Unintended Consequences

Trip Guide: Dante

I guess that I wanted her to hurt, and now that I admit that to you, do you stand in judgment of me?

I wanted her to hurt like she had hurt me, as if that could ever solve anything. I wanted her to lay awake every night because I couldn't sleep, and I wanted her to toss, and I wanted her to turn, and to pull her hair out every waking moment she could no longer be with me. But I knew that she didn't. I wanted to be as important to her as she had told me that I was. But I knew that I wasn't.

I wanted her to feel, firsthand, the pain she had caused me with hollow words of admiration, empty promises and broken trusts. I wanted her to feel the ways in which she had cut me as if she had cut herself. But I knew that she wouldn't.

I wanted to think that somewhere in her subconscious mind, I was a splinter that could never be removed. That every so often a song on the radio or a phrase randomly uttered would evoke a memory of me to her mind and that she would want to cry, or that she would call to tell me that she had been wrong all along and that she still loved me.

But she never did.

In Southern California, I had admitted to Amy that I was a deeply vengeful person who felt the need to administer consequences personally to those I felt had wronged me. And no one had wronged me as I believed Katherine to have wronged me. This was the baggage I had been carrying with me then, and that I still shoulder from time to time.

"That is very dangerous," she had told me, "and uniquely human. It's the sort of logic that allows us to preemptively invade foreign countries and bomb babies."

Amy had a way of cutting through the bullshit.

What I needed then was a friend, and I found it. The first night I spent in Oceanside, I rolled up my sleeve and showed her the abscess I had gotten in San Francisco. She tried to the best of her ability to conceal her nausea at the sight of it, but the look in her eyes screamed "This is very, very bad and I am not sure if this will be the last time I will see you with that arm."

"Holy Jesus Mother Of Fucking Mary, we need to get you to a hospital, now."

"Really? It's that bad?"

"Your entire inner arm is swollen to the size of a small grapefruit. Yes, it really is that fucking bad. Come on, finish your beer. Let's go."

Explaining to everyone at Amy's house why we had to rush to the emergency room suddenly was a comical attempt at spraying cologne on a turd.

"Woah, what the FUCK happened to your arm, man?" Bill had said then, and looked at me. John was sitting next to him, and as we had been speaking for some time, he had already surmised the problem. He was silent. I gave him a small look of gratitude and our eyes met. He showed no signs of emotion: John normally never did. His short, dark hair cropped close to his head, and his face that completely blank poker face that never changed. They called him "the real scum", for reasons that I will someday revisit, but we all let him get away with whatever he wanted. We tolerated it because, although John with a thief and a con, he was at his heart a sincere and dedicated seeker of truth.

"Spider bite, Bill. Those things can be really nasty."

"What the hell kind of spider does that? How long have you had it?"

"A few days."

"A FEW FUCKING DAYS. Jesus CHRIST, man. Shouldn't you be fucking dead by now?"

I blushed. Amy shot him a look. "Come on, let's go," she said, and she pulled me by the arm and we walked to her car together in the darkness.

I apologized to her enthusiastically. "I know we have only personally met once before, and it was in New York City, and this is my first night staying with you in your mother's home, and I normally don't have pus oozing infected abscesses on my arm" and etcetra etcetra.

"Listen, you don't have to apologize to me for anything. I want you to be OK. I just want you to get taken care of and be OK."

And then, in her eyes, the strangest emotion I hadn't seen in anyone I had met along the road for what seemed like aeons: Genuine warmth, genuine human compassion and empathy. It felt familiar and yet so strange, and somehow welcoming.

We drove to the ER in near silence. Not much was spoken between us then, and there was little risk involved. It was two relatively unfamiliar people, riding together in the dark to do that which needed to be done. Nothing more, nothing less. Periodically, she would look over and give me the slightest of reassuring smiles, but the sadness and genuine concern was welling up in her eyes and right then I felt an idiot impulse kick up inside of me to kiss her and tell her it would be OK, but I did not.

When we arrived at the emergency room, we were pleased to see that somehow we were the first in line. This surprised me, as even in smaller towns I had been known to wait for hours, just to throw a fit and wince my face in pain and demand a fix. Hydromorphone was what they gave you then, if you claimed the pain was severe enough. And at times, for me at least, it was.

As I was being checked in, the doctors asked the usual questions. Drug history, mostly. I sat down in a chair and held my head in my hands, somehow strangely ashamed although I knew I had no real reason to be. Amy rested her hand gently on my shoulder.

"You know, I don't judge you. You will see... One of the things I have yet to tell you, what I am going to tell you now... Maybe we are more alike than you would think."

And what she told me was not much different than many of the other women I had loved. She had been unfaithful to all of the men she had dated, many of whom she didn't seem to like in hindsight. She was running from her father's death, and had been. She avoided intimacy, she couldn't handle it. She acted out sexually. She betrayed lovers, friends and family and lied to them. It was on impulse. It was an addiction. She was now celibate, and had a plan to be celibate until Easter had arrived.

The only thing about it that struck me was the brutal honesty, the integrity and accountability with which she had faced the music and her self and shadow. Her face portrayed a certain tenderness, a genuine sense of understanding that was hard won and snatched from the jaws of defeat. It was real.

And still, somehow, the cognitive dissonance of hearing that in the state of mind I was already in, immediately post Katherine affair, was something that I was not yet ready to hear. I didn't judge her, and I knew that she had been trying. But somehow the very act of the confession, there in the sordid and dimly lit ER waiting room, felt maybe a little too candid and raw and real: Real reality TV, high def. The bipolar liar junkie, the lying borderline sex addict. "Well, we are more alike than otherwise," I thought to myself. "Oh dear, oh dear. What a mess."

But it was a beautiful mess, somehow, and I think maybe that was the first moment I realized that it would be OK.

Amy stood behind me, resting her head on mine and cradling it with her hands, when she wasn't rubbing my back and shoulders. And only now do I realize I had to force myself to not fall in love with her in that waiting room that night, with her broken down confession and earnest eyes, somehow betraying more age and wisdom than I knew she should have possessed at the age of 23. It was the kindness of it. The brutal truth shining through the darkness there as a guiding light. I saw it, and quickly realized to know the truth is preferable in all ways to the fear of having your illusions shattered.

Like Marlowe, I too had come to learn that there was nothing I hated more than the stench of a lie.

After about ten minutes, they came in to take me into the emergency room proper. The emergency room attendants were horrified, but they told me that I probably wouldn't lose my arm.

"You should really learn to just smoke more pot," one of them told me.

I laughed. "Well, if you can't laugh at yourself... Ha Ha Ha."

When the doctor finally came in to lance it, the pain was unbearable. Amy watched by my side the whole time, eyes wide in fascination and awe. They made a slit in the abscess after injecting a numbing agent directly into its swollen aperture. Pus and blood oozed out of my arm like an erupting volcano, and I nearly fainted from the pain while Amy held my hand and squeezed it tight. I squeezed tighter. After they had finished, Amy played the Ukelele and serenaded the ER staff with Dan Bern's "Jerusalem".

"When I tell you that I love you, don't test my love,

Accept my love,

Don't test my love.

'Cause maybe I don't love you all that much."

Every man in the entire ER ward had fallen in love her her by the end of the night, and I was no exception- Although I was the last to know it. And although all of this had been enough to spark off the renewal of my confidence and faith in others, the wound over the Katherine affair was still raw and bleeding. And I wanted her to feel it for herself, still.

Does that make you think less of me?

The Upside of Down, the Downside of Up: Up on the Downside and Down on the Upside

I've been walking around Portland the last few days, drinking in parks and reading and frequenting the food kitchens. It isn't so bad. Something about sleeping in dirt, on the ground, outside, or in the woods, makes me feel very rooted in my sense of communion with the animal kingdom. It's where we'd all be if society broke down.

I've been ripped off or gypped several times, and when it comes down to it I don't sweat it. Lessons learned, to be sure, but nothing worth dying over. People are OK, mostly. Shit luck situations we deal with in life push us to act in ways we normally wouldn't, more often than not. I understand that now. To that extent, it is a lot more difficult to remain angry at anyone.

And why would I? When I vibrate hatred and anger, that's what I feel in return. To the extent that it seems more powerful and advantageous to me to resonate sympathetically with energies rather than work against them, it makes more sense for me to recognize myself in others.

Lately, I find myself thinking about the story of the zen master who was robbed in his house one night, only for the burglar to find that the only possession the master had was a blanket, and the zen master took a long hard look at him and told him that he could have it. How disarming is that?

"Listen man, if you're that hard up for a few dollars, you obviously need it more than me."

Which was a lie, and quite possibly a justification for why I didn't attempt to jump three random guys on a street corner one night in downtown Portland.

Money has been tight, and I'm not much good with keeping a budget. What can I say? Everyone needs to play, sometimes. All work and no play makes jack a dull etc. I started out in the city proper this week, trying to actually get a feel for its layout and people and hopefully to fulfill my sense of wanting to have done something by the end of the day, even if it only be walk around and drink and people watch.

Several luminous, random and paradigm shifting sexual encounters later, I was sleeping under the bridge by waterfront, three sheets to the wind and wondering how I ended up sleeping under a bridge at 5 in the morning in a random city I'd never thought I'd ever live in. Funny how life happens like that. Bad decisions make for good stories, or at least entertaining anecdotes to remember to never tell your grandchildren for fear that it will corrupt their mortal souls.

And I've been plumbing the subconscious depths of my mortal soul, and some of what I've seen in that is terrifying. I think there is dirt in my teeth. I slept under the bridge in a white t-shirt which got covered in dirt. That may be a disadvantage to sleeping on a cardboard box. I guess it's not that much different from camping, really. Except you're camping with punk rockers, prostitutes, junkies, and flaming queers under a bridge.

Safely At Port

Trip Guide(s): The Invisible Rosicrucian Brotherhood

We arrived sometime rough around 4:20 in the afternoon in Portland. I was dead exhausted and half drunk by the time we pulled in. The acid had kept me up all night on pins and needles, enduring the thousands of externalized psychological projections under a starry night sky. Jean's husband Richard let us in and Amy left to go find a liquor store. She brought herself back a cheap fifth of something and a fifth of Jim Bean for myself. I quickly fell asleep on the sofa after a few nice sized belts, and didn't wake up until after the hitchhikers had returned from a long walkabout and Jean had come home from work. She was gracious enough to allow our guests to sleep on the floor in her living room, while Amy and myself opted for the guest room which was basically a cluttered storage room with all sorts of junk squirreled away in it.

That night, the kids slept on Jean's living room floor while Amy and I slept on the floor of what was later to become my room. Most of the night was tense and awkward for me, mostly because I hadn't yet come to terms with the fact that I was enamored with her. She slept with the blanket completely wrapped around her, and I would have had to move closer and possibly wrap my arms around her to manage a bit of blanket for myself. Would she have been comfortable with it if I did? Amy was on a sort of self imposed celibacy thing for her own reasons, and I didn't want to make her feel uncomfortable for any reason.

So, characteristically, I turned over on my side away from her and let her have the blanket. Later on in the night, I guess in my sleep I must have subconsciously pulled it away from her to wrap myself in. "You're killing me," she mumbled, and flipping me around, pulled me towards her, grabbing my arm and hoisting it around her waist. She held my hand tight, and I got the first decent night's sleep I had experienced in weeks.

That night, I dreamt of a human marketplace, trafficking in fetishist material and narcotics and weapons, and everyone communicating through the language of need, which was silent telepathy. When there were noises, they were the noises of insects- long forgotten, primal tongues. Not language in any intelligible sense. Most of the women in the market place were veiled, but there were dancing, dirty street urchins covered in a thick layer of grime and glistening with the sweat from their wild gyrations. It seemed to me to be raining spit, and there were sandstorms kicking up round everything. Long, sleek dark bodies brushed through the crowds that winded their way through the streets like a serpent. We were somewhere in the desert, but the scenery of the locale kept shifting. I couldn't get a feel for the streets and how they were laid out, because they were all the time rearranging themselves.

Next thing I knew, I was being led up a ladder by a masked psychopomp towards a glowing hypercube hovering above. As I approached the top, the cube unfolded into a cavalry cross of 6 equilateral squares. The abstract geometrical aspect of the shape fluttered and flickered out, morphing somehow into a rose cross as I was led up to the thirteenth rung of the ladder and nailed to the cross. The whole of the process could have taken several minutes, or hours, or aeons, or a single instant before death in which the brain becomes fully aware of its own existence and spits out a long and incomprehensible dialogue to itself that finally crashes the nervous system.

I looked out over the desert, but it seemed then that all was desolate and silent but for the wind: there were no more flies or insects of the market places, buzzing around chattering in their long forgotten dead insect language. There was silence, and dust storms. I looked across the wasteland and saw broken down interstates and bridges, and half decayed concrete walls. Graffiti on one of the collapsing concrete structures read "MARK 10: 34-45", something I didn't recognize or know at the time. Nailed in securely, my head still gave me about 180 degrees to work with, and I surveyed the landscape. Everything was dead.

And my blood fell like that, for hours or seconds or aeons, into the sand which was dry, and the desert absorbed absorbed my blood like rain.

"Where would the world be without the love that binds together this and that? It gives itself so that it can experience the supreme self. It offers itself up, it dies, but that death is rapture in its union with the whole. The only thing that can die is the ego. There is also that which remains."

Foliage, slowly but surely sprouted from the sand, while the birds pecked at my carcass and my bones whitened in the sun. Gradually, the elements wore the bones away, and the garden grew thicker and greener still. A sort of a divine chaos, a paradise garden began to bloom all around the desert clearing and that clearing became an oasis, full of many beautiful living creatures.

The angels of a great abyss bore the dust molecules of my lifeless body up and over the winds, scattered to the furthest most points of the four directions. There was no life left in them.

It struck me: A month or so back, Amy and some of the kids in Ocean Side had taken a trip with me to a 13 sided Rosicrucian vault on a wilderness reserve that was opened to the public. I took pictures of it that I still have around here, somewhere. Each side of the vault probably represented the 12 astrological signs and the sun, I had imagined.

"That's where they meet, and send out positive energy through the world. They are Christian mystics. Luminaries. I'd imagine that most of them are ascetic," Amy had said to me.

I looked up the unfamiliar biblical verse turned up the following:

"and they will mock Him, and scourge Him, and spit on Him, and kill Him. And the third day He will rise again.”

The next morning we awoke and decided to go and busk through the section of town with the head shops and health food stores. We met up with my friend and collaborator Yewsten sometime during the afternoon. It was good to finally meet him, as we had been working together from a distance for some time.

It felt nice to be alone, for once in my life. Self-reliant. To know what it is to not need much of anyone else around, I felt myself regaining independent strength. Amy and Yewsten and myself went a ways ahead of the kids from California, while Amy sang "Jerusalem" by Dan Bern and I harmonized with her. She always had a way of looking me in the eyes when she sang that song, and it made me feel kind of honored when she did.

We walked around for a bit and Amy played for a man who offered us three or four takeout boxes of Sushi rolls that were delicious. We sat by the car on top of the parking deck and smoked a bowl before we left and dropped off Yewsten in Beaverton.

I enjoyed seeing him. We decided to meet again sometime soon. Amy stayed at his apartment that night because of allergy problems over here. The next day, she took off right as I was waking up. She came to give me a hug, and ended up straddling me full on and we locked eyes with our arms around each other.

I kissed her softly, and our lips touched for a few seconds. She squeezed me one last time and turned to leave.

I smiled.

"I'll miss you, you know."

"You just be joyful for next time," she said and winked.

And I was. I was somehow joyful about the prospect that all that my life was had now died, that I was now free to do whatever I wanted to do because I had lost everything that ever meant anything, and that somehow, that was okay.

Like a phoenix, rising from the ashes.

A Pointless Theoretical Exercise

Teams are picked arbitrarily, through the spinning of a wheel which has 12 subdivisions- 6 black, and 6 white, in equal proportion. Throughout the wheel, each of the 12 subdivisions has an arbitrary "character" or "fictional persona" for any given team member to play, and should their spin land them on a subdivision with a  particular character description on it, they must become that description and pretend the description on the wheel neatly encapsulates the essence of who they are as a human being.

One portion of the wheel may read "fascist right wing ideologue" or "bomber of abortion clinics", another may read "crusader for womens' rights." The only common denominator here is that some players will be united in color (black or white), although all are united in that they are living beings and thus share all of the qualities that define "life". For the sake of game play, the white team must convince themselves that they are completely good and that their opponents on the black team are charlatans, frauds, and evil shitheads. And vice versa, with the black team.

The goal of the player is to lose his or her self completely in an arbitrarily defined identity given to them based upon chance, or hazard- which is to say, the spinning of the wheel. You have no choice but to spin the wheel. Beyond this, game play proceeds with the black team against the white team, and takes place on a checkerboard composed of "white" squares and "black" squares, as in a common game of chess.

The catch is that each player decides, arbitrarily, what type of movement is fair for their pieces and the ways in which the movements of the game work. Should a team member of the opposing team disagree upon what constitutes a valid move in a game whose rules are invented by the players as the game progresses, that player must then declare "Shenanigans" and the two must fight about the matter until it is resolved- Possibly, and most preferably, to the death.

Game play ends when one side has completely exterminated the other, and conflict ceases.

You have no choice but to play.
"Soon... Some day very soon, we will look upon what we have created, and we will spit upon the dirt we used to mold you into the clay of the earth, and we will change the valence and we will wipe this place clean."
- Mr. Gray

Highway 101 Is The Lost Highway

Trip Guide: H.P. Lovecraft

Driving up Highway 101, through the Redwood Forests. It is beautiful, but the long silences between Amy and I give me a lot of time to think. Dan Bern drones on and on through the car stereo, singing songs of George W. Bush and Osama Bin Laden paling around in Texas together after Bin Laden faked his own death... I just bought a terrible, unnaturally red slushie from a gas station called "Tiger Blood" that tasted like Pina Colada and throw up. What more could you expect from a drink named after Charlie Sheen's media meltdown? And like the televised freakout of its namesake- the one that immortalized him for 15 minutes before he withered away into 90 pounds of unemployable, coke-emaciated obscurity- it too seemed like a good idea at the time. The poor bastard. I blame marketing.

Maybe... And maybe I could blame the fact that I was breastfed until I was about 3 years old and coddled by mommy well into my 20s for some of my unhealthy dependency issues with women. Time to cut the fucking chord. Katherine was a crutch, a blank screen for my projections. What did I see? My own shadow. How could she have ever been anything else? She wanted a father, the one that died when she was 8 years old. I wanted a woman to coddle me and build my ego with shallow, insincere compliments. Many Freudian undertones to that whole situation you could hardly even call undertones: She called me "pappy" during sex frequently it began to sound normal.... And other thoughts I wrestle with, as we wind our way through forests of trees taller than any I've ever seen in the mountains of Northern California.

We stopped somewhere along the coast in the forest. Amy hopped out of the car and frolicked through the trees, running back and forth and jumping. It was adorable. She looked like a fairy. A tinge of some vaguely recognizable feeling emerged from deep within my body, and I quickly stifled it. "That's quite enough out of you."

We picked up two quintessentially smelly hippy hitchhikers, somewhere back in a small town called Garbersville. Nice enough fellows- the girl, Tiana, and her boyfriend Philip. They are hitching a ride with us into Portland. All of the lights turn yellow as we pass through them.

The boy has dreadlocks and looks a bit like a rasta. As soon as we stopped to pick them up, my first question before introducing myself was "Do you have any acid?" He told me as a matter of fact, he did, and he sold me his last two hits of blotter. Which was either a really good or a really bad idea, depending upon how the next 2 to 3 hours on the road pan out. "White fluff", he called it. "It's for sure good, clean acid." I'm sure. It tastes like an amphetamine analog. Beggars can't be choosers. I'll take it. I handed him a 20 and we started back on highway 101.

Conversation took a nasty swerve to far left of center when talk came around to the National Defense Authorization Act.

"The laws they passed, man" he said. "Now, kids are being snatched up in white vans by feds and taken off to mental hospitals. It already happened to me once. After a show, they took me after I had a bad trip and they locked me in a hospital. They doped me up on fucking seroquel and left me there to go crazy, man! One of our friends, he was in the woods at a gathering and he just disappeared flat out. Kids are just vanishing from the woods in Rainbow country.... They're trying to lock us all up... Or worse!"

"Jesus," I mumbled.

I envisioned a room full of Federal agents in a mental hospital behind a two way mirror, laughing as they tested awful memories extracted from hanged felons by snuff film pornographers on the sensitized young cells of junkies, and selling the photos developed from their brains on the black market.... The acid had begun to do its work.

I asked him if he had ever heard of Bohemian Grove, and chuckled.

"No. Why?"

"Furthur got paid to pay there once. Bob Weir and Phil Lesh. The Grovers are a rich group of corrupt politicians, bankers and fuckups, generally. They burn a big stone owl effigy, a bit like burning man. Every year. Nixon went there once, called it the 'faggiest goddamned thing he'd ever seen'."

"Heavy." The conversation had begun to feel tense.

"Fuck you, pay me," I said.

"The system wants to KILL us," he told me. "The Rainbow Family is the most dangerous enemy to the establishment."

"Eh? Rainbow Family? What makes them so dangerous? What exactly IS it that they do?"

"We camp out in the woods and make music."

"Oh."

"Really," he continued, "any traveling kid can just be yanked and black bagged by the government now. Most people wouldn't know they were even gone. Jacked in broad daylight, and that's a wrap."

"For playing music in a drum circle?"

I imagined all the half-dead, stricken with warts, homeless and psychotic heroin addicts in the tenderloin left to die in public parks. Why hadn't they been detained yet?

I smiled. "Something tells me if the hipsters were to be put into a camp, most of them would go on their own, voluntarily. You know. To be ironic."

Silence.

The sweet, younger girl in the back strummed innocently away at a mandolin as we pulled through a McDonald's- they wanted to go through the drive thru there rather than eat our organic apples with us. In the car, our whole vibe was a lot like the Manson family. The irony was not lost on me, however, when I started to peak on the LSD while waiting in line for soylent green burgers.

The advertisement seemed plastic and tawdry, the food looked unreal and smelled like burning plastic...

The next hour was a horror show. The kids in the back seat popped in a random mystery CD that they had found. It sounded like it came from another dimension. Backwards noises and guitar effects, weird chanting in some tribal language and crescendos that sent electrical chills through my spine. The car was full of hashish smoke as the we flew around the curves of highway 101. I looked at the highway, and it seemed to be a single stretch of road, no more than a mile, repeating itself endlessly. "The Chariot," a voice said to me, and it echoed inside of my head. I felt trapped in an infinity loop. "I AM ELECTRON!" I thought to myself. "I AM AN ELECTRON!" The lost highway. We were stuck inside of a fucking mobius strip! Until.... Until what? Death? Or was death merely the point where the alpha and omega overlapped to complete the circle.... Deeper, and deeper into the woods. Lyrics from a Leonard Cohen song randomly flashed in kinetic typography across my brain: "And we'll read from precious bibles/that are bound in blood and skin/that the wilderness is gathering all its children back again...."

"Let go. Love. Trust. Do you trust?"

It was a voice, but it wasn't my own. And it wasn't audible. It seemed to me to be coming from Amy's brain.

The events of earlier that morning flashed in front of my eyes.

I had realized I too was a liar, an adrenaline junkie, and an insincere person. How much of what I saw in Katherine that I hated was really just my own shadow? I had walked around the Tenderloin all morning and finally had copped a bag of brown powder. My hands were shaking as I hit in the bathroom of Carl's Jr.

On the ride back on the L, I thought to myself "Why are you still doing this? You are killing yourself to live, and it's not going to stop until you wise up. You held her accountable for everything she did to wrong you, but do you realize she did those things for the same reason you continue to do this to yourself? What of your friends? They have no idea you are doing this to yourself, why do you hide from them? Are you ashamed? Did it ever occur to you that maybe others operate on this level in different circumstances? That rush of adrenaline that you get when you know you are doing something that is not good for you. Where do you suppose that comes from? Why do you run from your own shadow?"

I didn't tell Amy and Pete on the ride out of San Fran that I was high on smack. I kept it to myself, as I nodded out silently in the passenger seat.

"It's not going to stop until you forgive her, forgive yourself, and wise up."

But it's a good deal easier to hate others for the things you have not yet come to accept about yourself than it is to change those things and to forgive.

We pulled up to a large sign post with a map and a picture of a huge redwood tree on it. The air felt so thick I could have cut it with a knife. Just then, it occurred to me that David Lynch was narrating my thoughts, which at the time seemed to be a sort of a mathematical equation involving Marilyn Monroe and Bettie Page sitting on each others faces as a means of explaining the cyclical duplicity of the cosmos.

"The map, Phil... The map... It's like, veins. VEINS."

"Yes, my friend. Veins. Veins. VEEEIINNNSSSS....."

Inside of my body, I could feel the collapsed veins and junk damaged cells struggling to rebuild themselves, and I recognized the damage in my body as being a microcosmic and holographic representation of the damage man himself has done to the seas, and to the land and to the air. Amy turned towards me and said, "The U.S military has been killing off the whales. It is a genocide, and no one cares. Not even me. Not even you."

Satan was buttfucking the Virgin Mary with a greased up strapon inside of my head when we finally pulled up to the spot where we decided to camp. Amy and Tiana jammed on fiddle and mandolin and it sounded somehow strangely discordant. Wild and frantic. The acid was creeping up the spine again, filling my brain with sharp and hideous clarity. Every nerve in my body felt aware of its own structure simultaneously. My brain started firing random fragments of thoughts at me, but for some reason they were coming out in Sumerian. Or Lovecraftian?

IA! IA! DAGON! IA! CTHULHU FHATAGN!

I sprawled out under the stars. My lungs hurt, and I was coughing up badly. The sky stretched and expanded and warped and contracted. A voice from deep inside of me murmured "Nature will have its revenge." But where were the voices coming from?

The stars... the night sky was clear as crystal and pretty as a picture, and they stretched out as far as I could see.

"Just think of all those galaxies out there," I said, to nobody in particular.

Amy and I slept in the car together that night. I rolled around for hours, trying to make myself comfortable, but I could not.

Before she fell asleep in the driver's seat next to me, Amy began to suck, bite and chew on an apple ravenously, making succulent and animalistic noises.

"You wanna bite?" she said to me, and smiled so sweetly.

"Amy, when strange women randomly ask me to share an apple with them, I am accustomed to saying 'no'."

She laughed, smiled at me so mischieviously. "You sure?"

And my God, I wanted her then and there more than anything. There was something so perversely innocent about Amy. She was naturally flirtatious, and a tom boy. She had a sort of a penis envy about her, and was more vocal about aggressive kink than just about any man I had ever met. She was a chaotic neutral, somehow balanced through the process of her art, which was her life.

("Heretic!", she cried out. "Cast forth the stones from your mouth!")

I felt tense then, and the maddeningly visceral waves of acid frenzy lit my genitalia aflame and sent long, pulsating torrents of electrical currents through my body. The celibacy of traveling for days on the road was torturing me.

And yet- No way. Couldn't happen.

"Do you feel tense?" I asked.

"Not really, just sleepy."

I tossed and turned. The hitchhikers' dog behind us was keeping me awake, and I told Amy that his noises and heavy breathing were periodically freaking me out.

"Try to think of the 'outside' of the car. The 'not car'."

Of course.... The outside. The outside of what? Outside of....

How huge was it? It was all so vastly alien, so foreign. I was such a small, small particle among particles in the body of a universe that seemed horrifically, and yet beautifully foreign to me then. Something outside of the car, the "not car", the "not self", was beckoning. Something outside of... What?

The smell of the car by the time we reached Oregon the next morning was making me sick to my stomach. The dog had vomited. The four of us smelled like half dead roadkill hippies rotting in the summer afternoon, old fast food and rotten apple corps.

The acid had kept me up all night, gibbering to myself in some half-forgotten Lovecraftian dialect, and my nerves were raw. I began drinking around 11 AM to soothe those deadened nerves, remnants of the razor sharp shards of revelations appearing and disappearing into the Redwood Forests that night, leaving my senses reeling under the night sky. My muscles were tense. The sky was overcast and drizzling off and on and on. Amy asked if she could sleep with her head on my shoulder, and I said yes. We rested.

And in the morning after the night, I fell in love with the light.

Meanwhile, as I write this, we pull to a stop at a fill up point a few hours south of Portland. Tiana and Philip play violin and ukelele, and we harmonize effortlessly with them on a very unconventional rendition of "Friend of the Devil" by the Dead as I have realization that I am both synthetic and organic, spontaneous and predetermined, mechanical and natural. Somewhere, far off, flowers are blooming, a dog rummages through a garbage can, a fallen angel regains its wings, and a butterfly flaps and causes a bilious cough in a grandmother halfway around the world in Shaftsbury. Prometheus shrugged.

They popped another mystery CD into the car stereo, and it was the Leonard Cohen record I had been thinking about the night before.

"Nobody could really hear him, the night so thick and green.... I'D LIKE TO TELL MY STORY NOW, SAID ONE OF THEM SO BOLD...."

I looked over at Amy, and half to her, half to myself said: "We all have an orbit to be on, and when we get off course, we CRASH."

She smiled.

"Yes. It is lucky for us that we have the gravity of others."

I first met Amy in New York city. I knew her boyfriend, Howard, whom I had vague memories of working with in the past. At least, I thought I did.

She wrote to me randomly one night and told me she knew of me through Howard. She explained that she was sorry, but, she had fallen asleep with her phone under her pillow the night before, and dreamt that I had called her and she had agreed to come pick me up in Philadelphia where I was living at the time and that we hit the road together. What a strange response to have to a dream like that, what a strange thing to apologize to me for, and stranger still that months later we did exactly that.

We are told these things happen for a reason.

We arrived in Portland around 4 in the afternoon that day, and I was half drunk and I fell into a deep sleep.

San Francisco is Babylon

Trip Guide: GANESH

I pretended to read Jack Kerouac on the bus from Sacramento to San Francisco, but I was too anxious or excited to really properly read a book, and I've always found Kerouac to be a bore, if you want to know the truth. I sat in anticipation, half wondering and half dreading what would happen in the week to follow with Salvatore and his flat mates, whom I had already begun to suspect hated him. And they did. The following week was a maddening regiment of watching Sal drink himself into oblivion, scream at his flatmates, beg his super to not evict the both of us then and there for his insolent stupidity. I had always loved Salvatore as a brother, but after his woman and child were out of the picture he too crawled into a bottle of Southern Comfort. Or Ancient Age, as the case may be. I cannot pretend to be better than Salvatore because I am willing to spend a few dollars more for brand names. The only real difference between us is that Sal is a mean drunk.

I speak from the heart too often to be able to deal with hot tempered, drunken Italians. Salvatore is and has always been quite the gentleman, and the type of person to really give you the shirt off his back once you are in good with him, as I was at the time. And in many ways I still regret the following week which was comically awkward and full of many social faux paus on both of our ends. It is what it is- and this has become my chosen mantra, much like the Serenity Prayer for recovering alcoholics. "It is what it is", man. And sometimes it just fucking IS.

We chatted via text message on the whole trip over. About everything, and nothing. I seem to recall having a conversation with him about Hebrew mysticism, which is a somewhat unorthodox passion of mine. What can I say- I like numbers. Salvatore's child was a Yid, his baby's mother is Jewish. So far, so good. It was an attempt to bridge a gap that had occurred between us around the time of his split with the girl. The last time I had spoken to Sal he was in a bit of a pickle with his lady friend, the mother of his child. I remember him telling me that he thought I was full of shit, which was and arguably still is the case. Sal has a very low tolerance for academic types, as I sometimes am. Quite the artist, quite the passionate human being, but wax philosophical with Sal and he's liable to break a bottle over your head out of personal insecurity. Particularly if he was drinking whiskey, which he usually was.

I first met him at a reform school that our parents had sent us to when we were young teenagers, not quite the age of 16. The place was a walking nightmare, full of kleptomaniacs, cousin rapers, horse rapers, aspies and derelicts. It was always a wonder to us that we were fucked up enough to fit the bill, and as I recall Salvatore was one of the few kids there who was not doped up on all the meds they stuck up our asses every night before bedtime. We quickly became friends, although even at the time his inferiority complex and hot temper made it difficult to tip toe around his feelings.

We played music to escape our problems. I still do. He still does. I guess that was the main reason we got along so well. I trained him, which is to say I knew and still know my way around most instruments and the theory behind them to be able to make them sing. I had a background in theory and composition, even at that age. To use Salvatore's words, I "played at being a composer" with him. We spent long hours memorizing songs we had written together, or perhaps more accurately, songs on which I had dictated basslines for him to play. He told me the first night I arrived in San Francisco that I was the person who was singly responsible for his obsession with becoming a better instrumentalist. I told him that I was sorry, for what it was worth.

When I finally pulled into the bus station on Folsom, I was exhausted. Sal was waiting inside the terminal when I opened the door and called for him to come out.

"I was waiting forever man. I was starting to think something was wrong." He smiled a toothy, overly enthusiastic grin. His long, greasy black hair was pulled back into a tightly knotted pony tail. He had bathed for the occasion, which is admittedly rare for Salvatore, but his hair and forehead were already starting to acquire that shimmering layer of perspiration and the shine it normally had after a few days of ignoring his hygiene. He reached his arms around me to embrace me warmly, and thrust a joint into my hand. "Let's get high!"

We walked a few blocks with all of my shit- which was a bit much even for two people to walk the whole 11 blocks to his flat. We opted instead to take a bus, and got stoned on the way to the bus stop.  We rode the Muni bus to a liquor store very close to the apartment, and I bought a six pack of some decent Belgian ale and Sal bought his usual liter of whiskey, in addition to the bottle he already had back at the apartment.

When we arrived back at his flat, the evening quickly degenerated into sloppy drunk impromptu jams of Eric Burdon songs and madness. Somewhere in the evening, things took a sharp left turn quickly when I said that I thought New York was a cesspool. I tried to explain that was the reason I liked it so much, but Sal was already on the defensive, staggering around drunkenly like a pugilist and flailing his hands in the air, screaming at me.

"What the fuck does someone from the bumblefuck midwest know about anything, anyway? You think you're real fucking cute, don't you. How long have you traveled now? I've been all over the fucking country man. Most people in New York are good Italian families in the Bronx."

"I'm not talking about them, man. I'm talking about Manhattan. And this isn't to say I don't enjoy New York City. I'm just saying- take a look at it. It's slick marketing executives, dope men and prostitutes. That fucking place is like Rome before it burned."

Somehow we back peddled our way out of the argument when his flatmates began beating on the wall again. Earlier that evening, Sal had made me pretty uncomfortable by screaming at them, calling the British man and his wife "Ichabod Crane" and "the OGRE", respectively. They'd really only asked him to turn down the stereo, which was at that point blaring The Animals. It seemed a reasonable enough request, but I could feel the hostility between both parties and things were starting to get ugly.

I had tried explaining to Sal that I had just gotten out of the worst domestic partnership I had ever been in, that every evening was a new conflict or struggle over some seemingly unimportant mundane detail, and that I was only craving a bit of sanity and stability. Knowing Sal as I did, I probably should've just kept my mouth shut and let him get evicted. He personalized it, of course, and that was the first bit of nastiness of the evening. Things just got worse.

Early in the morning, around 8 AM we were both still awake and completely trashed. Sal had slipped into playing old Tom Waits LPs at some point during the evening, listening to "Tom Traubert's Blues" and weeping about his lost woman and the daughter he was no longer able to see- undoubtedly due to his heavy drinking and uncontrollable outbursts of anger. I had embraced him long and hard and told him it wasn't his fault. If I look at that statement honestly, it was probably more in relation to my implicit resentment of the female gender at that point in time than it was any sort of objective measure of his innocence. We both knew he was a fuckup, but he was my friend.

We left in the morning around 8, went walking through the Mission. After taking a piss in the middle of the street in front of about a dozen passersby, Sal treated us to some fast food with his EBT card. As we stood there, three sheets to the wind, one of a million grifters begged me for 5 minutes continuously for spare cash which I did not have. Rather than answer him directly, I turned around and drunkenly barked gibberish at him until he left.

After that, we left and Sal staggered around town chasing after cop cars like a chimpanzee and making garbled monkey noises. Every so often, a pedestrian would make the mistake of walking near us or across the street from us, and Sal would put his dukes up into the air like the Notre Dame fighting Irish mascot and scream "HEY! HEY! WHADDAYOOOOOOUUUU THINK YOU'RE DOOOOOINNNNN?!!" He staggered through the streets, walking in front of traffic and flexing his muscles like Hulk Hogan, screaming things like "OHHHHHH YEEEAH, BRRROTTTTHHHHERRRRRRRR! YOU DON'T WANT TO ANGER THE HULLLKKKSTTTERRRR!"

It was good fun, until we decided to go back to the Burger King in the Mission because he wanted to pick something else up. I waited outside. After a few minutes he ran out of the front door, flailing his arms in the air mumbling incoherently about how he had tried to order something but he scared them and they told him to leave. After this, he had thrown his fists down onto the counter and screamed at the workers who began to scream back at him in a foreign language that was presumably Spanish. Things were getting nasty. As we walked away, he took his fist and slammed it abruptly into the solid doubly thick glass wall of the Burger King. Yelping like a wounded animal, he staggered off. "MOTHERFUCKERS! COCK-SUCKERS!" he howled.

After we had slept most of the day, we finally woke up, not just a little worse for the wear. Sal was in a piss poor mood, as was expected. He had fucked up his hand pretty bad. That afternoon, his super talked to him and told him there was a good chance he was going to get evicted if he received anymore complaints. The atmosphere was tense.

We walked around for a bit, went to the Goodwill so I could pick up a towel which I forgot at the Mexican diner we went to afterwards, and spent a bit of time oogling women in Dolorous park. It was a beautiful day, and people were congregating, smoking herb and drinking in the park as is typical on a Saturday afternoon in San Francisco. Sal was already half drunk, having bought about three tall boys since we woke up.

Later on, I decided to go out with a friend I was planning on relocating to LA with. Sharon was a writer, a noise musician and an all around flakey person. I had a lot of respect for her, and still do to an extent, although I can certainly understand why many others I knew personally refused to make any solid long term plans with her.

We went to a bar called Zeitgeist that evening, all three of us. Sal quickly got a little sand in his vagina because he was convinced we would ignore him all evening and exclude him from conversation. He split, taking the keys for the apartment with him. Sharon and I sat and drank and talked, and I bought her dinner at a little diner a few blocks away. After we had finished eating, I walked her home and went back to the apartment. I called Sal to let me in, only to find that he had fallen asleep.

I walked around through the Mission all night, freezing my ass off and wondering if Sal had intentionally locked me out due to some unforeseen instance of personal spite. It was still early, and I knew him to mostly fall asleep later in the evening. So I continued to walk around, and freeze. I was nearly out of cigarettes. I silently cursed my luck. I thought of the warmth of Katherine's bed, her dog Gyp curled up around my feet.

I called her.

"I'm in a bit of a position."

"Mmm."

She was half asleep.

"I got locked out of the apartment. Sal is pretty unstable, and I'm not really sure things are going so well. If you could send me a little money to get a cheap hotel room or help me find a place I could sleep for free for the night, it would save me from the cold. I have no smokes. I am broke. I'm freezing...."

We talked for a bit and she fell asleep on the phone with me before we could find a solution to my freezing to death. Mark Twain once said the coldest winter he had ever known was a summer spent in San Francisco, and it wasn't even summer yet. I cursed my luck, again. For all the good that it did me. I remembered laying with Katherine days before I left, holding her. I was staring into the locket necklace around her neck, transfixed. It was a replication of the elephant god Ganesh, remover of obstacles. It seemed like a strange sort of harbinger of the future at the time.

But who or what was the obstacle being removed? Was Katherine the obstacle I was meant to overcome? Was the universe finding a way to tear us from each other before anymore damage could be done? Was I only in the way of her getting what she really wanted? She always told me what I wanted to hear. She never cared to change, which meant I couldn't have ever been much more than an inconvenient burden to her. Hollow, empty pleasantries and bodily fluids were exchanged, but did I ever even know her? Could she ever even see me for who I really was? If we were nothing more than hurdles to jump over for each other before either of us could be free, why did I miss her still? Why had the universe seen it fit to bring us together in the first place?

I roamed up and down the streets all night, until I finally found a seedy old motel called the Krishna Hotel where a rape and a murder had taken place recently. I tried the knob for the door which was barred with iron bars and was surprised to find it unlocked. I staggered up the steps and passed out in the hallway, relieved to find a bit of warmth there on the hardwood floors.

I must've not been sleeping long when Sal called my cell phone and apologized most sincerely. He had fallen asleep and forgotten to let me in. I forgave him, for what it was worth, but I was still not very happy with the situation. I had a whole week left to put up with this shit?

I met him outside the apartment on Folsom. I went inside and quickly fell asleep.

The next day, there was a huge rave and street festival on Howard  that took up several blocks. It was fantastic. Everywhere I looked, beautiful half naked women in long fishnet leggings dry fucking people to loud electronic music. Men dressed in furry plushy wolf outfits, wearing campaign buttons that read "Nixon '72" and drugged out freaks barfing into the streets. Flaming queers in Freddy Mercury outfits dancing wildly on high rise beams and DJs lined every block, and the people were packed in together like a gigantic living Bosch painting.

Two natives came to us asking if we had a pipe. I responded in the negative, but told them I had papers. We rolled a spliff and smoked together. Sal told them that I too was a DJ, and that I put all of these other hacks to shame. I laughed. He was full of shit- I had just picked up a set of Numarks about a week before and had been fucking around with them at the apartment, so I was really still a beginner. I blushed.

Several days passed, and I had an awful fight with Katherine on the telephone. She was accusing me of all sorts of things, and every time I actually tried to explain myself she cut me off and screamed that she didn't care. Finally, the conversation ended in her calling me a pathetic junkie. I relapsed that night.

I couldn't sleep, I had realized things would never be the same between us again. I was drunk, and restless. Tossing and turning. I left and walked up and down Van Ness until I found a dope spot, and copped what I later found out to be a bag of black tar, which I had never had before.

I shot the whole bag without cooking it, which apparently is a very bad idea with anything that isn't brown or white powder. Slowly but surely, over the next few miserable days I spent wishing things could be different with Katherine and tip toeing around Sal's anger problem, an abscess developed on the inner crook of the elbow portion of my left arm.

By the time I finally decided to leave early for L.A. on a bus, it was hurting like a bastard and I was getting worried. Sal was intolerable that day, asking me to leave for a while even though I was in a generally agreeable mood, and had been for most of the ill-fated visit we spent together. I had no money, and nowhere to go. It was cold. I asked him for some of the money, about a dollar or two that I had given him for food the night before back so I could get a cup of coffee somewhere warm. He responded by becoming indignant and telling me off. I told him that he was the worst host I had ever had the displeasure of staying with, and to go fuck himself. I packed my shit, and took a bus in to L.A. that night.

I took a handful of anxiety pills and slept. Somewhere in the middle of the night, a gangbanger girl, probably from L.A., sat on the seat next to me and smushed me up against the wall. She slept that night with her head on my shoulder. We didn't speak a word to each other. I arrived that morning in L.A., and Amy picked me up to take me to her mom's place in Oceanside. I slept the best sleep of my life.

I realized, as I sat at Amy's desk and wrote the account of my trip to San Francisco last night, that it remains one of my favorite cities despite the rotten luck I encountered during the majority of my time spent there with Sal.

Which is interesting, because as I make the trip to Portland with Amy and our two ride shares today, we've just decided to spend a night in San Fran. Emily's boyfriend plays in a Blue Grass band in the Haight, and Pete is planning to crash with us at Amy's friend Joeseph's house.

I like San Francisco a whole lot, even though I'd be the first to admit to you that it is a modern day Babylon, full of junkies and pimps and whores and psychotic homeless panhandlers who'd probably just as soon shank you to death and play around in your blood than they would bumrush you to beg for money. And begging is the wrong word for what they do, because they often will not take no for an answer. Everyone has an angle.

And that is just in the Mission, so we will ignore for the moment the burnt out old hippies with names like "Free" and "Buffalo" and "Moon Beam" who have DEFINITIVELY outlived their use, or all the runaways or modern day pseudo-hippies who somehow didn't get the memo that it is no longer 1969 and that the Haight isn't about peace or love so much as it is about cons and marks, a mutually parasitic relationship. Not to mention the hopelessly disheveled junkies in the Tenderloin, or the Mexican block boys representing La Mara who will walk you from point A to point B to cop, exacting only a modest price in return. I've heard they sometimes buzz open peoples' faces right there on the streets of Mexico with chainsaws, but they have always thanked me for my patronage and bestowed the most earnest and heartfelt blessings upon myself and my family. It's all a matter of how you want to look at it, is all I could ever say.....

Yes, San Francisco is Babylon and filth and decay, like something out of Bill Burroughs' blackest subconscious vision: A vast, teeming human marketplace trafficking in any contraband you can imagine, full of thieves and pushers and overflowing with debauchery. But I thrive in these situations. Which says something about my general character and demeanor, although I can't quite put my finger on it. Fuck it. It is what it is.

A homemade banner attached to an overpass on the way through L.A. reads "E-POCALYPSE NOW". I have seen it two to three times on my numerous trips back and forth, back and forth, between Oceanside and L.A. on the handful of trips between these two places that I have taken since I first left San Fran. And that is an altogether different set of stories for another day.

"E-POCALYPSE NOW"- probably a clever bit of viral marketing or promotion, but extremely relevant, none the less. If god destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah with an Avenging Angel, and Travis Bickle waited for the real rain to wash the filth off the streets of New York, Bill Hicks petitioned the powers of nature to give the earth the enema it so badly needs for its own survival by flushing the turd that is L.A. into the ocean.

Fair enough, but I hope that I am not still in Southern California when Gaia finally pushes the plunger down to flush it all away.

And what of the notion that the infrastructures and electronic networks we have built for ourselves will be our own downfall, like Mary Shelly's "FRANKENSTEIN"?

Certainly, we have become dependent upon the internet. How would communication, commerce or society hold up without it? I have traveled through America this year exclusively through the use of the internet in planning my places to crash with friends miles away from one another.

And all it would take would be a few strategically placed pulse bombs... But ah, nevermind that.

Nevermind that grim realization that the end is always nearer than we may suspect, and that the shit will someday truly hit the fan when Frankenstein's monster turns on him. Yes, nevermind that. Onwards... to Babylon.

Reasons for crawling into a bottle of Southern Comfort

Trip guide: St. Christopher

About a week or so before I finally left, things had gone from bad to worse. We bickered constantly. "I love you, I hate you." Axis one bipolar plus axis two borderline in a relationship is a match made in hell. Things would go well, and then I'd notice one or two things to be inconsistent with stories she had told me. Receipts would come up around or in our house for places she claimed to not have visited, on days in which she told me she was at work or school. She began arriving home from her classes nearly every day with another man, one I wasn't introduced to at any point. I think my naturally occurring sense of inadequacy could have permitted this if I weren't already feeling like I was fighting a losing battle.

Every promise that had ever been made to me was broken already. The tension was building. Anyway, we were fucking as much as we were fighting, and that kept things rolling on a purely biological level for some time. But in the final week before I finally knew I had to leave for my own emotional and physical well being, she would kick me out nearly once a night, ultimately always coming after me after she or I had packed my bags and telling me not to leave. "I love you, I hate you. Go, don't go. Stay."

Like many other couples, at the end of the day, we didn't find much in common to talk about. Our days were spent eating out, or drinking expensive whole bean coffee. Or eating expensive gourmet chocolate. Or drinking expensive gourmet top shelf booze. Smoking expensive medicinal marijuana. Completely bourgeois sensibilities. I gained about 20 pounds in three months time. On the surface I was fat and complacent, one might have even argued that I was happy. But my inner life, my intellectual life and emotional growth was stagnating. I felt alone. I knew that I loved her. I knew that she loved me. Or at least I thought that I knew these things, but somehow it wasn't enough to keep the lies from piling up. To keep the resentment from growing, and to keep the distance between us from accumulating with the speed of a runaway shortbus on a collision course with a happy young family on a Sunday picnic.

At night, we spooned and watched syndicated episodes of Twin Peaks. Or cartoons. We made love, if you could call it that. And for the sake of honesty, you really couldn't have called it that. I smoked an awful lot of dope. We went for long walks in the woods, but at the end of the day neither of us felt fulfilled or understood.

I remember the day I left. I stayed with the neighbors next door. Katherine had thrown me out again: This time, she wanted me gone. This time was different. So she packed my bags again, and by this I mean she took all of my shit and threw it into a pile on the floor and furiously stuffed it into the few remaining boxes that I had. By this point, I had traveled for some time and had very few things. It was very convenient when she actually wanted me to leave. I needed only to grab the few pieces of musical equipment I had brought with me, my journals and books, and the three pairs of jeans or a couple crumpled up socks, invariably crusted with semen, and wad them up into my suitcases and boxes. This continued for about a week's time before the last, final eviction notice. "I WANT YOU THE FUCK OUT. LEAVE NOW."

So I left that night, and as I said, stayed with the neighbors. Two of the men there have since become very friendly with Katherine. I don't know and I don't care. So it goes.

One could say that I loved her, in a sense. I loved her much more from afar, before we became involved and when I was still really capable of honest love. I really was never meant to be with her, not least of which because of the distance between us geographically. Some odds seem impossible for a reason. Around Christmas time she took a trip back to our hometown, where I was still living. To be fair, my life was every bit as stagnant there in the midwest as it had became in the final days living with Katherine in South Lake. She stayed with me for the most of two weeks, sleeping in my arms every night after hours of marathon sex. It was like being in high school again. In the morning, she would wake in my arms and kiss me and play with the hair on my chest. It drove me crazy, and I'd push her away to roll over on my side and attempt to get another few minutes or hours of sleep. It's funny how the little things mean the most, in retrospect.

At the time, I knew I cared about her. My rationale for not wanting to become involved with her was simple. I knew how these things ended. I knew she wasn't nearly as old or as wise or mature as she feigned at being, and for that matter, neither was I. It seemed more simple to tell her that I loved, or that I cared for her in the way that I attempt to care for all other humans. It was that simple. I want to love, not to be in love. I wish to inspire, not to possess. I never expected nor did I care to have a long term anything with Katherine. I kept my distance, even while being near her throughout those days, until one night when everything suddenly changed.

I don't know what it is about the tears of a woman. Realistically, I understand woman to be a savage and cruel being, often times capable of acting in ways many times more brutal than men. But the external frailty, the ability to weep and to move my heart- Such tenderness! Such warmth. I remember exactly the way her tears tasted the night she finally won me over, in spite of myself.

We had just finished making love. "The Boatman's Call" by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds was droning on in the background, undoubtedly some song of a lost love taking a train back to the west or a long dead lover haunting the dreams of the narrator. She pressed hard into my arms and buried her face into my chest. At first, I thought it was just an attempt to move her body closer to mine, as if by pressing her face into my abdomen with all of her might, she could somehow manage to penetrate the physical and emotional border between lives. Then, the tears, those gushing salty waves of euphoria and melancholy, an ecstatic and sorrowful and tender emotional outburst. She raised her head above my arms and looked up directly into my eyes, a look so sweet and tender that it moved me to the very depths of my heart in a way that only a weeping lover ever could.

"I love you so much. Do you know that? I can't.... I am so afraid. I am so, just so FUCKING AFRAID, that you will not love me in the way that I love you." She gazed into me, locking eyes. Her cheeks were red, her eyelids smeared with the eyeliner and mascara that was now running down her face.

I was taken aback, only at first. Why were all the walls suddenly crumbling?  This was not in the game plan. This was a turning point, something critical was hanging in the balance here. I could only begin to fathom what it was, and even then I was in no way prepared for it.

"Katherine," I began. "I care about you very much. I have a problem. When I become involved with any one individual, I become blindsided. I often am unable to think or reason in the ways I would like to, as a person. My love for everyone, my love for other people, my life, becomes inhibited. You may not understand this, but my idea of perfect love is selfless love. And I don't think what you want from me is what either of us needs. Because the type of love you want from me is selfish. And it makes me selfish. You would come to see parts of who I am that you do not know, that you don't want to know. And it would never be because I didn't love you too much. You are consuming me already."

She began to cry harder. I felt her trembling in my arms. She looked like a scared little child. I wanted so badly then to hold her, to brush the hair back from her eyes and to tell her everything would be alright. I knew that it wouldn't. How could it? The type of aching I knew that she had felt, that she had felt now for years- an indescribable yearning, and aching to be wanted and loved and accepted, had to come from within herself. Just like it did with everyone else. How could I ever be anything but a quick fix for such a lonely, fragile young girl?

"I only want you," she said. "I just want you."

She buried her face into my chest once more, and I felt her need. I knew that I loved her. Mentally, emotionally I knew that I wasn't prepared to give her what she felt she needed. Katherine was mad. She has always been mad. Anyone who knew Katherine would have told you that Katherine was mad. And they did. Three suicide attempts, one hospitalization, and one trip to the county jail for Katherine after I had shared this moment with her, and Katherine was still mad. And selfish, childish and cruel. And every bit as beautiful as she was the moment I met her.

What could I possibly offer that could deliver her from herself?

And I held her while she trembled in my arms.

"I love you too," I told her. And I took the plunge. I fell deep, fell endlessly, into what seemed to be a dark and yawning void. It swallowed both of us. In the months to follow, through the blood and the intoxicated fucks, the shouting and the laughter, the light and the darkness and the frustrated attempts between both of us to reconcile the differences, that simple decision and the path taken that evening has made all of the difference.

And it is the reason that I am sitting here, somewhat embittered, a good deal wiser and a whole hell of a lot older, writing this to you now. I am 25 this month. I have no job, or permanent residence. No real lucrative future career prospects. I am homeless, roaming from place to place in Southern California, living hand to mouth and very badly shaken. And very much intoxicated. This is the path of love, and what they often don't tell you in the Disney movies. Love is not pleasure. It is not "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." Love is blood, and entrails, and dying baby birds. Love is aborted dreams, snuffed out candle flames and broken wine bottles. We don't follow the path of love because we want it. We do it because we have to, as if by some invisible compulsion towards a maddening and already foreseen disaster: A beautiful trainwreck.

You can chart relationships in a sort of a flight pattern. The plane takes off, it reaches its natural apex, it plateaus and, in the case of some genuinely lucky sons of bitches, it lands safely and all of its passengers depart to their respective locations, unshaken. My relationships, in hindsight, seem to be Boeing 747s flown by developmentally disabled chimpanzees: they never quite make it off the ground until they are well past the runway. The landing wheels and gears scrape against the natural terrain of the lay of the land, and when they finally do make it off the ground they don't stay in the air for very long. No, they come crashing to the ground when the chimp decides to nose dive into a school bus full of small, innocent young children which is in itself on a crash course with a schoolhouse full of smaller, more innocent young children. Add about 40 gallons of nitroglycerine to this volatile concoction, and viola! The Katherine affair.... The horror!

Reasons for crawling into a bottle of Southern Comfort:

I still remember the way that her hair smells.

I can't quite convince myself I am better off without her.

Was it all her, the violated personal boundaries I tried in vain to establish, the lies and the trickery, or was it my pride? Did I take a stand when I should have shown my belly? Could I have been happier if I were a dog person, rather than a cat person?  Did I zig when I should have zagged?

Could there ever be hope for us again?

Does it cause more pain to entertain that thought, or to banish it completely from my mind forever? Are all of the bridges burnt?

Can I do this again? Would I even want to?

Will I die alone?

So when Mickey, our good Samaritan neighbor who has since become very friendly with Katherine, agreed to drive me to Sacramento where I would catch the bus to San Fran and meet up with Salvatore, I was all smiles. I knew, at the time, that I was finally getting myself FREE. No more watching Katherine feign interest when I'd describe to her in detail the various pieces of writing, music I had produced, or projects in the works that meant so much to me. No more listening to her describe her frustrating, pointless day as a waitress being shit on by her patrons and verbally abused by her amphetamine riddled coworkers. No more fucking, no more fighting, no more get the hell outs and let's stay togethers. No more shrinking from her touch like a coward, during the countless anxiety attacks I suffered that I was convinced were completely a result of her overbearing and stifling presence. I knew my life would be that much easier. That getting free of Katherine was all I needed to become whole, to find myself anew and to start over with the numerous adventures and partners and Great Works I had convinced myself were waiting for me in the golden land of opportunities.

And I was wrong. I'll swallow my pride, which has usually done more harm to me than it has good ultimately and tell you that here and now.

And I said a quick prayer to St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, and Mickey and Terry got into their Jeep with me and we left South Lake. And on the way out of town, I took pictures of its beautiful mountains and lakes and hills that I had taken for granted with all of my bickering with Katherine for so long. And I didn't look back. At least, until we made it to Sacramento.

I pulled up to the depot minutes before they closed, and managed to buy a ticket by bribing a fat office worker to let me in and order a one way to San Francisco. I sat and watched the trains go by in the yard, took my boots and socks off and let my tired feet breathe in the air. The sun was shining. The breeze was cool, but it was hot. There wasn't a cloud in the beautiful blue sky above.

And when the bus pulled up, I grabbed my cardboard box and my one duffel bag and my backpack and I hopped on, just in time before the driver left without me. I must have been a comical sight, hundreds of dollars worth of musical equipment falling out of cardboard box onto the concrete, sprinting to make it to the door of the bus before the driver left without me. I handed him my ticket and hopped on.

And I have been drifting from town to town, house to house, on benders and hallucinations and dreams and rambling incoherently to anyone kind enough to listen ever since.

Beginnings, and endings.

As I boarded the bus in Sacramento, on my way to San Francisco, every nerve in my body fought tooth and nail against my impotent and dwindling will to split the scene in South Lake. True, the girl had been manipulative and cruel, and a liar. She was a borderline personality with a persecution complex and what seemed to be a vendetta against anyone who actually tried to reach through those defense mechanisms and the walls she had erected- those meticulously fortified, protective barriers. That artificial smile, the smile of a waitress waiting to clock out before she could go back to hating the morbidly obese patrons that tortured her so. The pathologically insincere demeanor and mannerisms. And the eyes. Always darting, glancing down and to the left, down and to the left. Those eyes, glimmering and dewy with tears the day I finally split, always concealing something even when in the genuine throes of emotion or passion. A facade. All of these things were true, but she was my girl.

And this story, like most, started with a girl. Although it didn't end when the last mask of pleasantries between us was ripped down and trampled under foot by our savage passion, our endless questions and our mutually exclusive need to be right. It didn't end when I realized, with a dreadful finality, that neither of us had really ever loved the other. And it didn't end when I came to understand that the foundation of our relationship which had lured me so many miles from the safety of my home was a lie, and that she was, in a sense, my mythological Siren. It didn't even end with my final relapse on smack while I was in Frisco, which lead to my nearly losing an arm to a particularly nasty "spider bite". (Bill had asked me why I wasn't dead by the time I showed it to the kids in Southern California for the first time. "Don't brown recluses kill people, man?")

Yes, they do. And so does black tar heroin, apparently. But we won't dig too deeply into that right now.

The story on its surface seemed to be about a girl. It wasn't. And the deeper I dug, and the deeper I dig, sitting here sipping Old Crow from a coffee mug writing this at a friends desk the evening before departing for Oregon,  the more I see with clarity what this has always been.  A story about me. My life, my Odyssey. Nothing more, nothing less. I suppose the real reason for my leaving was a sense of running from the past, disguised as a journey to "find myself". Funny to think I would be looking so hard for something that has been carrying me around all along.

The year is 2012, if not the year of the Mayan Apocalypse, it is certainly the year of the Personal Apocalypse. They say you have to hit a complete bottom and be destroyed before you can rebirth yourself voluntarily, like the phoenix rising from his own ashes. I still drink entirely too much, and smoke a hell of a lot more, if you want to know the truth. I've always had a fondness for both, and since my departure from the midwest at the beginning of the year, the frequency of both vices has waxed and not waned. There is something comforting about being able to return to a bottle of Kentucky bourbon that will always be there for you at the end of the day, regardless as to whether or not you know where you will wake up, or if you will wake up, in the morning.

But that is neither here nor there.

I am writing the great American novel. Only it's not great. And it is Anti-American. And it can hardly call itself a novel. And it is probably derivative of Kerouac. And most of its action takes place on a bus.

What follows is the travel memoirs of a sinner, a journalist, a musician, a lover, a manic depressive, an addict and a mystic. It is, by necessity, disjointed and rambling, and in the true fashion of the beats, I refuse to edit it. I never claimed I was a great American writer. I make no apologies. Fuck you, pay me.

-The narrator, somewhere in Southern California, June 2012