Monthly Archives: September 2010

I was seventeen and it was simply the freest I had ever felt. I remember the kindness of people, the list of characters that were never to return as sojourners into my perceptual consciousness. I yearn for the gravely massage of asphalt through the bottoms of my shoes. I miss the land.

The way that mountains slope and sink into the heartland, only to reappear looming as the snow-capped Rockies. I missed the flatness of the plains allowing more sky to exist than land, adding divinity to the stars of the night sky; more concise and awe-inspiring than any I had gazed upon before. I missed the Mississippi in the four o’ clock sunshine, so wrenching and lovely that I abandoned a thumbed-down car that would have carried me one hundred and fifty more miles, just so I could caress the whims of the nation’s soul, if only to absorb the Twain and Kerouac. My night stranded awake in Las Vegas when down the long street came the moon and I turned my back to it and walked. So many nights like that one, I would watch my feet as I hurried down an obscured alleyway, looking for a place to sleep, but coming up with a dead end, where I’d trip into a dark brown pot-hole puddle, soaking my shoe, then I’d hear a noise, and look up to see a distorted gape and eyes, clearly myself but parts that had been previously unknown, making my self-image twist like a flame in the wind. The way the heat pressed down on my psyche through the arid beauty of the Mojave, and finally the faint glimmer of the Pacific after a week of hard travelin’ —the knowledge that there was only more to come.

In Long Beach, after a stay with a friend, a local cop picked me up for being a minor out-of-state hitchhiking on the 405, which turns into the 605, which turns into I-5, which goes deep into the Pacific Northwest, where I was headed next. After some hungry hours at the station, I was put in a foster home in Inglewood, Los Angeles for the better of a week. There a public supervisor came every eight hours and everyone’s name, DOB, and social worker/parole officer was on a large pallid chalkboard in the living room. Luckily, I had come into some money en route by playing guitar, harmonica, and singing American traditional songs, and thus could afford a ticket back.

Now I’m in college and I have no time; I can’t hold down a job, I can’t read, I can’t write, I can’t focus on anything, let alone attain the daily visceral catharsis of survivalism. I think I’ll either drop out or become a drug-addled robot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjElQ6Ekr9o

Hello world!