Alaska & A Wrong Turn At Albuquerque

November 4, 2004
Bush Gets Erect..ed

Whilst the ruling class of the United States was busy soiling itself yesterday and today for all the World to see, I was busy writing & editing the story of my final hours with my two favorite fellow AT Thruhikers. This story and all the confessional prose that led up to it hurt like hell to write and may be hard for my trail friends to swallow, if I have any of them left by now. But it is as fair and true as I could make it, given the fantasmagorical nature of my brain. Some of you have already written to express concern for my sadness. I thank you, but I am fine. I am not sad. I am happy for The Happy Couple and grateful for having been grazed by love again after years without.

[End note: December 31st, 2004]
And that would be just about it. Kind of. I mean, this is IT for this page. I've moved the aforementioned "love" story of my departure from Jessica & Eric to its proper place in the chronology of this frikken Encyclopedia of Appalachian Weirdness, ala Rick McKinney. If you want to read that heart-wrencher again, just click on their names above and you'll be taken to the proper page, though the scrolling down will be up to you. (Tip: type "mad world" into the FIND option under Edit in your Explorer menu). I've added a few last entries to this page, and the Jiggle Editors have had their say. Adhering to their strict insistence on fiction only, the very last story is indeed ENTIRELY FICTIONAL. Such people and events couldn't possibly be real, although Nash might dispute that statement. The last story might cause one to ask, "What has this to do with his Appalachian Trail Adventure?" Indeed, very little. Except perhaps to illustrate the sort of bullshit chaos and misadventure and heroic deeds and petty crap and potholes and wormholes and myriad other distractions this author daily encounters in his valiant attempt to FINISH THE STORY! Well, I'm trying, folks. Pray for me. I pray for all of humankind everyday. I am Atlas, and I carry all of you on my back at all times. Hold fast.

-RSM

As it happened, I would never see Jessica and Eric again. Not on the Appalachian Trail, anyway. I would run into them by accident in Millinocket, at the tackiest hotel I've ever had the displeasure of overnighting in. And in that horrid setting, I got the news: Jessica was engaged. Game over. As though it had ever begun.

It was a game begun and played out only in the deluded mind of a dreamer, of a man who had dreamt he would meet the woman of his dreams on a 2000-mile trail with a male/female ratio worse than that of Alaska.

Dreamer.

Fool.

Jester.

"Wanna know what I think?"

An old Inuit Indian chief sits beside me tonight as I write. He likes me to call him Chief SpongeBob. If I had to give him a job description, I'd call him my "Meddlesome Muse."   

I stare into the flames of a small fire warming the igloo here in the tundra far above the Arctic Circle, and I know full well what he thinks. But I humor him. He is my host after all, his tribe having found me paradoxically undressed and blue as a robins egg jabbering insanely to a crudely made snowman somewhere outside the town of Old Crow.

"Tell me, Chief SpongeBob, what do you think?" I say with a sigh.

And then, in a manner that I'm quickly learning is his way, he says nothing for like two minutes. While I wait for him to speak, I reflect a moment on just why I'm here.

It's a little fuzzy, thanks to the hypothermia I suffered, but I recall that it had something to do with a heightened sense of patriotism in the face of all that freedom on the Appalachian Trail, a real love of country, that and a total sense of despair following some doom-filled event in early November. Oh, yeah, that's when they shipped my 19-year old buddy from the trail off to Iraq... Or was it something else? I can't quite remember.

"I think you found her."

"Wh-what?" I snap out of it at the sound of the old man's voice.

"You found her and you let her go."

"Who?"

"You know who, Chris. (He calls me Chris because of something I said when they found me.) The woman from your dream. Your mate for life."

"But she was TAKEN!" I raise my voice angrily and am immediately ashamed. I go quiet. I try and shut her out of my mind. I tell myself silently, "Now that I have told the story, I can let go. Let it all go."

The chief is patient, unfazed by my outburst. He scoops a burning ember from the fire with a spade-shaped shoulder bone of some animal, touches it to his pipe and smokes.

"Was she now," he says.

*****

The Inuit people say that when they found me in the snow, I kept repeating two things: "America is lost," and "I am here to visit Chris McCandless. Have you seen him?"

-RSM

Dear Jigglebox Readers:

The Webmaster, Editors, Java Script Writers, HTML Hacks, and junior assistant
cubicle dwellers here at Jigglebox.com would like to apologize for the
peremptory nature of all writings heretofore published on the World Wide Web by
that foul wretched over-sexed moose-humping god-less bastard Lord Duke, aka
Jester, aka Jack Jigglebox, aka THE DEFENDANT in the case of Johnson, Johnson &
Biggest Johnson, Attorneys at Law versus Jigglebox.com. (Actually, in point of
fact, our own attorneys have forced this apology upon us yet..) We, having
reviewed the allegations of Heinous Truth, Distortion of Reality, and General
Mayhem With a Keyboard, do willfully concur.

We the Jigglebox.com Staff of Slaves do hereby roll over on our bombastic boss,
trading potential prison sentences in return for selling out the scurvy swine
on the Witness Stand of Wholesome Family Values. Jester is a sniveling
bleeding heart liberal and overthetop emotionally torqued Mental Deviant, as
became grossly obvious in his latest confessional gibberish which, though we
willfully and greedily published, we had no part in writing and are therefore
blameless.

We, at our attorneys' behest, hereby apologize to all real humans resembling
real humans posing as real humans (smelly hiker trash though all of them be!)
for THE DEFENDANT's Danielle Steele-ish cheesy gut-wrenching distortions of
Real Trail Life, whatever the hell that might have been. We furthermore
promise that, whilst Jester Jack Crackmonger Hack is being hunted down by rabid
dogs and brought to Justice for his Crimes Against Humility, we will do our best
to put a bright new happy face on all remaining AT posts, even if it means
dosing everyone on The Staff with Nitrous gas and mass quantities of valium
(and some helium, too, to make them squeak when they talk) to achieve the
desired Happy Look that Jigglebox.com so desperately wants so that Oprah will
notice us and publish us and we can make the shelves of Wal-Marts EVERYWHERE!
Unfortunately, all we have to work with is Jester's remaining notes & poems,
most of them already fleshed-out whilst he was still on the trail, and due to
funding constraints and all that valium and nitrous, we will likely publish it all AS IS
just to spite the bastard.

-The Jiggle Staff

Correspondence & Crass Ramblings
from the Canadian Yukon

[Added 11/15/04!]
November 8, 2004
Cuz,
I have been enjoying reading more on Jigglebox.
Really dug the Donnie Darko references and found it
truly ironic about you hearing that song out in the
woods. This morning before I even read about it on
Jigglebox i had a huge urge to play Gary Jules "Mad
World" from the Darko soundtrack. The song always
makes me sad then leaves me with a little hope
afterward. I shit you not, I played it twice then
here, 6 hours later I read your post. Eerie.
I truly hope your summit posts portray some kind of
triumph and happiness. I know this whole Jess thing
was rough but i cant help feeling more and more
depressed and bummed as I read about it. But don't
take this the wrong way, you write what you feel and
experience so I have no right to critique. Hope all is
well and tell anyone who does not like what you're
writing about them to POUND SAND as I say. Its your
story not theirs.
Your Cuzin in a Rabbit Suit, Doctor J

Sorry, but you're better off in the Lower 48. Even
though America is steeped in doom with that dweeb marionette doll still in the
Driver's Seat, if you ever want America to be Great again and you wanna be
allowed to live there, you ought not flee to Canada, as I have done. They may
never let me back in. Remember the Berlin Airlift and that famous photo of the
East German soldier vaulting the wire at Checkpoint Charlie? The Wall around America is getting taller and its gaps fewer with every passing day in this New Era of Intravenously-fed Fear. But take heart. Sure, they were still standing in breadlines when I was there in ‘88, but the East Germans were safe FROM FOREIGN SCUM for over forty years. Having personally wandered lost down a street that ended in The Wall and been sighted in the crosshairs of a sniper rifle, this foreigner, young as I am, can attest. THEY WERE SAFE FROM ME!!

But seriously, I'm writing to clear up a buncha libelous hogwash that staff of
traitors at Jigglebox has been slapping up on the site in my absence, both
about "me" and of my journey via "creative editing" on their part. I am this very moment hacking into the Jigglebox server (thanks to the tutelage of my friend and fellow thruhiker K-Less) from my cockpit here at the Vuntut Gwitch'in Community Center, fully intent on publishing this letter to you. How is this possible from above the Arctic, you ask? Surprise: the Vuntut Gwitch'in are not at all poor, and have loaded up on state of the art digital gear including a satellite web feed, all purchased on kickbacks from oil companies. Smart little Injuns, they.

Why publish our correspondence? To let my readers know the
awful truth, the truth about how The Jiggle Corporation mercilessly fired you
the moment I left the trail, and then the country. And that therefore you are not to blame for anything currently being perpetrated by that Den of Thieves.

Okay, so on to the news and editorial corrections:

For starters, I'm totally over Jess. I don't think I ever REALLY loved her to begin with. She was/is HOT though, and spicy Italian, you know? Like, every time she punched her boyfriend, I'd think, "Oh, pleeeez punch me!" As you may well recall, at 21 I was sexually weaned by 49-year old sado-masochist and former supermodel Yasmine Kneipeglotzen. Although my "mentor" in that department was more of a maso-sadichist, so.. go figure. Anyway, I like a woman with FIRE in her veins.

The Vuntut Gwitch'in women are more large than fiery, to
say the least, and have very stubby teeth, ground down almost to the gum from
a lifetime of gnawing on caribou hides. But I found myself one to get my mind off you know who. She's a whole lotta woman, is she, more like all four of my trail lovers rolled into one! Big enough to blot out most of the horizon to the south, she keeps my thoughts HERE and not Down There in The Land of Jesus Exploitius, Inc. & the warmly embraced devil in a blue dress, Wal-Mart. Would you believe the Vuntut Gwitch'in people didn't even KNOW they absolutely MUST have Jesus in their hearts to go to Heaven? Can you believe
that poop? They don't even know who He is! And here your uncles are off converting South American bushboogies with no regard AT ALL for the poor Jesus-less Vuntut Gwitch'in Tribe! They asked me to help them in this regard, and you know what I said? "HEAVEN IS FOR EVERYONE! Now pass the Moose Juice!!"

Anyway, next I wanted to mention the Chris McCandless thing. Total fabrication. Not only did the Editors make up that melodramatic suicidal crap, but they've got my readers thinking I'm with the Inuit, and in Alaska, not Canada. I don't know whom they're trying to protect considering they're suggesting I be hunted down like a dog. Whatever.

The Donnie Darko references and coincidences are, however, all mine. But don't let that bring you down, man! It's like Donnie says at the end of the film, "I wanna believe that when the world does come to an end, I'll be able to breathe a sigh of relief because there will be so much to look forward to." You can thank my friend Linda for that wisdom. She lent me the film for an overnight, and I filched it off to the Arctic with me. Good woman, Linda. The old chief here digs the flick, which helps. Because I've watched it with them about twenty times this week, and most of the younger tribal members don't dig it, on account of the one Native American in it being the bad guy, the rabbit.

Anyway, we have much to look forward to, Cuz. So much. I'll tell you the same thing I keep telling my friend and love Colby Cheese. We're on the cutting edge of something HUGE! Hold onto the railings, Justin. Tie off to that pier piling, Colby! I'll pull this ship through the storm. And when I succeed, there will be red skies EVERY night, an endless sushi buffet and warm sake baths for everyone.

Don't believe me? Check out this GENUINE letter I just received yesterday. In a way, it almost answers your letter's dilemma, the sadness factor:

"I have been keeping up with your progress ever since you hiked (for a bit)
with two of my friends from Hoosier-Corn-Land. As soon as I saw a quote from
Charles Bukowski, I was hooked. I think that you are a fantastic writer. I've
read a lot of books, and I think that your prose is a lot better than the
disjointed, disconnected crap that gets published today. Sometimes I did feel like I was reading a book...the last passage that I read today made me feel so sad and out of sorts...that's what good writing is..." -Tilly

Here at Wal-Mart Sponsored Jigglebox.com, we want you to remember that sadness is just a commodity!

Correction: As Jiggle Captain and COW (Chief Operating Writer), let me be the first to assure you that shopping ISN'T MANDATORY. Not yet, anyway. I'm sure the Saggy Tush Administration is working on making it so. But for now, don't buy what you can't eat. The shelves of Wal-Mart are full of sadness. So, sometimes, is my prose. It is, quite likely, a reflection of that very sadness which radiates out from the Great Consumer Machine. Don't buy it if you aren't in the MOOD. I'll be fine. YOU be fine, too. Okay? Donnie is doomed, but he still manages a good laugh at The End. I have every intention of having the last laugh on this Life. Oh, yaah. You betcha. Make that your goal, too.

And this came today from a key figure in my story, one of whom the Jiggle "Staff Infection" of Editors seems to think I've libeled into serious lawsuit territory:

11/10/04 - "I think I've been here almost two hours and I still haven't read everything that you've posted since I checked last time. But I've at least managed to scan it all. You're full of surprises. I had wondered what the fuck was going on with the three of you and you answered my question,I like reading your writing but I miss hearing you read it. Since I've been driving all over NH/VT lately I've been taking out books on tape from the library. I just listened to some Kurt Vonnegut book, Time Quake I think, and it reminded me of you. It was nice. Lots of stories and tangents. It sounded like you sometimes. Anyway, I was so happy to get your last email, I don't mind the name change, I'm grateful to you for skipping ahead to hike with me, for your patience, and for writing about me. I like it. I like your honesty and your style, I want you to keep writing whatever the hell you want. That's important." -S.I. [THANK YOU, S.I.!!!]

So, you see Cuz, it's all good. No matter that I had to call up Command Central back down in Idleweird, California yesterday and have my doc Fed-X Overnight me a mason jar fulla diazepam just to keep the Evil Vibes of Humanity from penetrating my paper-thin skull long enough to let me finish this story. I WILL finish the story!

November 15, 2004
Okay. Lost a few days there to madness and claustrophobia-induced tundra wandering in search of my spirit animal. Alas, no matter how hard I concentrated or how unhard I concentrated, trying thus to achieve perfect empty-headed meditation, I had no luck. I even beat my head against the frozen tundra to achieve a drug-like stupor, and all I ever saw was that damn penguin from Fight Club saying, "Slide!" Anyway, back to the point.

What most people don't understand is that there is a LOT more to the story. But, kind and accommodating as the Vuntut Gwitch'in people are, there are just too many of them. Well, let me rephrase that. There are only 285 of them, but they're all apparently so fascinated by my presence among them that even though they all have rooms of their own and a jillion acres of tundra to run around naked chasing moose, they crowd & pester me like the mice in Never Cry Wolf. Even though I have a loft to myself here, I wake up to them watching me sleep from the open space below! I have to lock the shower door or they'll walk in on me to use the toilet. And when I sit down to write, bang! There they are filling up the room below the loft to surf the net or chat on their cell phones, whatever. I have no privacy what-SO-EVER!

Oh, and then the other night! Jeezuz! We all got slammed on Moose Juice, the locally distilled beverage of choice, and me with my head fulla juice and that damn white man motto, "Friends don't let friends drive drunk" I go and get in the way of the chief when he tries to take the pontoon plane out for a spin. Bad move. The guy's stumbling drunk, and I ain't much better, but he's the chief and he's got the keys to the plane and well, dammit, he got away with it. Like a parent, I was worried sick and thus pissed at him, but not near so much as the tribe was pissed at me! Turns out the motto up here is more like, "The Vuntut Gwitch'in let the chief fly drunk whenever he damn well pleases," or something like that.

Anyway, I may not be here much longer if this keeps up. The grass is always greener, as they say. I just want a quiet little room where I can slam the door shut on the F-ing world and FINISH THE STORY! I mean, I gotta. Apparently the World needs me. Listen to this, an afterthought from Tilly, the reader who wrote the earlier letter:

"Your writing...I just feel compelled to read it. You don't have the simple,
straight up style of Vonnegut or Bukowski...neither do you have the
involved, poetic style of James Baldwin (although sometimes you do.) And
you don't really have the precise, academic (for lack of a better word) of
Joyce Carol Oates (my personal favorite ever.) Your writing is articulate,
thoughtful, involved...it's just wonderful, really. I think that when your
words pull the reader in and force them to continue reading, you are really
a talented writer. When I said that the particular passage made me feel "out
of sorts" in a way, I guess I was paying you the highest compliment. When a
book (or movie or song, for that matter) pulls you away, you forget you're
you, you forget where you are. When you're done reading, you are
overwrought with emotion, and you look around, and you're in your room,
where you always are, and you're disappointed. It's like a low level
alcohol buzz. A little adrenaline, a little mental overload...because for a
few minutes you were gone, away where the writer took you, and you're sad
that you're back. It's a great feeling."

So, Tilly's got me thinking. I'm thinking about the Doyle. You remember that loco rundown old hotel in Duncannon, PA, the one frequented by thruhikers? Well, short of any invitations to the Ritz Carlton (which are as yet not forthcoming, the proverbial check in the mail), I was thinking, "Why not the Doyle?" For $65/week, I can go down there and finish this thing. I'll have those poor bastard southbound thruhikers coming through STILL at this late date to keep my mind primed on the subject at hand. I'll have a door to slam shut on the world. And even if like Bukowski in the film "Barfly," even if I can hear people fucking in the room beside me and someone else's TV from across the hall, I'll still have the pleasure of shutting the door on them. I can wear headphones! Or maybe just have my Pocket Rocket stove with its torchlike roar constantly going, burning through propane cartridges like there's no tomorrow as it cooks up batch after batch of hot cocoa and Black Velvet. Lemme know what you think. Maybe you can drive down, get weird. Enough then. Gotta get this up on the World! Wide! Web! so everyone knows I ain't dead yet and well, just to spite those Jigglebox Mutineers.

Vaya con Dios, Justino et al!
-RSM Jester

[Added 11/27/04]
November 26, 2004
I'm roaring down southbound Interstate 5, blazing a blasphemous burn through Steinbeck's dustbowl California, the sun a dull orange ball weaving a last spell of hide and seek before its nightly farewell, peaking out and disappearing again behind the rolling hills between this vast inland dried up sea and "Pink isn't well, he stayed back in the hotel" is blaring at me through dead Luci's stereo and the beemer, the blasphemer, holds court in a high-tension parking lot at 80 miles per hour, a thousand cars crushed together and cruising, a long anxious snake of death just waiting to be the biggest pile-up in interstate highway history, and I'm riding it, riding the mad wave of nerve-rattling, ass-aching American holiday traffic to Turkey Day.

I'm headed home, wherever that is. Well, for a moment I know where it is. It's the home of my nephews Jacob and Matthew, two little guys whose laughter and play make holiday stress worth every Quaalude. (Yeah, I just WISH I had Quaaludes!)

Home. My God, how long has it been, that word, so horrifically nebulous to me. When I was ousted from my home in New Mexico, an actual house I had "sweat-equity'd" a vested interest in, I fancied I might find home in New Orleans. When just five months later the heat hit New Orleans, I ran back to Cali, then Maine, then an island off Galveston, Texas through winter, then New Mexico again, then back to Cali. Idyllwild, California. Ugh. Home to many, curse to me. Idle-weird where I am known to EVERYONE as the freak with the weird car. IdleFuck where, like a retired Marilyn Manson, I haven't a chance of meeting anyone who I can trust to see me apart from the car, apart from the freak. Idlewood, as in don't bother getting an erection HERE buddy. I-drool-weird. I am weird. An idol without a cause stuck in a vortex at 6,000 feet. Idol-vor-tex.

Idyll
Function: noun
Etymology: Latin idyllium, from Greek eidyllion, from diminutive of eidos form; akin to Greek idein to see a: a simple descriptive work in poetry or prose that deals with rustic life or pastoral scenes or suggests a mood of peace and contentment b : a narrative poem treating an epic, romantic, or tragic theme
2 a : a lighthearted carefree episode that is a fit subject for an idyll b : a romantic interlude

When I'd had enough of my beloved/hated Idyll around this time last year, I made a concerted effort to escape, to "bust a move" to Berkeley, California, home to many a good friend and artist. I bought a boat. I sat on the too-small to live-aboard boat for days at a time through terrific storms sometimes, and I wrote and drank beer and stared at a map as long as my leg, a map of the Pacific Crest Trail. I would walk it someday, I thought. Perhaps as soon as the coming spring season.

And in the name of lust and mourning, I made too many 500-mile trips south to Idyllfuck, clocking over 10,000 miles on my Chevy in just a coupla months, ten trips in all. The last trip in the Chevy de los Muertos, (fate, not without a sense of irony) nearly cost me my life when the driver's side tie rod broke at 85 mph. If I had been, that moment, passing one of the ubiquitous line of tractor trailer trucks, I highly doubt I'd be writing this now.

After some difficulty, (for I didn't have a legal Berkeley mailing address), I finally got a library card in that city in late February. I used the card once, taking out one book. A book detailing with love and wisdom the phenomenon of the Appalachian Trail. Concurrently, I'd been courting a local high-end psychiatric facility, making the necessary arrangements for a, shall we say, "congenial committal" should my waning ability to cope with simple things like brushing my teeth reach an unbearable zenith. I say congenial, because my previous brush with 911 had been anything but. Nothing quite like having two nervous cops with guns pointed at you "rescue" you from yourself when all you really wanted was to die anyway. I could have snapped my empty fingers at those fuckers and they would have blasted me into the next world without a second thought.

But Berkeley, thank God, is not Albuquerque. In Berkeley if you call the suicide hotline, they send a taxi for you. It was a service I never had to use, however. For I read that book and before even finishing the last 20 pages, I returned it. I left Berkeley and sought out home on the AT.

When I was in Georgia, I dreamed of a far off land called Maine, but settled happily into the "mobile" home of everyday trail life. In the South, home was Harper's Ferry, the midway point. And from there on out, home was New England. When I hit Massachusetts, the home of my birth, I barely blinked. Home would be in New Hampshire. Then by surprise I found home in Manchester, Vermont with an old New Mexico amigo Dave who had a ski chalet there. I stayed for over a week. I hit New Hampshire and one day giddily hitchhiked to my aunt Mary's to announce that I was HERE! But there I found only the pains and itches of daily life, life as usual, strange jealousy, my Grandmother in the hospital, my aunt Patty loveless and feeling trapped in her world. I felt, by no fault of Mary's or Patty's or poor doped-up Grandma's, a stranger, not at all at home. I set my sights again, on Maine.

No, I suppose at that point I set my sights on Jessica, a lovely gentle spirit who I will forever consider my best friend from the trail, my closest connection made, if only on some hopelessly intangible and cerebral level. But calling her home is like calling, well, anyplace and everyplace I've lived "home." If home is where the heart is, then I am truly fucked. For my heart is blasted all over the wall of this nation, all over the map of Les Etas Unis, Estados Unidos, America the lower 48.

And then Alaska, too! But I'll get to that later.

Once inside Maine, home became Katahdin. And closing in on Katahdin, it should be clear to any of my readers that in the shadow of Katahdin was a deep longing, a longing, an impatience, and a sadness, a melancholy that found its pending-winter angst answered in one word: California.

I've never felt surer that I was on the right path, the proper NEXT STEP in my destiny, than when I boarded the plane outa Manchester, New Hampshire bound for soCal, the cold rain of mid-October just beginning to fall as we left the ground.

But maybe, maybe I was wrong.

For home was anything but a "simple descriptive poem of peace and contentment." For a minute, maybe, but no longer. So I ran. I ran up mountains that most struggle to climb at a moderate pace. I ran until my lungs revolted and then I ran some more. Day hikers looked at me like some super-athlete, and for seconds at a time I felt pride. "Oh, Lord if only you'd allot me one-tenth so much pride as anxiety, one one-hundredth so many smiles as shivers of self-doubt."

I ran through the blinding snows of my mind to Alaska. But even among its native's I found no peace. I wrote a little. Amid epileptic spasms of trail withdrawals, I stepped outside myself and worked humor to soothe the apparently voodoo-toxic sadness of my strongly-expressed pain. But then I got running again.

Days now, eight days in total, have passed dreamlike and frantic. I drove and I drove and I ran empathetic with my brother Rocky along the high-contrast darkening golden shores of sunset San Francisco Bay, and when he left I cried tears for him that he will never cry himself, not with me anyway. I cried for him, for his mom, for the ever-present horror of cancer, both real and metaphorical. And I listened to the Donnie Darko song, again. And again. And again.

And yesterday 200 million of us gorged on beheaded American turkeys. And whilst my family prepared our bird, I sat alone in my room here at my sister's house and thumbed through my Palm Pilot and thought about all the people I'd like to call and give thanks to for their friendship. They totaled over 100. I managed calls to two. I'm not good on the phone. I never was, and the trail has annihilated what little phone-ability I had.

Home then. Thirty or so hours later, even the turkey leftovers are nearly gone, and so, for most of the day, was I, lost in thoughts of home, wondering where to find it next.

I awoke this morning the way I often do in this house, slowly, with a good hour or two of half-slumber to the sweet sounds of my nephews at play across the hall. I swear to you, never do I recall being awakened by "noise" so non-disruptive and, well, sweet! The sound of their imaginative play, rolling cars across the floor and role-playing as they move their little four and seven-year-old personas from vehicle to imaginary house to imaginary hospital, little figurines in the hands of the diminutive gods of play, Matty and Jake.

Fantastic, really. But this is not my home. And so today (and I kid you not) I pondered the following options.

One, use a flight voucher I have to fly tomorrow to Baltimore, MD, where I'll taxi to the Greyhound, bus to Harrisburg, PA, and taxi again to Duncannon and the Doyle Hotel, where, for $75/week, I shut my door on the world and write, write, write, cook meals in my room, ala AT hiker-style, and go down to the bar once a day for social interaction and PBR on tap. How do I get "home?" Dunno. And who cares if home is nowhere.

Two, fly BACK to New Hampshire and go hunker down at my father's place in Freyburg, Maine. He invited me, and seemed a bit put out when I announced my intention to return tout suite to California following my Katahdin summit. I could stay there, equally as long I'm sure, and for free likely, but with only half the privacy and concentration I might get at the Doyle.

Three, drive the BMW east out Interstate 10. Stop at Bisbee and Tucson to visit friends Kate and Colleena, then onward through New Mexico with a possible swing north to see friends in Albuquerque (though doubtful, too much bad juju there for me still) then on to Houston to see Sister Margarita, to stay with her in her new home and write. The Sister and I, despite her vows of celibacy and marriage to the HOLY ONE and all that, have some kinda spooky connection for years now that I'd like to investigate. And she's repeatedly offered me sanctuary in her home, specifically citing her comprehension of my need to FINISH THE STORY. But dammit! She's not available! And after my romance with the T-Goddess of Idyllwack last fall (an ill-fated threesome with me the foolish appendage-lover with high hopes and no chance) and my more torturous recent lust for the greener grass on another lovely "lawn" never to be mine, I don't wish to open my heart to ANYONE not entirely ready for the likes of me.

Which is ironic, being that most people would look at me and think, "He's the one who's not ready for any ONE woman, no way!" Perhaps they'd be right. But I don't think so. And being the sole proprietor of my head, I think I know. For never before in my life have I looked so critically at potential partners, sizing them up for the long term, employing years and years of "case studies" in multiple character types to predict the future with this woman or that. God, I've dated enough to know. Wary not to freak anyone out, however, I never told any woman on the trail that I was out there looking for a life partner. But I was. Absolutely, I was.

Wait a minute.  Is this about women or a home?  Or is it about finding home in the arms of a woman?  The latter would of course be the best, but, me thinks, not without first establishing a nest of my own.  Or is it about the story?  Or money?  Or escape?  Or an addiction to movement?  I mean, who WOULDN'T be addicted to movement after seven months of nomadic existence, sleeping in a different bed or on a strange new piece of ground every night?  I think it's money. I mean isn't it always?

Four, sell the BMW and use the money to buy a sailboat. I love it, don't get me wrong. Driving it, instead of the beater old Chevy for instance, I feel that sense of nobility that my "Thruhiker" status on the AT afforded me. A bum, yes, but a noble bum. A high class bum. But I sense that the BMW might prove to be a very expensive car to upkeep. I only ever bought it to help my deceased friend's mother financially. But it's a liability. Today, it is a running BMW, formerly owned by the lead songwriter and singer of the popular band Perfect Circle, and thus of greater than-blue-book value to the right celebrity memorabilia buyer. But tomorrow, if it ceases to run, it could be worthless. Which leads me to five.

Five, buy the 27-foot Catalina or some other make of similarly-sized sailboat large enough to live on. And live on it! (Alas, I would HAVE to sell the BMW to afford this size boat.) And if I'm only allowed to sleep on it 3 nights/week (as is the policy of every marina on the west coast), then spend the other 4 nights in a shipping container in the artist warehouse in Oakland I checked out the other day. Good people, cheap rent. Albeit a weird living sitch, but cheeeeeeeeeep! And among artists!

Six, marry & move in with a longtime friend here in soCal, a woman for whom I've longed for over a decade who was never available but who now is.  Alas, after finally coming together, it appears the Fates will not allow us to go beyond friendship, and the evidence is written all over the umrumpled, passionless sheets of "our" bed. 

Seven, retreat to Idlemild, imbibe of its strange hemlock cocktail of agoraphobia, ennui, and purloined privacy, be thus driven insane, and finally climb the mountain and experiment with paradoxical undressing, the only sure-fire way to leave The Hotel California for good.

Who woulda thought so much Free Will and so many choices could EVER be a bad thing? That such could lock up a man's brain like an overwrought computer hard drive and leave him staring out a window across an endless sea of suburban pink stucco homes seeing nothing, hearing not the voices of his nephews pleading with him to come play, his face an inert computer screen, frozen, stuck as it were on a one-word virus: homeless.

-rsm

Dear Jigglebox Readers:

The Webmaster, Editors, Java Script Writers, HTML Hacks, and junior assistant
cubicle dwellers here at Jigglebox.com ONCE AGAIN wish to apologize for the
depressive nature of that last segment.  That Jesus-blaspheming bastard Lord Duke, aka
Jester, aka Jack Jigglebox, has gone TOO FAR this time, and we've got him right where we  want him.  Between the efforts of our cadre of attornies and the aide of a handful of white hat hackers, we're shutting Mr. McKinney out of Jigglebox altogether.  No more will sensative Jigglebox readers be forced to suffer the Heinous Truth and Keyboard Mayhem of this shameless, confessionalist diddler of drunken nuns.  He's CUT OFF!  It's last call here at Rick's Rant Cafe and I, Paul Ander Munchen, Editor & Chief of the new Jigglebox, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Clear Channel Corportion, assure you that Mr. McKinney's days of drama queen egoistic first person memoir-writing ARE OVER!  FINISHED!  From now on, Mr. McKinney (who will of course be taking on a proper novelist psuedonym) will only be allowed to publish FICTION!

The sniveling bleeding heart, emotionally torqued confessional gibberish which marked his previous success is a THING OF THE PAST.  And all resemblence to persons living or dead is going right out the non-fiction window with it, let me tell you!  And then it will only be a matter of time before Oprah and Wal-Mart line up for distribution.  Mr. McKinney, as a devoted purist of the written word, will of course receive only $10 and a handful of food stamps for his contribution to the site.   (God may just spare his greedy soul yet, eh?)

-The Jiggle Staff

Nash and his nut stash