Driving Myself Crazy
And Sleeping Around

Mile Zero
Early March 2004
The Cerebral Trench Warfare Brigade

Having thoroughly exhausted myself with consumer culture & cars driving back and forth from the Palm Springs area 500 miles each way to the Bay Area some ten times in the past four months (that's 10,000 miles since Turkey Day), I have decided to sell the sailboat, park the BMW, hop Amtrak to Georgia and thruhike the Appalachian Trail to northernmost Maine this spring and summer. Yes, it's true. I have finally gone completely sideways.

I bought a sailboat to get out of my head and onto the water, but more immediately to live cheaply in the prohibitively expensive Bay Area. As you know, I also bought a Winnebago in January for similar reasons: live cheaply, see the West in comfort and style. It was an endeavor that lost its charm immediately with the dawning realities of 6 miles to the gallon, parking hassles and consequent cop harassment on the streets of Berkeley. I sold it a month later and, thanks to my mechanical prowess (a skill I'd rather dispense of altogether) I sold it at a profit.

The boat, like the RV, is undoubtedly a very worthy and inexpensive urban living solution for many. There are many shadowy figures skulking around on my dock pretending not to live aboard their boats. And why not? At $5/foot/month for a 25-foot boat, it is a rent that Bumfuck, Nebraska would have a hard time undercutting. But I have learned in my recent acquisitions that no amount of dressing or chic naming (sailboat! Winnebago!) can hide the fact that the indweller is essentially homeless. It is neither legal to live aboard my boat nor live on the streets in a Winnebago. And while this must work for many, I learned that for me it just plain sucks. While I hardly claim to be a strictly law-abiding citizen, I cannot daily go to sleep beneath the radar and rise the same. I need a place to call home, one that doesn't require skulking in and out of or moving every three daze to avoid a parking ticket.

So why the Appalachian Trail?

Because believe it or not thruhiking either the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada or the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine has long been a secret dream of mine. Ever since hiking chunks of the Sierra Nevada with a field botany class in 1987 and later hikes of northern California's Trinity Alps, Marble Mountains and Lost Coast, I have secretly longed for the epic, mind-blowing gigantor hike. And somehow thanks to art cars, beer, women and gonzo journalism, a decade has passed since my last big hike.

But I haven't answered the question of why a vagabond hiker's trek when what I seem to need most now is a cozy cabin to myself somewhere. The answer, I suppose, is that when you're really good at something, you may as well keep it up, especially if next year or the year after you might not have the physical or mental stamina to do it. This thing for me, of course, is motion.

Where the road is concerned, I am an undisputed king. And though my relationship with this kind of motion is certainly of the love-hate variety, I'm a traveler. The ability to travel as I have been doing for years is a gift of freedom. It is a grace afforded us by a combination of external tranquility (national peace, as it were) and inner courage.

Proficiency at the art of travel is a badge of immense freedom, of freedom exercised. When a public official recently expressed disbelief that one so dollar poor as I could travel-to and live-in (albeit briefly) seven states in one year's time, I replied, "You would be surprised how little money a resourceful person can live on." Likewise, it takes little money to traverse the entire country if one has friends and is patient.

As the seed of interest in "thruhiking" has grown in me in recent months, accelerated by the looming early-spring departure dates of March or April, I have been reading up. The list of would-be sacrifices to comfortable suburban life intrigue me:

• Sleeping in a sleeping bag in a different place every night (Ha! Between the boat, the RV, friend's houses, the ground, the car, and a few motels, I've been doing this for months)
• Eating like a squirrel with a cookstove, often without even that (Ha! With no kitchen of my own and disdainful of wasting money in restaurants, this would be me)
• This ain't no Winnebago camping! (Owning an RV briefly was a great experience: I learned that I felt absurd carrying around such a huge shell and the gas mileage cinched the deal)
• The beverage choices on the trail: water, water, coffee and tea (I already drink water like a fish, never drink soda pop, love tea, prefer instant coffee or "mud" to a latte any day, and lately my beer consumption has declined dramatically, mostly due to my ongoing battles with chemical depression)
• No toilets on the trail (There are few more satisfying & simple acts of freedom than peeing in the woods)
• No TV, no radio, no movies on the trail (I've sat down in more movie theaters in recent months than ever before. Why? To escape the dismal realities of a muddy spectrum of world problems and the reality of my own lonely, disjointed and insecure existence. I love movies, but I know myself enough to know that in the natural world, I won't need movies to escape. Anyone who knows me knows I haven't watched 20 hours of TV in twenty years. I am uniquely blessed with a passion for writing, a thing which obfuscates the need of television to entertain. I will, however, miss music.)

Doing without music will be difficult at first, I am sure. One could wear a Walkman on the trail, but this brings three problems to mind immediately. Plugged in, you are not in touch with your surroundings, a weakness which rattlesnakes and bears won't respect. And aside from the obvious weight issue of player, CDs and batteries, how many conversations have you ever had or entered into wearing a Walkman?

Which brings us to the question of "Why a nature hike when you're lonely?" and why I have chosen the Appalachian Trail over the Pacific Crest. Answers: because a nature hike is more social than you'd think, and because the AT is the more social of the two.

As much as I crave a "place" to call home right now, I know my heart enough to know that the right people can be more "home" to me than any place on Earth. I have traveled extensively in this country, yet when it comes time to decide where to live, I have no answer. Not now anyway. And why not now? Because I have friends EVERYWHERE. Wherever friends are feels like home. Ipso facto, my problem is not homelessness but that I have too many homes!

In the past year, I have lived in a small town in the mountains where everybody knows me as the guy with the weird car yet nobody really knows me at all; and in Berkeley, CA, where a handful of very busy people I never see know me and the only strangers who approach me are panhandlers and crazy people. I have never been more lonely in my life.

Both Berkeley and the small mountain town of Idyllwild are places I love as well as people therein, and I have thus tried to make a go in them both. Both have left me feeling hollow. Thus, for the time being anyway, I have given up on the idea of finding a place to call home. Back to nature then. Back to people.

It is a weird irony of life that you can be more lonely in a crowd than alone. City life for the no-small-talk and rarely chatty me has proved excruciating. I walk through oceans of people in a horrific bubble of solitude every day here. Dating is the same for me. I don't date. I don't pick women up in bars, or anywhere. I've met what women I've been with over the years largely through friends or small, inherently social gatherings. We meet, and if the chemistry is right, we crash into one another like plutonium atoms, light up the night sky, and if we're lucky the sex & mutual respect turns to love and carries us through for a few months or a year. But I digress.. (smile)

From the material I've been reading, the Appalachian, for its proximity to cities and population centers all up the east coast, is anything but empty of people. Thousands of people hike the trail every year, all around the same time. But unlike the nameless and socially-destitute masses around me in this fucked up "culture" of ours, the handful of people that nightly come to rest at shelters all along the AT route are cemented together by the common bond of their very uncommon pursuit. I have read as much, and I just know it is so, based on a lifetime of swimming from one of these funky freak communities to another, finding them with ease like a dowser finds water with a stick.

Another social horror I've been living with lately is boredom. Boredom has never had a place in my life, and before it takes root and drives me to the nuthatch, I'm going to kill it like the scurvy dumb drooling dog it is. As monotonous as a 2000+ mile walk might sound, it will probably be anything but. I don't like repeating my steps. When driving a distance, I will do almost anything to avoid turning back even one freeway exit. Thus, the thruhike, 2000 miles north, every step and every day different than the next. I don't know this, of course. But of course it's true.

If all of this sounds like I am rationalizing aloud to myself, I am.

[Whatever point I was making has since been lost, now a week later and rip-roaring ahead toward a First Day of Spring beginning on the Trail. -RSM]

March 3
The first day of spring and the trailhead of the Appalachians is but a short 18 daze away. Suddenly, I have a schedule. Considering I want to get Duke out of his present outdoor predicament and into a waiting automotive museum 500 miles away before I depart for the trail, well, I've got a lot of work to do and fast. But today I have accomplished the first, or perhaps the first, second and third steps toward this new mad vision of mine, The Appalachian Trail. I have made the commitment in my mind, begun to verbalize it, sold my boat and come south to Idyllwild where I will leave my car and set out via train to Georgia. Here at Bruce's house, I have a room to myself, floor space on which to spread out, inventory my gear and pack. I am very excited about this next step.

Getting down here wasn't easy. After a panic attack night in the ER at Berkeley's Alta Bates Hospital, I awoke to transacting on the sale of the boat in the rain downtown, the BMW overheating from a blown hose, then sickness, a short-lived stomach flu of sorts and dental work (last minute) and then the road, all of it too much. I caved-in somewhere near Bakersfield, opting out of the remainder of the drive to Idyllwild (another four hours) to take my nodding head and ill guts to bed at Buttonwillow's $25/night trucker motel. Twelve hours I slept, then caught "The Man Who Knew Too Little" on cable, a helluva deal at roughly $2/hour for divine sleep and a movie. Finished the drive today, the day's end wrapped in irony, back in Weirdsville again. But this time I have a six month long goal ahead, half a year away from here. I can't wait. -RSM

March 4, 04
Morning. Sweet dreams of her last night. I was in a theater, darkened, after a show, the last one in there when a woman entered to inquire why I was still there. Then my wife (as yet a vision, a dream) entered and gestured for the woman to relax, saying "He's still here." Curly dark shoulder-length hair, eyes soft and dreamy, a warm smile. Yes, all vague descriptors, but alas, that is all I can recall. So now morning, and I feel as though I am already on the mountain, the 2000-mile trail ahead truly overwhelming. But it is a definite goal, and as such attainable. It is infinity that most frightens the task-oriented mind. Give us a goal, a job to do. Even we free spirited greyhounds need a bunny to chase. So now to the bunny, several baby steps at a time. Today then, reading. Acquisition of a sewing machine. Perhaps a supply run, though more likely a day of list-making. To it. -RSM

March 5, 04
Last night islept in the mtns. night before that i slept ina moetl bed on a lonesome stretch of interstate 5. night before that i slept ona boat, my friend's boat, having just sold mine that morning. night before that i was on my boat, as i was for the week predceding. before tath it was the mtns of socal again. and before that in my tent in the desert of joshua tree. before taht in suburbia at my sister's house. and before thtat it was the boat again. i am a nomad, always on the road.. this trail will be the same, but new, trading the car for a pair of boots and a pack. better.

It's so hard to see progress in this vague procession of days and in the casual and unclocked, unrecorded manner in which I go about doing things each day. I do work, but without pay or boss, it's hard to see that I'm getting anywhere. And with 1/2 a dozen unpublished manuscripts in my bone closet, even very real tangible accomplishments don't feel like success. On The Trail each day, at day's end, I hope to feel that sense of having done something, gotten somewhere, and been bedazzled in the doing. -RSM

March 6
Just got into a Jesus discussion with M. Since my last visit here, there appeared a poster on the kids' door featuring a race car with Jesus Christ slapped all over it where Pennzoil & Taco Bell logos might normally be. M has been slipping the Jesus into everything these days and I asked her about it. "It's not about religion or people at church," she said, "it's about my personal connection with God through Jesus Christ." I said that's wonderful, that I was glad for her. We talked at length about it, about our religious upbringings and our the teachings of our parents, and all went relatively well. I had meant to more or less wrap up the discussion when I said, "I just hope your faith in Christianity doesn't reach a point where you shun people with other belief systems, non-Christians as it were." I was referring to my grandmother the Jehovah Witness and friends who are Buddhist, Morman, etc, that and a long history of God-based spirituality across a vast spectrum of cultures and nations around the Globe. But this only lit the fuse, and she responded, "But it's biblical, says right there in the word of God that the only path to salvation is through Jesus Christ." I realized then that M was already there, already in swaddled in Christian conviction, protected and assured by the exclusivity clause that is the Christ. "Don't you believe that Jesus is the son of God?" I said that I did, but that I also believed that a million-score dead who never knew Jesus have found their way to God just fine. And then we were interrupted in our discussion. It's been near an hour since and M has not reappeared. But when she does and even if she doesn't, I would like to say this: I believe in God and Jesus, yes. But I also believe in a Universal Good, a force working toward the divine in all of us. Furthermore, I believe in faeries and angels and lovers and ghosts. I believe that Heaven will be there for those who seek it, just as life here on Earth is either Heaven or Hell depending upon how we look at it. I believe in Cause & Effect and in Chaos & The Gonzo Embrace of the Epic Adventure of Man. I believe we are all lost & hungry but that faith in something drives us on, and that is both amazing and beautiful. I believe that Jesus meant what he said when he said that the kingdom of Heaven exists inside every one of us. I believe that everyone who believes in something has as much a chance at redemption as any Christian touting his or her exclusive truth of the path to salvation. -RSM

March 11, 04
The Machine rolls forward with fantastic ease and great result. I now have tickets in hand for a four-night rail journey to Atlanta by way of Chicago, and the trail is so close I can smell the Moose scat. In the past week I have accomplished a number and variety of preparatory tasks unimaginable in these past year or so of crippling fear & loathing. I have smogged the BMW, had a bad wisdom tooth pulled, had a full medical exam and been given a clean bill of health by local Dr. Joe, rounded up and purchased almost a thousand dollars in supplies for the trek (including $160 in granola), packaged said supplies in seven parcels ready to mail to myself at points along the trail, and rescued Duke the Art Car from his cage of trees by the restaurant (a good spot but of-late most certainly a "cage with golden bars" as it were) and towed him here to Bruce's where he'll be quite safe and happy in my absence. And let's not forget the hours and hours spent preparing Jigglebox for "live from the trail" postings, many of said hours spent creating a way for my editor, attorney and gonzo cousin Justin to easily post the words I'll be emailing him from the trail. Baby steps toward the trail. Anything is possible, even in this kind of crash course pace I've set for myself. Dream big, act fast, search for what you want and need and if it doesn't feel right move on to the next thing. Waste not, want not of time. Preliminary pack weight estimate based on full gear load plus food but w/o water: 22 lbs. Twenty two pounds!! And that thanks to reading Ray Jardine's book and taking his "go-lite" philosophy seriously (and spending the extra bucks on the ultralight gear). My favorite item? The Pocket Rocket butane-fueled stove, weighing just 3 ounces and fitting in the palm of my hand like a badminton shuttlecock, it's extending wings retractable until the tiny stove resembles little more than a handful of metal darts. Bitchin! -RSM

Friday March 12, 2004
Yes! The JACKET arrived today! And I do mean, THE JACKET! Easily worth twice what I won it for on auction at Ebay, my new-to-me North Face billion-fill down betty warmed its former owner on his trek of the Himalayas and will now warm me in the Blue Ridge Mountains and points north! I'm so excited I could wet my pants. To meet me now, tonight, you'd never know I just got out of oral surgery and have been spitting blood for two hours. I'm pumped! In a little over a week, I've divested, plotted, planned, invested, packed, listed, shopped, arranged, run ten dozen errands, and even managed to see a doctor, three dentists, my nephews and my mother in preparation for a departure date now just four days hence. I've even devoured two fat books on the subject of the AT and a third arrived today. Blessed with a fair budget and nothing but free time, I have accomplished in the short term what should take months to plan. Now we'll just see if it works. I could very well be completely delusional, and there's no way in hell one can succeed at such a major endeavor as this in such short order. But screw that! I've never been one to color in the lines, so why start now? I'm only concerned that of all the advice imparted (and followed by me) by author and thruhiker Ray Jardine, his conviction that hiking without months of prior training is a sure recipe for disaster. Unfortunately, this is one piece of advice I cannot follow. It's not possible. Not this year, anyway. And THIS YEAR is the year Rick McKinney walks from Georgia to Maine and tells the tale on Jigglebox.com. This is the year. This is the time. And the first day of spring is the day.

The main focus of Ray's philosophy is pack light! Pack light and travel far faster, better. This I have done. Where the author of "On the Beaten Path" set out carrying a 60-pound load (not to mention his own 275 lbs. of body weight), I have achieved a base packweight of 15 lbs., an amount which the addition of food and water will no more than double, leaving me to carry 30 lbs. tops after each resupply. As I move through the week and consume supplies, my pack will loose up to ten pounds. And what about my lack of training? Well, at a relaxed pace the AT takes six months to hike. That means departing from the Georgia trailhead no later than early April. When I learned that the first day of spring was March 20th, the die was cast. So I gotta go. No time to train. Jardine reasons that the untrained muscles require a day of rest between each day of hiking. And while I respect his authority and agree with him on every other count, my imminent departure leaves me no choice but defend my position as a "cold starter." So here's my rebuttal: who says the body counts in 24 hour days? Why isn't it enough to give the muscles eight-to-ten hours of horizontal rest in the form of exhausted slumber? I say it is. And I've learned this funny truth about my body: it pretty much does whatever my mind tells it to do. So I say I'm going to be just fine starting cold. I'm going to rise each morning early, hike to midday with a dozen or so 2-minute breathers, rest an hour or more midday with my feet elevated and my keyboard on my chest typing away, then resume a moderate pace until sundown. My days of rest will be my nights, just so.

Just so. Just.. I hope so. Now to go divide up two pounds of dates into 7 Ziploc baggies, one for each of seven 10-pound resupply boxes I've been packing this week. If seventy pounds of food doesn't seem enough for six months out, you're correct. Being closely woven into the populated fabric of the American East Coast, the AT provides thruhikers with many opportunities for resupply along the trail. So I have packed mostly specialty items, things I can't be sure I'll find at Jethro's Corner Store in Deep Woods, Tennessee. Additionally, my resupply plan extends only to the halfway point on the trail. If I make it that far, I will break for Independence Day and spend a week packing a second round of self-made care packages.

To the packing!
-RSM

I. No, not I. She. She has me in her grip. She has enslaved me. She the dream, and she doesn't even know who I am. I am. I am a little man. I am a man perched on the edge of an abyss, and I am going to jump. It is my nature. I am a jumper. I am a gambler who never touches money. I am the gamble. I gamble on me. I am Evil Knevil. I am the space monkey ready to be shot into orbit. I am game.

I packed my bags today, pre-flight. I unloaded a chock-fulla-crap BMW into a chocker-fuller-crap Art Car. I broke everything I own and everything I've recently acquired into seven separate baggies, all to be packed into two-week parcels and shipped to me en route. I don't what the fuck I'm doing.

Bruce assures me that I DO know what I am doing. He is a dynamite cheerleader. Tonight at the restaurant I fell in love with a bus girl with Cleopatra eyes and a long angular face and me thinking, "I want HER to be my cheerleader." I was devastated to learn that she was only 14. No Bruce, I don't know what I am doing. Obviously.

I pack and I pack. I plan and I plan and I pop another Klonipin. I drink an IPA and mash together hamburger and raisins and crushed up pretzels and garlic and onions and form them into patties for our dinner. The sun sinks below the mountains to the west and in its setting makes me sad.

I sold my boat in Berkeley because I felt, in the words of Bay Area local Tom Waits, "lonelier than a parking lot when the last car pulls away." I had a boat! Women love a man with a boat, right? That's what I had heard. I didn't meet any women. I didn't meet anyone at the marina. Everyone that "appeared" to live there (albeit illegally like me) skulked around the place never returning my sheepish Hello's, never making eye contact. I felt like an asshole. I felt like a trespasser. I felt lonelier than a.."

At my age it doesn't make you feel very good when you fall in love with a 14-year-old. I mean, you knew she was young. But man o man, I had no idea she coulda been that young. They build them seriously and prematurely equipped these days, apparently.

I think about Bronwyn, the love of my life from 1993 to 1996 (and to some extent still going). Had she and I conceived a child, it would now be nearly a teenager. Scary.

But mostly scary that it DIDN'T happen. Scary that I am now over a decade older and not a whit wiser it would seem and falling bleary-eyed for a girl not much older than my would be child. Now that's grounds for some serious loneliness.

Don't get me wrong. I fall in love easily and often. I fell in love with a woman my mother's age just a few weeks ago. I am hungry. I have never felt loneliness like this. It's terrible. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

I saw Mike at the restaurant tonight. Mike is a very successful something-or-another. Mike, without meaning to I'm sure, makes me feel very unsuccessful. He thinks highly of me as a writer. Over the summer, he made several inferences to wanting me to write something for him so that he could make a short film. I finally had to confront him with the reality that I was living on about $20/week out of Duke's donation can, and that at that income level I could scarcely write for myself. I told him that if he wanted me to write him a short script he would have to "make my life a little easier" in the form of a coupla C-notes. It took this kind of bluntness to get him to understand the vast discrepancy in our financial situations. But it worked, and I almost fell out of my chair when one night he slapped down three bills for a short script. Flattered, honored and just plain pleased as punch at the respect that $300 showed me, I pumped out a 7-minute script for him in one day.

It has been like summer here in the mountains of southern California this past week. I imagine Pacific Crest Trail thruhikers trickling down from the peaks above town to get their mail and supplies and try to imagine what my life will be like when, one week from tonight, I am the thruhiker, spending my first night of some 170 nights.. in a tent. Will there be snow in Georgia? Likely. Will I make it through the first week even? Will I be lonesome?

I'm entering new territory now. Efficiency has guided me this far these past weeks until the pieces are almost all in place. But what of me? What of the reality of this hike? What am doing, really? And why am I doing this? I'm not scared.

I'm terrified. Terrified of my own conviction, of the apparent self-confidence with which I dive into the unknown again and again. Jesus. God help me.
-RSM

ps: I just happened upon this brief entry, written on the back of a happy hour menu from a historic fish restaurant in Berkeley. This gist of it reminds me of WHY I am venturing east for a long, long hike in nature:

January 28, 04
Guy my age approaches me at corner of Shattuck and Kittredge looking troubled. He places a box cutter razor knife to his neck and says he's gonna commit suicide right then and there because he hasn't eaten in a week. Myself, just fresh from the lobby of Berkeley Mental Health, I tell him to go there and get help. "Too late for that" he says, then adds, "but if you got 50 cents.." I give him the 50 cents and he departs. I am badly shaken by the incident. Horror is everywhere. I go pay $10 to escape this horror, to escape into the fiction of film. I choose badly, picking the latest film by Clint, "Mystic River." Fuckin depressing. Back at the marina on the payphone, Rock tells me that P is perhaps trying to psychically steal his kidneys. I can't take much more of this.

March 14, 2004
Chest Test So I figured out a way to improve on this typing on my chest idea. In order to keep the palm pilot from dislodging from its precariously perched position on the keyboard, I rigged with stays, one pulling in either direction to keep the unit from slipping off its perch either to the left or the right. I cut the snaps out of a couple of little plastic thrift store purses, super glued them to the top face of the palm, and to each a line extending down to the keyboard and glued in place there. Improvisation . MacGyver would have survived just fine in the wilderness with only his paperclip and shoe strings And so will I. My chest typing method works. Now it's as though I am typing blind, and in fact I am. Blind and reclined. This will likely be the only way I'll want to type when on the trail after a hard day of peak bagging. Halleluiah for technology.

Too damn early the next morning. Bruce off to work at some ungodly predawn hour. Ever the light sleeper, I lie awake with codeine constipation. The rotten wisdom tooth is out though, so no complaints. Rotten wisdom. Now there's an irony. Bossa Tres mnemonic in my dawn-addled ears. Just 36 hours now til I board that train that'll deliver me into the unknown. Georgia. Jesus. Who woulda thought it. The train, the walk. The Auschwitz transport train to the Bataan death march. Okay. I'm getting a little dramatic, even for me. But this is BIG. The commitment: six months, over two thousand miles. The pack: even at only thirty pounds, it's gonna be a bad-back nightmare for the first month. We built an anti-mice food container, Swami and I. I call it the Howitzer. I had called the bomb initially, but with today's search engine hyper climate of fear and Patriotic Act McCarthyism, probably best not to call it that. No, instead let's name it after some fucking military gun freak's crowning achievement. Yeah.

Anyway, it's fairly low tech and no doubt the least expensive and most durable piece of equipment in my pack: two big-ass coffee cans that come together to form one long can. To assure they stay together, to further guard against them crafty mousers, a tiara-sized hose clamp cinches up the middle and we're ready to rock and roll. Okay, so much for the Go-lite philosophy on that one. But hey, there are remnant cabins and shelters all along the trail and by golly I'm gonna use em. After all I ain't gonna meet the Granola Girl of my dreams stealth camping way off away from the gang, now am I? And the shelters are where the mice live, where they live and have developed paramilitary-like food infiltration tactics, or so I've read.

March 16, 2004
Crunch time.
My last night in a bed for the foreseeable future. Not a good time to pop a codeine and watch Requiem for a Dream. Ugly flick. Morning now. Battle fatigue, the kind of battle where the enemy is YOU, is fear. Too many questions without answers, that dead zone before or between rather, the guidebooks and the real jungle..

Today I meet with O for coffee and a strange farewell of sorts. Despite all the love I mustered for this woman over the past six months and in the virtual reality of my imagined dream of us, I kinda dread this meeting. I feel as though I fell in love with a pinup girl and a New York powerbroker and a supermom all tied into one. A big city powerbroker she is not, but her constant reminders to me of her tight, tight schedule hearken back to the day I left Susan, my old summer camp love, on a commuter train in Boston, she transformed that morning from weekend jeans and flannels and falling curly black hair to power suit, corseted curls, businesslike manners and a coolness that shocked me, a personality switch so common to the business world yet something I will never understand. O is nothing like that, so pardon the comparison.

O is a poet and a sculptor of fine natural found object art. O is a good mother to her handsome son. O loves me back, loved me forward I should say before I even realized I was there with her in that blind and blissful place. But O is unavailable and thus a Siren on the rocky shore calling too me, her straightjacketed muse, unwittingly of course, never understanding that with her lovely song she will smash my tiny boat in shallow water and I, without arms, will drown in her. Word to the wise, a word, a phrase no doubt spoken in warning many times throughout time: don't fall in love with unattainables, unavailables, married and or mostly married people, male or female. The side-dish lover loses every time.

So, in the words of Chris Somethingoranother who walked North through CA and OR, WA and Canada to his destination Alaska back in 1991 while I was in college, and who kept walking deep into the deepest shit that mother nature has to offer, who said, "Now I walk into the wilderness." The New Yorker article about his illogical but forthright and convicted quest toward some cold but perhaps blissful death in the wooly cotton arms of snowy nature, away from all this consumer driven shit down here in the lower 48, struck me deeply. Now I walk into a tamer, more populated wilderness not to die but to be reborn, away from the world so tattered and torn. (Thank you Jimmy.) I walk for Luciano, who died for lack of a hardened shell round that swollen heart of his, so full of love, compassion, and pain. I walk away from unattainables and a patterned and deeply grooved past of my own pain. I walk into the future, into the unknown future, and though I take ME with me I fully plan to slough off a few layers of dead skin and demons along the way.

I walk also for you, for all of you who need such a journey but cannot make the time or find the freedom. I have been accused of self-righteously lording over the consumer-trapped masses locked in cubicles and kitchens and factories and mortgages. If you have had this impression of me from my crying out against things incomprehensible to me, then I am truly sorry. I never meant to come off "holier than thou." Rather, I unwillingly capture as does a giant satellite dish all the pain and unhappiness in our culture. It enters me like blasts of dental office radiation penetrating the skull in search of cavities. And it finds them. Forgive my presumption, but there has GOTTA be a whole lot of dissatisfied people in this country, people with big dreams now dwindled by the crushing reality of an uncaring money-driven world. There has to be a lot of this, because this overwhelming and collective sadness fills me like a blood-soaked sponge. It hurts me. It has nearly killed me on more than one occasion, unwitting receptor that I am. Too sensitive as a child, twice as bad as an adult, I am helpless to suffer the ills of the world. And so I write

I write out this pain, bang it out onto plastic keys in some hope that in the doing some of it will leave me. I write it out so that it will not kill me. And I try to phrase things in a way that shed light or sound familiar and perhaps strike a poignant chord in readers who may be host to that sorrow themselves. I try to .. no, I don't try to change anyone. And I sure as shit don't try to say that I am right, that my wholly unstable and broken life is any better than one lived in a cubicle or a stucco suburban cookie cutter home. My life is a nightmare.. but, it's also an ever-changing and fluxing adventure, and it is mine and mine alone. If I could shut off the stream of ugly images and pain and sorrow that flood my heart and head like so many radio waves and x-rays and cell phone wireless words and thoughts flying through the air, if I could tell all that to go away and leave me in peace, I would. But for me there is no peace, there is only hope that I can keep a few steps ahead of the sorrow.. far enough ahead to smile and see the beauty that's out there beyond the veil of human suffering. Holier than thou? To revive a very simple, perhaps childish but powerful weapon from childhood: I know you are but what am I? HA!!

Having said ALL THAT, now let's go climb a mountain or two. Or three. Or a bazillion! YEEEEEE-HAAAAAA! Georgia here I come!!!!

Copyright 2004 Richard McKinney
All Rights Reserved