing only

by yourself and in a world with no other humans to interact with would

surely be hell. Even if you only hate them all, it’s still an impetus

to better yourself and prove them all stupid and worthless. We exist

as an individual only because there’s a group to individuate ourselves

from.

Relationships come and go, just like life rafts sink and get

busted up on the docks. Sometimes you can build the raft in to a

ship, and keep it in the harbor. These are the relationships you

spend time cultivating. The ones that mean more to you than the

others. Ship building is a good metaphor for friendship, I guess.

You have to have a ship to sail the sea, and the more equipped the

ship is to keep you afloat and comfortable, the better. The best

ships can weather the most powerful of storms, yet take the most to

build, equip, and maintain. Sometimes ships sail to seas unknown,

never to be heard from again.

We don’t know what to do with the people that just don’t get it.

Some of them we label as criminals and put them in prisons. Some of

them we label as retarded and we put them in asylums or heavily

medicate them and pay someone to keep an eye. Some of them get it

153
enough to exist in the world, but can’t progress. We keep them under

our thumbs with religion, the economy, and fear. Some of them are

close to where they need to be intellectually to take full advantage

of the world, but just can’t seem to cross the line. These are the

people we try to help, and try to steer in the right direction. All

of them are separated from us solely by their personal and individual

ability to exist in the society we created.

What do we do? Exist as we always have, using our differences

both as an identification and a source of repulsion? Do we try to

change things? Are there really any other options? Can you cater to

one side of a conceptual balance without taking away from the other?

How do we exist together as people, yet identify ourselves as

individuals? When we’re talking about concepts, there has to be a

balance between one side of the fence and the other. The intellectual

haves and have nots. It’s depressing. Is it our right to wish for a

better world when we know it will never happen? Can we steer our

ships toward the setting sun without fear of intellectual pirates?

What could the intellectual revolution be revolting against? The

tyranny of the stupid over the smart? That’s not right either. It’s

doomed to failure because of the ability of the intellectually

baseless to improve their predicament. Sic semper evello mortem

tyrannis.

Drawing a clear line between smart and stupid is impossible just

like anything else being relative, externally interpreted, personal,

and individuated. Can we revolt against conceptual balances? Can we

154
revolt against the idea that we have to be on one side of the fence or

the other? Will America continue to be divided into red and blue

states, or can we all register as independents? There’s a nice clean

similarity to the conceptual struggles we know and lament in the

American political system.

We are all Americans. We are fifty states united under a federal

government of individuals representing groups of individuals. They

argue back and forth about theoretical concepts, and create laws and

rules to try to organize society and deliver justice to those who

chose to deviate from those rules. We have a two party system that

divides groups of people with the same goals of existing and

prospering into “republicans” and “democrats.” There are other

parties, but none with enough numbers to matter in Washington.

There’s a very small ideological difference between the two that’s

just as foggy as it is small. Republicans traditionally support

smaller government, less taxes, and a free market economy. Democrats

traditionally support government spending on social programs, labor

unions, and cultural diversity. While seemingly fighting for opposite

conceptual sides of fences, they are only establishing where the fence

is. There was never a dispute over there being a border, only where

the border lies.

Buddhists talk about the middle way, which is a nice way to wrap

up the whole process. People do not completely agree on anything that

lay in concept. Physical things are unerring and permanent. Concepts

are esoteric and liquid.

155
 Establishing a middle ground is for extremists. Average people

don't fall into the extremes, they capitulate somewhere near the

middle of ideological fights. Most people can reason both sides of a

good argument. While sailing the stormy seas of society, what have we

but ships, sailors, harbors, and cargo?

156
 Chapter Fourteen – When The Lights go out in New York City

Is there really any point to seek to remove ourselves from this

struggle? Is there any way to make Atlas shrug? I’ve mentioned this

a few times, but one of the best books I have ever read is Atlas

Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. It’s a hell of a book; half philosophical mind

fuck, half literary masterpiece.

In it, the life and times of a country of people are decided and

affected by influential people that argue constantly over the good

life, what it is, and how to get it. We encounter characters Dagny

Taggart, Hank Rearden, Francisco D’Anconia, Hugh Akston, John Galt,

Ragnar Danneskjold, and others united in a struggle against idiot

fucks and their Washington counterparts James Taggart, Orren Boyle,

Wesley Mouch, and Dr. Robert Stadler.

Like it said on the back, the book is tremendous in scope, a

literary classic, and equally distributed in those that read it, hated

it, and loved it. I am one of the people that read it several times,

found solace in the ideas of Ayn Rand, and urged others to read it and

appreciate it as I had.

John Galt, the leader of an intellectual revolution, comes to the

realization that he is living for other people that feed off of him

and his ideas without acknowledging his accomplishments as his. He

invents a radical new invention that converts the static electricity

in the atmosphere to kinetic energy that can be applied to a motor.

This would obviously change the world around him very rapidly, but he

157
doesn’t want the world to benefit from his invention while

ideologically supporting this idea that what he did was done for

humanity as a whole. Although it was meant to be delivered to

humanity, John Galt struggled with his ability being capitalized upon

to reward his inferior co-workers.

Although appreciating the fact that humanity would benefit from

his invention, he works at a company that has been sanctimoniously

dumped in the hands of the workers. This has resulted in the men

being paid according to their needs which are decided originally by

the mass, but eventually decided by someone arbitrarily put in charge

of deciding what a person’s needs were. They were forced to work

according to their ability, which meant that John “needed less” based

on his lack of a family, but was able to work more due to his enormous

intellect.

If the problems in this are not self evident to you, allow me to

explain. If you are someone capable of creating something, anything,

be it a new idea, a new machine, a new piece of music, or a new piece

of art, you deserve recognition and respect for the formulation of

that new contribution to society.

This is not a characteristic to be taken lightly, and as John's

character shows us in the book, he doesn’t take it lightly either.

Instead of letting the company take all the profit and credit to

further its ridiculous needs, he quits and takes his new ideas with

him.

158
 He’s lucky enough to have a few friends that act as life rafts on

stupid sea, sharing his ideas and respect for what it means to have

them. All the men in Washington are seeking to make money for

themselves by influencing business and the stock market to take

advantage of people not equipped to take care of themselves and

profiting from their inabilities. They construct a flawed economic

system doomed from its beginnings in a room full of pig-headed

sociopaths.

John and his friends Francisco and Ragnar seek to use their

abilities as an inventor and progenitor of revolution, a global

financial entity, and a pirate, respectively, to undermine the global

society of idiocracy perpetuated by old money ass holes that don’t

have the intellect or foresight to handle the lives of other people.

They target the individuals in the world that possess the ability

to come up with new ideas, and ask them to quit that life to join John

Galt, et al. in a place nestled in the Rocky Mountains called Galt’s

Gulch where they can exist to freely interact and re-create a society

founded on mutual respect of fellow human beings that love their lives

and won’t let themselves be ruled by other people and the economy.

Their oath to each other states “I swear, by my life and my love of

it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, or ask another

to live for the sake of mine.”

Throughout the book, the ideas presented by Ayn Rand through her

characters form a philosophy that is almost as all-encompassing as the

refutations to it she supplies in the text. The ultimate struggle is

159
to convince Dagny Taggart, brilliant manager of a transcontinental

railroad, that she needs to join the intellectuals that have retreated

from society. She maintains the belief that society doesn’t need to

be changed, but just needs to be fixed.

She fights the intellectual revolution to the end, supplying

every possible explanation to avoid it. In the end, the looters of

Washington destroy the world. As John Galt and Dagny Taggart fly over

New York city, the lights go out symbolizing the end of the old world.

There’s only so much stock you can put in a book. It’s

impossible to lay out every single opinion you have and every single

thing someone might say to oppose it. Ayn Rand tried very hard, but

still the only solution she could offer was escape. Through Dagny she

tried to offer an explanation for the call of society to be repaired.

It still can’t work, though. Galt’s gulch is a fictional place just

like utopia, heaven, Care-a-lot, and Candy Land.

Society can’t be fixed by taking out the best of us all and then

letting the rest destroy themselves. That doesn’t solve anything, it

just perpetuates the whole dynamic of the intellectual haves and the

intellectual have nots. Social change is rooted in the need for

change. There has to be a majority consensus that there is a problem

before a change can be made. Change is a concept rooted in time,

another concept. Change exists in past, present, and future. Change

can be personal, broad, and externally viewed as right or wrong.

160
 Some day in the future, will the people that inherited the earth

from us wander around the ruins of New York City like we wander around

the ruins of Rome, wondering about the people that lived and worked

there? When the lights go out in New York City, will it be the end of

humanity, or just the end of New York City?

Ayn Rand purports that society will, and must, be saved by the

select few possessing the ability to save it. This idea is supported

in our social stratification. There is a pyramid of economic society,

with the power elite at the top, the debt slaves at the bottom, and a

hierarchy of “middle class” between them with a ladder that only goes

so far. Mobility is possible in our society, as evidenced by John

Galt’s rise from obscurity to greatness.

The future will happen whether we are ready or not. It will

come, and we will be forced to endure what it brings whether we are

ready or not. Intellectual society is similar to the economic pyramid

with idiots at the bottom, and wise men at the top, but the key

difference is that the ladder goes from the bottom all the way to the

top. There’s nothing keeping you from intellectual greatness except

your own will to continue learning.

In that respect, an intellectual revolution wouldn’t be a

revolution at all, just an acceptance of the need to progress as a

society and on a personal level. Progression is balanced by

transgression and regression. You must struggle to achieve greatness.

Greatness is defined externally.

161
 When Ayn Rand’s Atlas shrugged, it was because the metaphorical

motor of the world had been stopped by John Galt and his associates

removing themselves from society and manifesting it in a new direction

in a new place. It resolved the philosophical problem of escape, but

it did not offer a solution in the real world, only a fictional world

created by Ayn Rand that while bearing a striking resemblance to ours,

is not.

When the lights of Ayn Rand’s New York City went out, there was

no internet, there was no facebook, there were no cell phones, and

nuclear war was just beginning to offer a realistic and tangible end

to society and moreover, the world. The civil rights movement was yet

to come to fruition, and Jack Kerouac was just beginning to publish

his writings about his late nights of pot smoking in black jazz clubs.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was just another black guy in the south

getting oppressed by white idiot fucks.

Nuclear war never happened, but neither did nuclear disarmament.

The civil rights movement happened, and it at least dissolved one of

the stupid differences we separate ourselves by. At least we got that

right. History shows a line of progression, regression, and

transgression building up to the present, yet still offering us an

unlimited amount of ideas to build on. Change happens every day as we

march through the inevitable passing of time. We will never stop it,

and we shouldn’t try.

We’re all going to die, and so will New York City. Our lights

will go out long before the great cities we’ve built, but everything

162
comes to an end. With the exception of concepts. Concepts are

eternal. As long as there are people, they will agree and disagree.

163
 Chapter Fifteen – A Destination

So, we have a destination. The future. We march forward

in time, but measure it backwards from arrival at our destination.

The hardest part of any trip is the long road home. The anticipation

lies in the approach, the value in the destination, and the meaning in

the return. Life is a long road home to death. Marching on

endlessly, our existence just a shit stain on the universal blanket of

time. Things fade away as we grow older, ideas we held fast evaporate

as if we had never questioned them in the first place. Our reveries

of childhood dreams are crushed by nightmares of adult reality. We

dream of being Ghost Busters and wind up doling out burritos in

another stupid dot on a map.

Every night I like to take at least a couple of minutes to look

at the sky. There’s not much that is more breath taking to me than a

good view of the stars on a clear night. Ever since I was a kid, I

liked to stare at the stars and wonder how far away they are. I

remember lying in my bed one night, very young, thinking about the

vastness of space. It’s a pretty big concept for such a young child

to contemplate.

My dad had just read me a book about the planets, about the names

and what they were made of, and how long it would take to drive to one

in a car. I got to thinking about that kind of distance. I knew how

long it took to drive to Grand Rapids in a car, we used to go there

all the time, and I had lived there once. I knew it was kind of far

away. Farther than I could walk, at least, or ride my bike.

164
 I thought, If I were to drive a car to the moon, it would take a

really, really, long time. I also knew that when I stood and looked

at things in the distance, the smaller they were, the farther away

they were, at least in general. Humans are born with depth

perception, after all.

So I thought to myself, if the moon would take a really long time

in a car, and I couldn’t even see the other planets, but knew they

were really big just like the earth, how far away could the stars be?

And, if space is like a swimming pool filled with glitter, what is

beyond that? Then, I thought to myself, this place is really big. A

lot bigger than me, a lot bigger than my house and my school and my

city. I thought about where the god I heard about every Sunday fit

into this equation. He created Earth and all, but 2000 years ago,

they didn't even know that Earth had an entire other half. They

didn't even know there was indigenous people there, let alone the fact

that there were other planets hundreds of times the size of ours –

they thought the planets were gods watching over them.

I remember a few years earlier than that, we're talking toddler

days, meeting a friend of my parents that was a pilot. My first

logical question was “did you go to Care-a-lot and see the care

bears?” He told me that Care-a-lot wasn’t a real place, and that the

clouds weren’t solid enough to build a castle on, because they were

made out of water. I wasn’t crushed, I wanted to know more.

“If the clouds are made of water, how do they stay up in the

sky?”

165
 “Well, there are different states of matter, solid liquid and

gas. Matter sinks, liquid runs, and gas floats. Ice is water, too”

“Oh. What about air?”

“Well, that’s a little more complicated, but the air is

something, too- everything is made out of little pieces called atoms”

I should have pressed further, but I was only seven, and I had

some playing to do. I wandered downstairs to talk to the little kids

again, and we built a fort underneath the air hockey table. I

remember sitting there, listening to the other kids talk about the

cartoons we were watching, and I couldn’t help but keep wondering

about what that man had told me. No Care-bears, huh? Why are some

things around me real, and some things aren’t? Just makes me want to

watch what I say around little kids. A year or so later, my mom told

me the Ninja Turtles and Ghostbusters were also fake, which I had more

or less figured out. Life didn't look like a cartoon, afterall. It

was like a moving book, that wasn't difficult to get over. I

systematically extrapolated that to Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, The

Tooth Fairy, and every other childhood illusion. When I came to god,

my mom told me he was real. Confusing.

So there were no Care-bears in the clouds. I thought, if the

astronauts went to the moon and they didn’t find heaven, then maybe

god wasn’t real, too. I couldn’t have been more than seven years old.

I was prepared to go beyond that. If god wasn’t real, and Earth

wasn’t the only planet in the universe, then what else could be out

166
there? What other gods might people have? If other stars are like

the sun, how many planets could there be?

Is there a grand architect to everything? Did someone far

greater than I design the whole place? What was it like before the

universe was around? Nothing but endless white? How could there be

white? No one would have a concept of white because no one would be

there to see it because they wouldn’t exist yet. What was white,

really, but just a word- a concept. Heavy.

It was a bit too much for me, and I slowly drifted off to sleep.

Problem was, when I woke up the thoughts wouldn’t go away. They never

have. Maybe that’s when I first realized how big it all is.

Everything, the world around us and the world around our world. The

ultimate entirety of the universe is so incomprehensibly vast.

Sometimes I don’t think most adults realize how big it all is, and how

small they are in all of it. The world is so much bigger than you,

your house, your town, your state, your country. The solar system

full of worlds, the galaxy full of solar systems, the universe full of

galaxies.

We’re insignificant. Sad but true. All doomed to be stuck on a

rock together with nothing to do but argue with each other, make

babies, and invent concepts to further complicate our already busy

lives until we die. We engineer expensive electronic toys to make

communication easier, but we talk casually among each other at parties

about sports scores, hair color, and sales at Wal-Mart. Sickening,

isn’t it? Of all the things to do and see, we keep ourselves in the

167
little bubble of 'community' we've assembled around us. It's a shell

keeping out the blinding light of profundity that is the world around

us. World not in the sense of the Earth, but world in the sense of

everything, everywhere, small as an atom, and as massive as a galaxy.

I’ve spent my entire life trying to answer questions I come up

with lying awake in bed at night, or dumbly staring at the starry

skies. I don’t know why, I just do it. I have yet to seriously ask

myself the question “does everyone else think about these things,

too?” I’m scared as to what the answer might be. Sometimes I think

people really don’t bother asking questions about what’s going on

around them. It’s sad more than it is scary, I suppose. They just

walk around letting other people tell them what to do, acting like the

melodramatic assholes on reality television. Re-enacting the scene

from the latest viral video, quoting lyrics by the latest corporate

create-a-band, re-tweeting, and status-updating. Filling out drop-

down boxes.

I saw a shooting star a while ago for the first time. After all

my years of staring up there in the black abyss thinking about

concepts like infinity, god, and the universe, and I had never seen

something as common as a shooting star.

I was lucky enough to be in the company of a good friend. We had

been out drinking with her roommate and a few of her friends. One of

them had stuck around after we went back to her place, wanting us to

go somewhere else. To the bowling alley, or something stupidly

mundane like that. We were standing in the front yard transfixed on

168
the sky, excitedly pointing and yelling at every meteor that streaked

across the sky. It was a meteor shower, like the ones you hear about

on television all the time. I had never remembered to go outside

during one, even if I had ever had the time.

We ditched the loser, and headed out to an open field, with as

few lights as we could find in the city. It was only a few blocks

away. I was surprised to see that no one else was out there enjoying

the view. Oh well, I guess maybe no one else cares.

We laid out a blanket and watched the sky for an hour or so. The

vastness of space seemed, at that moment, so familiar and tangible.

The meteors may appear thousands of miles apart, hundreds of miles

above us, but we saw them in transfixed spacial perspective that

painted a uniquely human picture of inescapable beauty. We waited,

staring, until the meteors seemed to die down. I could live forever

in a moment like that. Seeing something amazing for the first time,

good company, good stories, good times. I said once that life is

nothing but a bunch of stories. I’ve come to agree with myself more

and more as time goes by.

That moment was much like my moment on the rock, or my moments

staring out at the rocky mountains from the golden burro café.

Snapshots in time that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

If I died tomorrow, I wouldn’t be afraid. I have seen and experienced

so much in my years on this planet, and I wouldn’t give up those

experiences for anything.

169
 Just the other day, weeks after that moment had passed, I

wandered home drunk after a long night of partying and typing late

into the night at Fourth Coast. As always, I took a fleeting moment

to stop in the front yard and gaze up into the sky. As I looked up,

just above the top of the house, a shooting star streaked across my

view. I smiled, remembering the last time I had seen one. Then, just

for a second, I thought I might see a golden bird get caught mid-

flight by a black jaguar. Maybe it was an acid flashback, now I know

what people mean when they say that. You'll just have to see it for

yourself.

I only entertained the thought for a second, as I walked into the

house, down the stairs, and fell into my bed in a wretched exhausted

hump. I laid there, again, thinking about the stars like I always do,

and thought that maybe it wasn’t so bad, all the crazy shit going on

around the world, and around me. As long as the stars are in the sky,

and as long as there’s rocks in the Pacific Ocean, I’m going to die a

happy man. There's a level of involvement we maintain as we trudge

our way through existence. A balance, a middle-way, a homeostasis, a

harmony. That's what we should be seeking. It's good to see both

sides of the fight, it's a good perspective to keep. Stay in the

middle, face-forward and ready for the day. Ready for the new, for

the journey, and for the long road home. Life, I've heard people say,

is a constant battle. If it's a battle, it's time to put on your game

face and fighting stance. Die facing forward, with the zeal of your

youth and the wisdom of your age etched in your face for all the world

to see.

170
 Chapter Sixteen – The Long Road Home

We got to San Francisco, a disgusting mass of smog and cars

lining ridiculous hills full of row houses. Kevin drove in as I slept

like a newborn high on Humboldt grass, and found a nice scenic

overlook with a really good view of the Golden Gate bridge. He

decided to take a nap, and woke up with a knock on the window from a

man with a shiny badge and a flashlight.

Cops.

Kevin turns on the car, rolls down the window. We had been woken

up by cops once in Oklahoma City, and once in Montana, all as a result

of our choice of parking spots for sleeping. It’s admittedly a little

suspicious to see a car with a Michigan license plate and foggy

windows just sitting in Golden Gate Park in the early hours of

morning. Sometimes I disagree with Kevin’s judgment on places to

sleep, although it was a gorgeous view. Oh well. The cop happens to

ask the question, “Are there any weapons or drugs in the car?”

I swallowed hard. Kevin has a vocal opposition to telling a lie.

I can’t hate on the guy for having values, but there’s a time and a

place to divulge crucial information; particularly when you have the

right to remain silent. I just wanted to get home without a prison

stay. We had a gun. We were staying in the wilderness for large

tracts of time, who knows what the fuck we could have run into? It

was perfectly reasonable to have a firearm in our possession, and it

was completely unnecessary to speak on the matter. Kevin would rather

171
have been perfectly honest, I would rather have remained perfectly

silent. To each his own, I suppose. At least he didn't mention my

grass.

It was a nine millimeter, fully legal and licensed to Kevin. No

dirty weapons in my car. Unfortunately, as we found out, California

law says that if you have bullets in the case, it’s considered loaded.

Also, only law enforcement officers are allowed to have twelve shot

clips, or whatever crazy shit he had.

Another cop pulled up, after we had been asked to exit the car,

hand over the keys, and sit helplessly on a log next to the car. I

was sweating bullets. There was an ounce of Humboldt County Chronic

just barely concealed in my open backpack, which was sitting on top of

the mattress in the back of the car, which was covering an open bottle

of tequila. The gun was under the other end of the mattress, which is

what we told the cop. I had given Kevin the “Please let me speak to

these people, I know exactly what to say” look, and he picked up on

the vibe. He opened the back hatch, lifted up the mattress, which

caused the backpack to fall forward and fully conceal the bag of

grass. I imagined the backpack helping me out intentionally as I

heard the satisfying sliding sound of fabric against vinyl. He opened

the gun case, inspected it, compliments Kevin on the cleanliness, and

let us go free with a warning not to carry concealed handguns in the

state of California.

The other cop, having been a California import himself, escorted

us to a nearby youth hostel where we could sleep uninterrupted in the

172
parking lot. That was my first taste of San Francisco. Fucking

terrifying. I smoked two bowls before I went to sleep that night,

fighting off the shakes of adrenaline the whole time.

When you play with fire, you’re going to get burnt. We had a

quick brush with reality that day. It was nice, however, to be

treated ethically and respectfully by the police, who understood our

situation and didn’t try to be overtly authoritative as much as they

did informative and helpful. That’s how the police are supposed to

act, and I was really happy to have seen it. I’m just really glad

they didn’t see the bag of weed and the open intox.

We woke up and drove back to Golden Gate Park to take pictures

and stretch our legs. We wandered over the ruins of machine gun

entrenchments from forgotten days, imagining the lives lived out there

protecting the bay. We walked along the streets, feeling the city

from the inside. This was the destination, the point where the trip

comes to an end and fades out to the long road home.

We wandered around Chinatown, in and out of the shops, buying

trinkets and smelling the smells of hundred-year old fermenting teas

and oriental incenses. We sat at a Chinese restaurant, scooping rice

with chopsticks and discussing our departure.

We paid the bill and left town to check out Big Sur, our final

stretch of the near entirety we drove of highway one. Kevin had been

enticed by a picture of this place in Big Sur called McWay cove, a

nice protected beach with palm trees and a waterfall. It had become

173
his sole obsession of the trip. The whole paradise bit, he seemed to

be searching for a place to imagine as his happy place. A place to

visualize himself in during trying times. After pulling to the side

of the road several times to take pictures, and soak in the view, we

found the parking lot for McWay cove. We found out it cost eight

bucks per vehicle, and the waterfall had run dry.

I swear, for a second, that I almost saw Kevin shed a tear. How

horrible it is, to come to see paradise and find out it costs money to

walk down the staircase and look at where the waterfall used to be

until all the assholes in San Francisco and Los Angeles sucked up all

the water. They had commoditized his paradise into a farce. I asked

him if he wanted to go down, he just said “let’s get back in the car

and find a view of it from the road and take a picture” with a far

away look in his eye, as if he were fighting the urge to cry. I could

hear his voice shake ever so slightly.

I felt bad for him. I had been feeling the overwhelming sense of

commercialization, too. There was something different about that

stretch of the drive than the serene scenes on my rock of solitude.

We left Big Sur not quite sure how we felt about the whole situation.

Surely it was beautiful, surely it was amazing, but there was just a

sordid feeling that we were part of some sort of institutionalized

escape fed to us by societally-induced visual archetypes of freedom.

It was driven by thousands of people every day, just the same.

Nothing about it was unique or memorable despite the fact we had

decided it was our destination. For some passing through, it was a

174
drive to work or play. For us it was supposed to mean something.

Something we could remember as an escape, but ended up remembering as

a sort of disappointment. What was this feeling I had? Surely the

land was beautiful and the journey was a triumph, but I felt it lacked

substance. It lacked meaning outside the bragging rights of cruising

Big Sur. We hadn't discovered or uncovered it's beauty, we had been

duped by commercialization to go there and “know” it was beautiful.

We drove post haste southeast towards Death Valley. Kevin drove.

Madly he drove through the night, disgusted with Big Sur, the big

money America machine, and particularly with McWay cove.

He woke me up in the geographical center of Death Valley, as far

as he could reckon, in the still dead of the desert night. He was

smoking a cigarette. He just said “we’re in the middle of the desert,

check out the stars.”

We got out of the car and sat in the middle of the road for a

long time, listening to the animals in the distance chattering

mindlessly and relentlessly about being in the middle of nowhere and

how many stars there were in the sky. It was a thousand times more

beautiful than any view of Big Sur. It was a visceral and personal

beauty, one with an actual meaning. An experience with fulfillment

that didn't feel as if we were marking a box on “Life: The Checklist.”

It was a random experience in the dead of night, one that has

certainly been had by others but not capitalized on and commoditized

like that stretch of coastal highway bridging terror-tropolises Las

Angeles and San Francisco. Untold millions had uttered about the

175
beauty of Big Sur over soy lattes, taking the natural surroundings as

taken-for-granted fixtures of their daily lives. I stared into the

limitless expanse of the universe and wondered how many of those

people had taken the time to drive three hours away and check out this

scene, which I found exponentially more appealing than a stretch of

highway between cities. It was only then that I realized why it was

we were traveling around the country. The value of the trip was in

the unexpected personal experiences along the way. The long road home

wasn't a sad decrescendo of the trip, it just another part of the

trip. The trip hadn't been about going to San Francisco, it was about

two buddies hitting the road with an idea of a destination and a

thirst for new experiences. You can't plan those things out, they

just happen.

Two days later, we were home. Kevin drove almost the whole way.

We didn’t talk much for the whole ride. It wasn’t that we were angry

with each other, we were both just so disappointed with what we had

seen that we’d rather just get home and deal with it in our own

personal ways. There’s not much to be seen after you get through

Denver. Kevin and I had spent our time in the Rockies, we were

homeward bound.

It’s a clear shot through the Midwest back home to Kalamazoo. We

stopped in St. Louis for a change of scenery and a quick look at the

Arch. It cost money to take the ride up it. Everything costs money.

We commoditized everything. Here you go, America, have this Arch.

It’s going to represent the spirit of adventure as the metaphorical

176
gateway to the West. Gateway to a consumerist garbage wasteland it

is.

When we got home, nothing had changed but the season. It wasn’t

winter anymore, the snow was melting away and it was time for spring

again. I still had to go on making burritos, my memories now fading

away. Kevin had to find a new vision of paradise, and I had to figure

out how I was going to settle back into a familiar world full of idiot

fucks and life rafts on stupid seas.

What did the future hold for me that summer? I continued to make

burritos, I continued to live, I continued to pursue those moments

where I didn’t care about anything except what was going on right

then. I ended up going to Pennsylvania a few times, I drove to

Washington, D.C. to visit Seth, I went to Chicago a few times, I went

to Cedar Point with my little brother, I went camping in central

Michigan, I stayed out late drinking and having a good time as much as

time and finances would allow. I made a lot of new friends that

summer, some I hope to keep around for a good long time. I loved

every fucking second of it. I spent my money, I didn’t care, and I

don’t regret it. I love being alive.

There are a lot of concepts flying around these days. All sorts

of things we have to worry about, and things we have to take care of,

but just want to put off to another day so we can enjoy the little

time we have. I’m just like everyone else. I wake up, I do my job, I

try to enjoy my life as best as I can. Even though there’s so many

questions still unanswered, so many questions still yet to be asked,

177
and so many more things to see and experience, there’s always going to

be times where I wish I was somewhere else.

There will continue to be times standing behind that cash

register where I just can’t make sense of the world around me. Times

where I feel totally helpless moving in and out of my parent’s house,

trying to carve my path through the wilderness and staring up at the

stars late at night in a drunken haze, wondering what it all means.

Times when I'd swear life couldn't get any worse, and times where I'd

wonder if it could get any better. Life is a wholly-encompassing

experience of soaring triumphs and depressing defeat holding the

extremes about a middle-way for you to walk your line from birth to

death. It's your line, stretching forward to meet new experiences,

and stretching backwards as a long road home.

I hope you have learned something on this journey with me. It’s

your road, and it’s a road you must follow alone. Don’t worry, all of

your friends will be there to help keep you along the way. History

brought us to where we are, and it’s up to us to perpetuate and add to

it. Who cares about the idiots? Let them be idiots. There will be

good times, and there will be bad, but we can all rest assured knowing

that tomorrow is another day, and there’s always a new road to travel.

Home is where the heart is.

178
Enjoy your journey.

179