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 The back jacket shot on Dead Men |
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8/28: That's all she wroteIn 48 hours, I will be climbing into an 18 and 1/2 foot canoe with Captain Frank Grandau and his beagle named Clyde. For the ensuing two months, I will be paddling down the Mississippi River on a mission of hope, and no doubt a great adventure. Henceforth, please check out my new Blogger page embedded within Jigglebox.com: The Dreamcatcher ExpeditionWish us luck. I think we're gonna need it. -RSM For anyone interested in seeing how this press release (and thus my entirely self-concocted and imagined theme for the journey) came to life over the course of two weeks, several cases of beer, and easily as many revisions as empties left lying on the floor of my hotel room at The Doyle, here are two of the drafts, the very first and the very last before I finally threw up my hands in surrender and let my high school buddy & professional writer friend Stricky take over and make it really sing. That's right. I am not Hemingway. But neither am I Dan Quayle. Thank you! And everyone, a big round of applause for Sister Maria Margarita, Mutual of Omaha (Texas region), Dept. of Salvation & Copulation, whose sage advice will live on forever snuggled twix the covers of "Dead Men Hike No Trails," for being my "woman on the ground" this year, just as my cousin Justin Alessandro and Swami Bruce Endres were in 2004. Sister Margarita will be the recipient of Sony memory sticks as sent through the mail by me from the river (thanks to my use of the ancient pda technological wonder, the Sony Clie SL). The Sister will be uploading from said sticks and posting to the Expedition page as often as possible, hopefully once a week. Dreamcatcher Final Press Release
8/16-20: Dateline - The Doyle Hotel, Duncannon PA"Life used to be lifelike, now it's more like showbiz, I wake up in the night and don't know where the bathroom is, don't know what town I'm in or what sky I'm under, I wake up in the darkness, don't have the will anymore to wonder.." - Ani Difranco The ceiling fan turns languidly overhead, not by the electric but by breezes blowing in off the mile wide Susquehanna River to the east and out my window, a giant orange sheet of ugly fire when at dawn I awoke hungover from beers drunk down in the bar two flights of stairs below. Or is it three? The Doyle. Happy 100 year anniversary, you weird and wonderful old place. For two years now I have wanted to return to this place I haunted on the AT, this crumbling beauty of a once fine hotel long let go, now just $75/week for a room. Now I'm here and questioning just why. For the first time since I can remember, maybe the first since my last days on the AT, I type prone once again, here on my back on my single bed. Lacking a desk or chair in this spartan room reminiscent of a 100 Bukowski poems, I type thus lying down. And in no time I succumb to sleep, mid-afternoon. Over my bed on a hook in the window frame I have pinned Eros, my new duel revolver muse clad in white tank top with belly showing, blonde and sexy as the night I met her years ago, New Year's Eve, and kissed her on that sacred turn of a clock hand from one year into the next. I haven't looked at pornography in years, not online or in magazines, no point. Nor do I carry photos with me in my travels of any woman I've ever loved, for a moment or with all my heart. I find all the above to be naught buy stinging reminders of my solitude. Glancing over at Eros, I wonder what has prompted this exception. I walk the streets of stone-dead Duncannon listening to Ani Difranco (lyrics above) and nod in agreement as though in some virtual conversation with the singer. Chalk on the sidewalk dredges up childhood dreams and I linger. Back in my room now after a late evening stroll around about a 4-block radius of the Doyle. Earlier, while writing, I fell asleep, middle for the afternoon. Slept thru half of happy hour, more than, from 4 to 5:30. It was the fan and the heat of the day typing on my belly. I recall plugging into my music thru headphones to try and stay awake, but soon even those were thrown aside in deference to siesta. A phone call from Dave in New Mexico stirred me. I made my way down to the bar for a happy beer while there was still time. I'm glad I had had a nap and the beer was a happy one because talking to Dave brought me down a little. He’s struggling now with the realities of having to finance a wife and child and he's not doing well, standing by and watching as his thin supply of pine nuts and the season dry up. He says he's accepted the idea that soon he'll have to get a job at 7-11. I want so badly to be able to help him, but I am powerless in my current life of disability and apparent inability to promote my book. I can do nothing for him, nothing for anyone. I'm barely holding myself up by tattered strings, a marionette doll looking skyward as his estranged one long arm works awkwardly overhead to animate a tired and not altogether cooperative body below. Many of the strings are threadbare, many more broken and retied, shortened in the doing, such that the doll hangs akimbo, never standing quite straight anymore. I order the cajun chicken wrap from the bar as I tank down another beer, this one much larger than the first. I appreciate the effort on the part of the chef, but it's all jalepenos, more Mexican than Cajun and certainly spicy, tasty but somehow it doesn't go down well with the bar smoke and the draining energy of this place. I'd forgotten how much of an energy drain it can be here. It’s all in your mood. If you’re down, it’ll take you down further. If you’re up, it’s paradise, old style. I pay my bill and quickly take my exit, feeling guilty, having just learned that I spelled the owner's name wrong in my book. I mean, how many Vickys have an E in their name? Vickey. Well, shit. I feel the downward spiral of a late-in-the-day first meal and 30 or so ounces of Pabst. I thank Vickey’s husband Pat for the meal, meaning it, really. Mexican, Cajun, who cares. It was good. It’s me who is off. I grab a Red Bull from the convenience store out back and pound it. I'm desperate not to fall back asleep this close to sunset, the sweetest part of my lonesome room window-sitting day. But back in my room, with no other furnishings, I sit on the bed and the inevitable happens. I go down with the sun, sleep til nearly ten. There's live music tonight, blues by Sue, the same woman who played two years ago, the Sue whose daughter Sarah taught me to open fist box a girl. I start to wonder why I came here. I've paid for a week, plan on staying at least thru the weekend, having arrived Wednesday. It's now only Thursday night. My attitude and or my defenses to the sucking energy had better improve soon. Either this place is haunted, or I am. I decide it’s both. I try and read Twain's Life on the Mississippi but am stuck at Sam's early days learning to be a river pilot. Like him and all the names and directions and instructions being given the young man by the river pilot teaching him, I fail to see what reading this book will do for my education of that river. I just want to be out there. I want it to start. And then I want it over with and I want to go home, home to wherever home is, the Strawbale, sanctuary still, a lonely place but peaceful until I find a woman and reason to find home somewhere more permanent, more mine. This latter thought and the obvious ambiguities and not-so-obvious hopelessness of my seeming eternal homelessness fills me with despair every time my mind drifts there. It has drifted there a lot this sunny yet cool New England summer, and every time the despair like a bucket dropped deep and yanked up brings with it the coldest water of a well of death thoughts. I become exhausted at the thoughts of no home, no woman, and no hope of every having either again, and I just want to die. Right then and there. It's instant suicidal ideation, the snap-together puzzle piece of a deadly equation to which I can see no solution. In such moments, I think only that Heaven is my home to come, that whatever chance at home I had here on Earth has come and gone. And down in the bar at The Doyle, singer Sue croons out the Eagles' Desperado: "Freedom, well, that's just some people talking. Your prison is walking thru the world all alone." I order another Pabst on tap and try and empty my head awhile. The days and nights pass. That's how this place is. Most hikers will tell you, and I can't agree more, that The Doyle will suck you in like some kind of hiker heroin. You wake up five, six days later and wonder where the time went. Stephany, a New York literary agent and friend of a friend, related to me in one of the longest and nicest rejection letters I've ever received, how she grew up around here from ages 10 to 16. She said in her time it was nicknamed "Dodge City" because people were shooting each other all the time. She escaped to college and never looked back, says she spent those years in misery and how from my book's descriptions it sounded like it hasn't changed at all. I imagine she's right. In a small aside, I loved the irony of the first words of her next paragraph, the one following the tale of her Drunk Cannon youth. To whit: "The bad new is that I just don't think I can be of much help with your quest for a mainstream publisher." I found that funny, seeing as how I hadn't expected much different and, given the tale of her youth as precedent, seems the bad news had already been told. For the better part of my second ay here, I avoided the bar and vowed not to wither away my time here in a Pabst Blue Ribbon haze. That lasted until Happy Hour. On the morning of the third day, I vowed not to make any more vows. I decided to just give in the place, to the entropy, to the crumbling beauty, and to the goodness of its owners, Vickey and Pat, who truly are good-natured people with big hearts. I think it was that second night though, when I still wasn't quite right in the head from the first night's drinking and feeling thus a bit lonely and isolated and full of the "why am I here?" shit when I had the smarts to ask bartender Pam for the photo albums from years past. I wanted just one of the albums, 2004, my year, having learned the hard lesson during my time at the hostel in New Hampshire in earlier summer that the fraternity of "your year" means everything. I found I had no discourse with the hikers of 2006, no common ground, which is insane because of course we all walk the same ground. I can't explain it. It just didn't work, for me anyway. So over time I came to avoid the hikers. But now came the album and I opened to page one. Vickey has done a wonderful job documenting every hiker that's come thru The Doyle over the years since she and Pat took it over. There was even a glossary of page #s by hiker name! I went thru them all and the memories came flooding back. Many names I had forgotten. But I smiled at their faces and knew them again in an instant. If for no other reason than to reference this photo album, I might should have come back east last year or in the winter of '04 to work on my book, as I imagined I would but never did. So many names, so many great people. I list them in the order they appear in the '04 book, a largely accurate timeline of when they traveled thru. They were: Bramble, Camera 1 & Camera 2, Ashtray, LL Fuzzy, Ranger Jim, Over Under (a guy who had no trail name back when I hiked with him briefly from Day One), Salt Lick, 2 Cents, Big Stick, Jester (that would be me), Raven, Slow Poke, Mouse Bait, Michigoose & Lefty, Boo Boo, Arms & Snacks, Chef, Gordy, A Dog, Beat Box, Night Rider, Nitro & Michael, Alabama (now simply "Bama"), Impulse, Sun Pig, Dirtnap, Gather, Paparazzi, TDS aka Jason, Wind Sock (the southbounder who'd met my buddy Dave in Vermont), and another southbounder I'd met named Gnome Sherpa. And finally Grass, her appearance dated 9-22, telling me she’d dropped by the Doyle after summiting Katahdin. The same was probably true of Fu Man, whom I’d met in Georgia when he was almost done a southbound thru dead of winter. His date was (9-28). Then Party Girl (10-13), and Sanguine (11-10), and what a great name this one, a girl I never met: Hippie Long Stocking! And from the album I got to learn at last the mystery of the few names I couldn’t recall from our summit photo, our October 8th Class of 04 photo. From left to right, back to front, the missing links were Lightweight Joe, Cherokee Tears, and Lumber. It was a fine reunion, indeed.
8/21: My brother TomTom Kennedy is not my real brother. I don't have any brothers. But if I did, I'd want him as one. Tom is a tramp king, and in this we are two of a kind. I have a backpack and a laptop; Tom has a welder and a girlfriend. Actually, I don't even have a laptop anymore. It died, withered up and died all brown and stinky and full of worms in true Macintosh fashion. This isn't to say I don't like Macs. I do. I loved it. It wrote "Dead Men" and despite many little bugs, it kept alive for the duration and for that I am truly grateful to it. I'm still going to kill it though, even though it's already dead. I sent its corpse home to Arizona where, barring some miracle cure by Swami, I will boot it up one last time (yes, still boots, just needs a new $500 hard drive - ha!), take it out to the "boot hill" shooting range with Lord "Crazy James" Hull, and blast it straight through the monitor with a few rounds of hollow point lead from James' revolver. Then I'll glue it on Duke, my art car. Anyway, I was talking about Tom. But I strayed. I strayed because ALL COMPUTERS SUCK ASS. As much as I love Tom, I am not going to rewrite the lengthy ode to Sir Kennedy that I wrote five minutes ago, only to watch vanish before my eyes when the 'puter decided to jam my juice, man, aaauurrrrgh! Anyway, the gist of it was that Tom is really, really cool and his girlfriend is a cutie and he somehow manages to live in the Bay Area despite being as itinerant as me, and not only live in the Bay Area but live with the famed Flash & Dana, dynamic mischievous duo of da still-burning Burning Man. And I got into all this (on a day when I'm stressed to the gills getting ready for my Mississippi River trip and should be doing that work) because Tom sent me some photos of his groovy new welded monster mobiles. I just couldn't resist tweaking the latter. - RSM
PS: I didn't get anymore baby photos and the weeks up, so no baby Jello wrestling.
8/14: Babies, refridgerator rides & really bad editingOkay, it's baby week here at Jigglebox.com. Posting my friend Dave's son's photo prompted a "not to be outdone" submission by another dear friend, so, let's have 'em. The more the merrier. Babies, take to the mat! I wanna see some baby wrestling! In blue Jello! Yes, that would be good. Here anyway is cute little Ember of Bisbee, Arizona, a canyon town currently experiencing the Second Coming of Noah, or at least one very heavy desert monsoon season.
To quote Cochise County's leading Ark-ee-ologist Kate Pearson "The foot of the gulch becomes a raging river literally and there are a billion cops keeping traffic flowing while giant forklifts remove rocks and rubble and refrigerators and swamp coolers and stoves, etc." Can you believe it? No, says Pearson. "You wouldn't believe it." Ember is pictured above clinging for dear life to a beaded Hula Girl curtain while floodwaters bearing a chunk of black and white tile flooring go roaring by. Being one tough baby, Ember not only survived the surge but appeared to get a good rush out of it to boot. While we're on the subject of boots, I would like to make clear to those of you who didn't catch my sarcasm in yesterday's post and might have thought I was in some way endorsing the aforementioned hiking memoir, I WASN'T! I was mortified by its blatant lack of editing and wretched grammar, to say nothing of its bland and soporific prose. Ugh. I'd rather make and drink soup made out of a 1000-mile old mud caked hiking boot than read that book. Jesus, I'm sure the hiker is just a swell guy and all, but damnit man. Don't quit your day job. (If any of you think I'm being a little harsh here, go read his reviews on Amazon.) Quote for the day, regarding the violence between the Israeli military and Hezbollah militia, spoken from the lips of a young Jewish man from Connecticut: "Hey, I'm Jewish and all, but I'm sick to death of the whole thing. It's been going on too long. As far as I'm concerned they oughta turn the whole place into a glass factory." These just in! Photos LIVE from Bisbee, AZ & The Second Coming of Noah!
Jigglebox wishes to thank the unknown photographer who risked being sucked into the underground flood tunnels (tunnel entrance between floating dumpsters) to bring us these amazing photos!
8/13: Competition, if you could call it thatWhile doing a random Google search today for the names of the owners of the Doyle Hotel in Duncannon "aka Drunk Cannon," Pennsylvania, a place for which I am bound a few days from now, I happened upon a link to an AT hiker's book advertised through MY publisher. Naturally, seeing the Booklocker label, I thought it was a quote from my book. Haha. Guess again. Booklocker, it appears, publishes OTHER writers, including other hikers of the AT. So there it was, "Once Upon a Climb" by one James Richardson (click on the link to check it out). I alerted my editor, Pam Johnson, in whose beautifully-restored Victorian home I have been staying these past few days. She came right up, and there together, we had a little read, a little taste of James' prose. Well, I'm just gonna stop there, pass no judgement, let loose no giggles, just let it be. And let you, should you wish, have a look for yourself at how the "other half" live and write in America, a land where just a few years ago every third person I met was a writer and now, thanks to the invention of the blog, every man, woman, and child can now claim some status in what to me has been a hard won career. Fuck. In other and much lighter and brighter news, my friend Dave Cuneo and his wife Vicky gave birth to a lovely boychild some time ago now. I received some photos in my e mail today, chose one, and proudly prop it up here for all the world to see. Little David's mother is a knockout from Los Mochis, Mexico, and dresses her son well in tacos. Beautiful boy.
I've had a perfectly divine and peaceful visit here at Pam's castle and been so well fed and beered that I've literally gained five pounds in just about as many days. In two days, I'll be at The Doyle, reliving my brief and besoffen (German for shitfaced) days spent there whilst passing through on the AT. For anyone interested in seeing the hotel, here's the link The Doyle to their site with a nice shot of the 100-year old hotel notorious for being home to thruhikers and terminal hammerheads for decades. Recent new owners Vicky and Pat have been cleaning up the place since a year or so before I went through. I'll be interested to see how much it's improved by now. Look for me at the bar where dollar Pabst Blue Ribbons flow like spring snowmelt all the do-dah-day. Rumor has it I might see me an angel there. I hope she real puuuurty like this. - RSM
8/12: The summer? Hell, where'd the spring go?[A look back at a madcap spring scrawled on airplane napkins, May 10th] Zoom. Bang. Shazzam! Where did all this begin? Was it with New Year's and the publication, at long last, of THE BOOK? I can hear the shrink now: "So, you deal with death by running away from it?" Yeh, sure lady. Run, Lola run. That was me after Stormy checked out. That's my way. And it's what The Doctor prescribed, Hunter S. himself said it: "Keep moving." So it was Mexico's Copper Canyon, the Ferrocarrill train to the coast and lovely Lourdes of Barcelona, met on the trail and come to heal me, stayed with me five days with no common language between us but that of love. Then Diego and a visit with sis and the nephs. How did I get back to Arizona? Memory fails. Ah, yes, hitched a ride with the Art Car Caravan, a bunch of my west coast family going to Arizona to see the rough sketch of the someday-surely-grand Art Car Museum being dreamt into reality by Harrod Blank. Then what? Book signings. A string of them. Bisbee saturation culminating with a hot show at Hot Licks and all those lovely local musicians backing me up, wow! Was that it for March? What the hell became of March? Early April saw me in Deming, New Mexico picking up Blister Sister and her fellow thruhikers bound for the Continental Divide. That took up a whole three for four days, tops. Then mid-April and up rolls Tinker to the Strawbale House all the way from Massachusetts smelling of french fries (he converted his diesel Mercedes to run on vegetable oil) and bad modern pop-country western tunes billowing from his stereo 24/7. Then Zang, we're in Vegas cuz that's where AT'04 and Iraq '05 survivor Tinker wants to go. Some tower room at the Sahara high up but not high enough for certain death should one feel like leaping out the window. Lonesome for a women and feeling small and out of place in that city of money, I won't say I didn't consider it. Then lovely Zion and Angel's Landing, one insane knife-edge climb and a stunning sheer cliffs of purple and red, a flawless dropping leap, should one be so inclined. And then the Grand Canyon and lucking into a Backcountry permit for an overnight at Phantom Ranch at the canyon's bottom, permits for which are typically snapped up months, even years in advance. At last french fry ride back to Bisbee when I can no longer tolerate the pop-western music and whoosh, Tinker's gone. Now here I am on Southwest Flight # 269 into Houston, May 10. Rounding a massive cumulous tower of storm weather over San Antonio, I'm plugged hard into the music today, "The Driving Mix" I threw together on the mp3 player and at the moment it's the theme from Requiem for a Dream. I smile at the recollection of several small coups pulled off in the past few hours and days. Most recently, I turned my "C" boarding pass into a special "Preboard Pass" by explaining my medical condition to the SW counter lady at Phoenix Sky Harbour airport, that condition in which severe claustrophobia manifests in heightened acute anxiety and eventually physical illness, all this if I get stuck in a middle seat. She bought it. I walked on with the old ladies and mothers with children. When high as a kite, one MUST have a window seat. Just making my flight out of Ontario, CA this morning felt miraculous. Hid a key for Hunter (God bless that man) to pick up the Beemer there and buzz her home to Arizona. Leaving Idyllwild dead early, car a mess and packing at the very last possible moment there in the airport parking lot, gleaning this excursion's needs from a car full of hiking gear and street clothes and a writer's things and boxes of shiny new books. Of course before all that there was the hike: four days on the Pacific Crest Trail with Appalachian amigos Bama and T-Bird and Nemo and new friends Stomp and Midnight. Seventy five miles in four days. And the icing on the cake? Doing my biggest mile day EVER from the Palms to Pines Highway all the way around Idyllwild's rabid and sheer giant claw-like backside to within a mile of the Taquitz Peak Fire Tower. All that in ONE DAY! Close to thirty miles and probably 5,000 feet of elevation gain. And the surprise whiskey gift from Bruce duct-taped to a fence by the highway crossing with the name JESTER Sharpie'd on its cardboard box disguise. An excellent surprise! Good times with all last night, Timmy and Claude included, the latter newly under Bruce's roof yet so hospitable to all these hikers showing up at his door. Nemo crying this morning, crying for home and Hugo (and fond of her, I'd like to think maybe a fear tears for me!) I'll miss them all. But this summer my destiny doesn't lay with this trail or any trail, really, but the book. Now it's Houston Hobby Airport and touchdown! Shazzam! On the tarmac and off to share my book with my art car family, to celebrate with them at yet another Orange Show Art Car Weekend, the biggest gathering of art cars in the U.S. And me, specially invited to come do a book signing by Suzanne Theis, head honcho of the show who, when I called her on Harrod's advice, had a copy of my book in her hand, ordered from Amazon. Miraculous! Yee-haa! Up the gangplank now feeling good and triumphant, I bounce as I walk to high energy of the Spider Man 2 theme song blasting in my ear, "I'm anything but ordinary!" And me smiling because really, that's all I ever wanted, to just never be bland or boring or ordinary. Hoo-rah. -RSM
8/10: Carry on THIS, mofo!Yes, it's true. The world has gone completely sideways. Reality will no longer be measured by the formerly accepted standards of God & Country, physics and the five senses. No, from now on everything will be viewed through the tunnel vision lenses of deep-seated fear & loathing and "protected" by lots and lots of guns, one gun for every baby bottle Mommy will be closely scrutinized while suckling for safety's sake at Security Checkpoint Alpha, one gun for every new freedom surrendered in the name of the new enema, er.. enemy: Liquid Terror. Wasn't that nice of the Towelheads to give our government and policing forces one more BIG FAT reason to strip of us our freedoms, our laptops, our carry-ons of every kind? And speaking of stripping, what's next? A friend pointed out to me today that soon the terrorists will no doubt find a way to hide life-threatening weaponry of some kind in the actual fabric of their clothing. That right, folks. Get ready for the new Fly Naked For Free Miles airline milage accrual program. It's coming. Sure as some new weird and twisted Gatorade commercial designed to make you feel safer carrying around eloctrolites, anywhere that is but on a plane.
Nope, no more liquids. After today you won't even be able to board a plane if mandatory airport on-site urine tests show your body's water content to above the following acceptable norms:
(Figures for both sexes will will vary slightly based on body fat.) Stay calm, however. This is still America and your right to shop at Wal-Mart has been saved by the forces of Good over Evil once again. In the immortal words of my great mentor and friend Hunter S. Thompson, it still hasn't gotten weird enough for me. (But I have a feeling that in my lifetime, it will.) - RSM
8/05: Speaking of rabbit holesI just dropped by MyRobitisPregnant.com, the home site of my new brother-in-letters Jon Rolston's musings and photographs. (Is that bad grammar? I think it is. Tough noogies.) Anyway, I went there for a laugh and I got one. A couple, actually. And an informative lesson on how apple cider is made with mixed metaphors and dumb American consumer values. No, that didn't come out right. Jon didn't mix metaphors. But he made a great analogy between himself and his life in Los Angeles and apples. Bookmark this guy's site. He's GOING SOMEWHERE, MAN! And when he makes it I wanna be able to say, "Hey, I know Jon Rolston's gardener." Which is just one degree of Kevin Bacon away from ACTUALLY knowing Jon. Which is enough. In L.A. Oh, yeah, Jon now has feedback capability (something I gotta get) so you can comment on his stuff. He also has links to other sites he likes and though I haven't had time yet to peruse them, I bet they're as inspired as his. So, what are you waiting for? In the famous words of Charleton Heston, "Apple cider is people!" In precisely three weeks, I'm going to be dipping an oar into the waters of Lake Itasca on the Canadian border for the first time as AT'04 compadre and former Naval Commander Frank Grandau and I set out our two-month, 2,350-mile southbound run of the entire Mississippi River. The recent great review author Rebecca Rule gave my book in New Hampshire's Concord Monitor has inspired me to put together a Huck Finn press-kit-spin on this mad river run of ours. I've come up with a title, based on my desire to collect, on bar napkins and scraps of paper, the dreams (life goals) of everyone I meet along the river, stick em all in a fat wine jug, cork it and send it out to sea when we reach the Katrina-decimated gulf shores below New Orleans. I wanna call it: The Dream Catcher Expedition. Whaddya think? And Frank wants to show how the river, like the AT, connects and highlights the similarities of all the otherwise self-perceived disparate peoples of the many states and cultures it runs through. I do believe Frank and I are gonna whip up a helluva cool thematic, beautifully photographed (by Frank) and written account of our journey. And thanks to semi-modern technology, once again YOU are going to be able to follow our journey right from your home pc, Starbucks laptop or, if you're a real pirate, from your Office Space cubicle. I believe you have my stapler. - RSM PS: Readership has been dropping steadily over the past year here at Jigglebox, worryingly so, so much so that, in the words of Milla Jovovich in the film Dummy, "Oh, man I'd fuck anybody right now" (in this case to bring readership back up). So, for all you ladies out there, here's a little incentive to tell your friends to come join the Jigglebox Family. Homophobes, close your eyes. I wouldn't want to turn you on.
8/03: I love my Sister, Bitchen Blister!I am coming to the realization now, finally, in early August, that this was my summer to chill, relax, unwind, let my hair down, get weird and have fun. Alas, I am, despite all appearances to the contrary, an extremely driven, hard-working personal taskmaster who has a real hard time relaxing, and this summer was no exception. I had it in mind that I was duty bound to publicize the book. And so, all summer despite lots of fun and sun and swimming and hiking and drinking, the failure worm was always at work in my head. I damn near lost it a few times. Thank God for a network of very supportive friends and a free, sponsored cell phone. I'd be hospitalized by now. I am so proud, however, of the achievements right now being undertaken by several bands of friends here in the states and abroad. While I've been simultaneously loafing & gnawing away at my fingernails, they have been stomping the terra! None have given up, and some, like my dear friend Blister Sister, have gone far beyond the necessary and into the realm of fantasmagorical self-improvement and well, a Nirvana of sorts. To listen to Blister on the phone tonight from Yellowstone was to feel that sense of the above & beyond. To really hear out her words and feel her pain was to remember how huge an undertaking is a long-distance thruhike. The poor girl is stressed out! But I hiked with Blister on the Continental Divide last year. I know for a fact that right now she is retracing (in the opposite direction) trail she has already covered! She and her compadres (check out her photos here on Billville.net) set out nearly half a year ago to conquer the CDT and thus, for the four of them anyway, complete the coveted Triple Crown, the mother of all trail badges in the U.S., the addition of PCT, CDT & AT, roughly 8000 plus miles in total. So if Blister Sister has reached (and surpassed) the point at which she gave in to inertia last summer, why is she still hiking? WHY? Because Blister ain't no section hiker. She didn't finish it last year, so she started all over again and dammit if she ain't gonna finish it, all of it, again, this year.
It is with great admiration and pride that I raise a glass to Blister Bitchen Sister. Blister, YOU ROCK! Hang in there, girl, and remember what I said. The rest of the world is writhing in a far less admirable mire of pain and stupidity. Praise to the goddess stompin' on the terra. Read all about Blister Sister's adventures this summer in Vermont Sports Magazine Online. As with me on my AT journey, she has been stealing time away from hiking to write a running account of her trek. And that ain't easy, lemme tell ya. Blister is one of many friends doing great things this summer, and I intend to touch upon the exploits of several others in upcoming posts. Next I wanna tell you about Ski Bum and Deia and their trek half way around South America and point you in the direction of more amazing photos! For tonight, however, that'll be all. My rum cocktail, a potent concoction of cream of coconut, pineapple juice, OJ, rum and nutmeg introduced to me by amigo Mike during his visit last month, has officially taken over my brain. I MUST HAVE REST! Good night. -RSM
8/02: This just in!Writer & syndicated book reviewer Rebecca Rule has put me on the map in New Hampshire! The Concord Monitor - print version
Penny Smith, the mad genius mind behind ArtCars.com did Dead Men a real kindness. (I only found out about the mad genius part lately during her periodic reports whilst immersed in my book - man, is she something special!) Reading Penny's letters as she walked down the trail with me was really a trip lending me a whole new perspective on everything I'd communicated in the book. Penny recently honored my efforts with a wonderful full page review and tie-in to my art car life in this special ArtCars.com Dead Men dedication. Thank you, Penny. So many people are writing me now with tales of their own struggles with depression and/or suicidal struggles. It is both painful and beautiful to be entrusted with and opened up to in this way. Though I lament that so many suffer, I am glad that they are relating. A word of caution, however. I am no guru, no psychiatrist, no counselor. I continue to tread a very thin line between the safety of a Prozac-and-sunshine-bolstered healthy mental state, and a darker state of mind, one in which I am regularly hypnotized by the Sirens that would call me out of this life. Read and enjoy the book for what qualities you find in it, then move on and do something to strengthen yourself. God forbid, but if I should one day fall victim to that Siren song, please do not follow. Know that it was an act of passion, a 2nd degree self-murder undertaken in a moment when logic was nowhere to be found, when I'd forgotten how beautiful life can be and how very much I am loved. I've no such plans, but I worry for those now relating to me. -RSM
7/09: The tale of the Chicken Drop signWeird day here in Warren, NH, northern nowhere outpost at the base of New Hampshire's famous White Mountains and crossroads of the Appalachian Trail. I hadn't anything planned, though I'd heard of a bluegrass festival going on downtown. When it came time to go, I wasn't ready as usual so I told the boys to go on ahead and I'd follow in Blister's Jeep a little later. This I did, thus affording me the opportunity to come and go as I please (downtown Warren is five miles away from our little village of Glencliff and the hiker hostel). The freedom to come and go would, of course, become the freedom to drive home drunk as, despite my best efforts, sobriety was not long to be had on the town greens with bluegrass a-playing and games and beers and fried dough and peels of hillbilly laughter a-flying through the air. The real fun began when we drifted over to and settled in with the Chicken Drop people. Hollis and Broad. (I'll get on with the story and let you think a moment over which one is the husband and which the wife.) As luck would have it, these most interesting characters happened to be the one group of locals with which hostel co-caretaker Ffej (Jeff spelled backwards) had some connection. Turned out he knew Hollis, who had painted the Hiker's Welcome sign out front of the hostel. That was the connection. In a small town, you take what you can get. Turned out we, or I anyway, would get a lot more than I bargained for and go away a happy man. In the carnivalesque atmosphere of this small town Independence week celebration, there were a lot of vendors but come to think of it, not a lot of games. I'm wondering now, as the sun sets into a mountain off to my right and I scramble to capture this moment before another stomps it out of memory, if the Chicken Drop weren't in fact the only game of chance offered around the gazebo that day. I didn't need to hear the concept twice to buy into it and fork over my two dollar bet. What the hell. It was perhaps the weirdest gamble I'd ever engaged in. Here's how it works. First, you gotta have a chicken on hand. Maybe more than one. And some chicken wire. Next, you paint a 4x8 sheet of plywood like a checkerboard and number the boxes, at random, with numbers from 1 to 50. Then, like any professional business, you hang out your shingle and draw in the customers. What, exactly, did the customer get for his money, in this case? Well, a chance to win the pot, of course, all of $50 (the other $50 went to the house). It was a little like roulette, I suppose. When I tell you how it works, however, you might liken it more to craps. There was a list, you see, with fifty spaces for names, one for every block on the checkerboard, as it were. Each person ponies up their two dollars and when the list is full, the game begins. And ends, almost as fast as it began, because chickens don't mess around. They get right down to business. "Is this a fund-raiser of some kind?" I asked Broad. "Yeah, it raises the funds in Hollis' and my's pockets," he replied. "I see," I said, and I ponied up my two dollars on the block numbered 21. It was the sign, I think that really drew me in. Their "shingle." It depicted a multicolored chicken with wild, spiraling, psychedelic eyes. How could I resist. Seeing as how Ffej knew these folks, we were invited to sit with them, to escape the scorching heat of the sun through the now ozone-less atmosphere and sit in their comfy chairs and drink a beer and chat. In time, as the names on the list and the fervor of the coming game grew, I came to know the family: Charlotte, the daughter with the gigantor pump-action squirt machine gun; Hollis, her mother and the artist behind the signs (the one at the hostel and the Chicken Drop sign), Broad - Hollis' Husband and Michelle, a friend from Massachusetts. Incidentally, did I mention it was a Sunday? Yep, Sunday July 9th, so forget about Monday off for the 4th or whatever. This was the end of the end of Warren, New Hampshire's big summer blast and already the bluegrass was winding down and the vendors packing up. Which, in ChickenDropVille, could mean only one thing. This was to be the last drop. I gotta hand it to carnival barker Broad. He held out to the last. As the last of the musicians packed up thier gar and folks folded chairs and headed for home. Broad garnered the last ten names needed to fill the list, and thus the final $20. And so at last the game was on. Hollis collected up old Nelly or Mama or whatever the old hen's name was, and with not a whole lotta ceremony, dropped her in the chicken wire enclosure and onto the bingo board of numbers. And there old Nelly stood. The shouting began in earnest, but Nelly stayed put, right where she'd been dropped. I couldn't help but think, "Now that ain't fair! If she don't move, how do I have a chance of winning?" Well, Hollis' daughter Charlotte quickly cured that, scooping up a much younger chicken and tossing her in, whereupon said chicken ran higgilty-piggilty around the bin. The crowd howled and whooped and hollered. And then it was over. The little chicken took a shit. Chicken Little shit on number 30-something. (I don't remember what number exactly because it wasn't even remotely close to my number so I didn't care.) And thus ended the final Chicken Drop of the Warren weekend blues festival. Drop. Poop. Splat. You lose. But I myself didn't lose. Why? Because I fell in love with that Chicken Drop sign Hollis had lovingly painted. The sign had apparently survived several seasons of this weird backwoods local New Hampshire tradition. It was naught but colorful paints on black poster board staple-gunned a hundred or so times to four narrow sticks, age-grayed pieces of 1"x 1" pine, far as I could tell. But I loved it. It veritably screamed FOLK ART to me, and a real gem at that. And something else. It had my buddy Harrod Blank written all over it.
Harrod blank, my friend and great visionary folk artist and, via his photography and filmmaking, a capturer and archivist of folk art of all kinds nationwide. Harrod likes chickens. So, as you can imagine, with Harrod in mind, I had to have that Chicken Drop sign. I hinted. I blurted. I flirted and fawned. "How much?" I asked the artist. "Make me an offer," she said. "Chicken shit," I thought to myself. And I thought but didn't say aloud, "Don't make me place a value on your art!" And then I remembered. I wasn't playing with a full deck. No wallet, that is. I had only what cash I'd thrown in my swim trunks' pocket before leaving the hostel, intent at the time on spending as little as possible. Oh, shit, I thought. What have I got? I pulled out the contents of my pocket. "I hate to insult you," I had earlier said, worrying over the price. But now it was set. It was my pocketful or nothin. So I said it. "I've got $33 in my pocket and not a cent more." Hollis gratefully accepted. She explained that my gushing interest and the lengthy story I'd told of Harrod growing up with chickens and my impression of Werner Herzog in the jungle and the probability that the art would be greatly appreciated by my friend had sold her. Thirty-three dollars would be just fine. And that's the story of the Chicken Drop sign. Enjoy it in good health, Harrod! - RSM
7/17: Recent Developments
7/15: The Gonzo GospelQuick, cuz I gotta go to bed and git up and go fetch Stricky at the aero-puerto tomorrow for three daze of sun and fun and rum, but I just to had to post this. Look, Mom! I'm on ArtCars.com! Yeee-ha-hoodie! Oh, I'm gonna be famous, gonna be a star, gonna have a big old fancy house and a fancy car!
7/14: Tears for the emperorsEvery time I see a man or woman struggling down the street on palsy-contorted legs or a worse case in a one-finger navigated electric wheelchair or anyone with a broken body, I feel a lump in my throat and fight off tears. This intense reaction is not so much triggered by pity, I don't think, as by gratitude. For in seeing them, I am yanked hard and fast out of any brooding introspection and smacked across the face with how very lucky I am to be physically healthy. (We'll forget about mental health for now, just as I forget it in these snap-to moments.) Tonight I watched the documentary film "March of the Penguins" and was humbled to the core. As Morgan Freeman narrated the tale of the emperor penguin's nine-month long migration and starvation across Antarctic ice in their millennia-old quest to reproduce in the worst climate imaginable, I watched slack-jawed and riveted straight through. I've never seen anything like it, so beautiful and at turns so tragic, so noble and selfless and indefatigable these creatures. I think the real hook for me was the penguins' similarity, at a distance, to humans walking across a desert, or a desert of ice. They are on a long walk that for many will end in defeat. Click! It's a thruhike, such as the ones going on right now, right through this house, as did mine in 2004 on the Appalachian Trail. The reasons are entirely different, but there are parallels. The penguins don't fly. They don't swim. They walk. For baffling distances they walk and endure rigors unspeakable. And they go without food for incomprehensible lengths of time, all for one shot at finding a mate and making one baby penguin. They make even the toughest of our species look like pussies. Like getting a glimpse into the vastness of the Universe, "March of the Penguins" made me feel so small and silly and absurd in my so-called suffering. Bah! I challenge you all to not shed a tear when a father penguin, whilst awaiting the return of his mate on her long walk to the sea for food, loses his one tiny offspring to a windstorm and stands over it, nudging it and making pained sounds. He is crying, and you'll cry with him. But God, how amazing the march of the emperor penguin. I had no idea. What an incredible film! I highly recommend it for adults and children alike. On a final, personal note, hearing Morgan Freeman tell their story gave it all an added layer of magic for me. Morgan Freeman has been talking to me since I first fixed my eyes on a TV set in the early 1970s on a Sesame Street-like show called, "The Electric Company." I associate his soothing voice with early, happy childhood years. I imagine he must be getting pretty old now. I'll miss him when he goes, like the one old penguin whose eulogy he narrates, face down in the snow, eyes slowly blinking down to a close, an old penguin too tired for the rigors of the emperor's long march.
7/13: Pussy Go-LoreBefore I explain today's subject header, I'd like to thank my new friend and fellow ranter Jon Rolston and his BRILLIANT site MyRobotisPregnant.com (Check it OUT! After reading my gibberish, of course..) for reminding me of a few things. I mean, we didn't talk or anything, I just figgered this shit out from scouring his site. One, I can write funny stuff and stuff about other people rather than dwelling in my introspective hell all the time. And two, I can write really short rants. Hell, some of his blog entries are one paragraph long! And his blogs are stuffed with photos, which is cool, but not as easy for me cuz I'm retarded and write all my own code in that ancient Aramaic called HTML.. blah, blah, blah. Rather than explain Jon's site any further, I'll just reprint yesterday's letter to him below. Dear Jon.. I'm the guy whose dad goes to church with your dad. You wrote me back in February a few weeks after my girlfriend shot herself. I was all fucked up in the head over that and running mad and reckless deep in the canyon jungles of Mexico trying to get shot by dope growers or hacked up with a machete or something that would translate back home as murder, not suicide. (I have a sense of humor, but it is dark, and I saw no humor in anything at that time.) Thus was I confused by your donation of $2 (I saw it as either a mispayment for my $20 book or an insult.) I was a heartsick clueless mess, and I apologize. It took scouring through the past year's emails this week in preparation to move over to gmail to find your email, your donation notice, and at last the time to sit down with your site. I was hooked in no time. I can never understand how people can sit for hours reading my stuff online. I just write and post as a compulsion (can write but I can't read online, usually). Myrobotispregnant, however, is brilliant. I don't know you from Dick Champion, so to speak, but in the past 24 hours I have become well-acquainted with the writer and persona behind the robot, and I love it. I read all of your recent material and perused your various other portals. The poetry recitation to the chick at the peep show (ala Paris, Texas, no?) is nothing short of brilliant. Throughout my perusal of the site, I laughed and smiled and was grateful for the reminder of what it is to write a little less self-consciously with eyes open to the world and a healthy sense of humor. I thank you.
In the mid-90s at Burning Man, I knew a girl whose gig was serving grilled cheese sandwiches in the middle of a frikken orgy in a huge, multi-roomed tent such as a sultan would have. That was back before the cops moved into BM in full force, taking all the fun out of open sex and full nudity, back when I could drive my 12' tall art car full of friends around bellowing out demands for free beer from my (very loud) pa system, all of us drinking as the Trader Joe's-esque assortment of weird beers piled up in our laps and one lone BLM cop would roll up to my window on an ATV, shake his head and drive off, back when we dressed up like postal workers, disgruntley (is that a word?) delivered junkmail wielding real firearms, then cruised out to the drive-by shooting range and fired off automatic weapons at life sized stuffed animals. Ah, the good ole days. To whit: yes, I have know Flash since 95, truly "one of god's own prototypes, never intended for mass production." Love him. I was in the cafe in Gerlach with him the night one of his x's walked in later, after I'd left, and unloaded a revolver at him at point blank range and managed to miss him with all but one shot. (I was both sorry I'd missed the show and glad I had no longer been sitting next to him.) He and his lady Dana know me as Duke. I am currently in Bumfuck, NH, up in the Whites, escaping the scorching heat of the Bisbee, AZ (where i winter - I am basically a homeless nomad) desert heat. I will be here hiking and swimming and training in a canoe until I fly to Minnesota in late August to be co-oarsman on a two man, two month canoe trip down the entire length of the Mississippi. I hope to be done and in southern california for my Bday in late October, where I plan to do some promotion of my latest book. Got any venue suggestions for a reading/signing in LA - someplace(s) they'd take an unknown? Best, Okay, so that's Jon. In the subject line of the above email to him, I wrote "My Robot aborted." Sick fucker, me, eh? Which brings me to today's title, Pussy Go-Lore. This is a blunt and crass reference to rumor that there is a lot of good, available pussy on the AT. It is bullshit! A bedtime story. A fable. It is the stuff of lore. Crap. Yeh, okay, so a woman came into the hostel yesterday who was attractive and sat teaching me guitar chords and softly singing Pink Floyd lyrics to me over the roar of pouring rain outside the bunkhouse and then totally lost interest in me (if she ever real had any) when a virtual rugby team of grubby, wet men came stomping in the door over the coming hour or so. She left today, and though I could have suited up and followed her (as I am ever-ready to hike) I just let her go. Cute, single, hiking alone, southbound so she's got a long way to go - perfect! But disinterested. Actually, there is no such rumor. The female-to-male ration on the AT is worse than Alaska, worse than the Moon. I'm just being a cranky bitch. And I swore I wasn't gonna talk about women anymore, so.. I'm done. In other news, anyone looking for a very cool, original necklace should check out my buddy Rob's auctions on ebay. I've never seen the likes of what he does. He CUTS COINS! Totally unique. Give him any coin you like, and he'll cut out the empty space surrounding the images you like on the coin and voila! The effect is, well, you gotta see it. Open another window right now, go to ebay, click on Community at the top, then into the search box plug in the user name "petsalad" then click on Seller's Items on the far right. Smokers of the ganj (sp?) will especially appreciate his rendering of George Washington smokin' a fatty. I'm bidding on that very coin right now to give to a stoner friend. But go ahead, outbid me. They're ridiculously cheap for the work that goes into them, and I know he'll make more of that one. New Hampshire-ites would very much dig his rendition of the NH Quarter, an idea I gave him, in which he cuts it such that the Old Man stands out proud, the "Live Free or Die" slogan coming out of his mouth like a cartoon voice bubble.
That's me in April. Note the smile on my face and the AT Thruhiker patch on my jacket. The smile is because I was among AT'04 friends and excitedly seeing them off on their colossal hike of the Pacific Crest Trail (on which I should have joined them for the duration). The smile is because I naively thought I was bound for some major book tour of New England that I was shortly to whip into existence out of nothing. The smile is because I naively thought that being based out of a hiker hostel on the AT would be fun cuz I'd get to relive my journey vicariously through this year's hikers. The smile is because I was wrong and didn't know it yet. The reality is, I don't get to wear that cool merit badge of a patch that I love so much because it's too warm to wear that jacket. That's okay. I can deal with that. The other realities are that there is no book tour and that I CAN'T live anything vicariously, let alone the biggest single achievement of my life: my thruhike. Ipso facto I don't associate much with the hikers, because I'm on a totally different space-time plane than them. That and they're all men. If I were gay, this would be HEAVEN!!! But I'm not. My idea of Heaven is Alanis Morrisette as God doing cartwheels in a white tutu (Dogma=good flick). Where was I? Or perhaps more appropriately, where wasn't I? Oh, I know. I was talking about myself AGAIN and I was not exercising my rather large musculature of humor. In other muscle news, I need a canoe. I need a canoe to take out on my Dad's lake and start training now for this Mississippi thing. Otherwise, I am going to be in for a world of hurt when we kick off from Lake Itasca and my arms, elbows and shoulders sieze up on Day Two. This concept was brought to my attention by friend Swami, who is wise in all ways, tolerant as fuck of the world of morons that surround him, and once upon a time a frequent canoer. Is that a word? Who cares. I need a canoe so I can paddle 3/4 of the way across the lake, bludgeon myself with the oar, then paddle up to the shores of the summer camp on the opposite shore and have a dozen college-aged counselor hotties come running to my aide as blood benignly but impressively pours down my bare ripped chest mixing with beads of sweat to make me look on the edge of death. If I fainted, do you think they'd give me artificial respiration? My cohort here at the hostel continues to remind me that I am "thinking with the wrong head." My response is, "So? I got nuthin better to do." Besides, I'm firmly entrenched in the idea that WE ARE ALL THINKING WITH THE WRONG HEAD ALL THE TIME. That statement cuts both ways. Those who aren't thinking with their dicks yet busy building bombs and amassing fortunes of misery are doomed assholes who would benefit by a little dick thinking. And those who are thinking with their dicks are acting on instincts older than dinosaur DNA. Women and men. Don't agree? A female friend of mine with a robustly healthy sense of humor who is yet very serious by turns has shown me her penis and swears all women have one. She will blythely lift her skirt, nudge down her panties, spread her lips to reveal a protruding clitoris, and say, "See? It's just smaller than yours." She's very serious about this. And she's not alone. I know several women who embrace the theory that the clitoris is a diminutive penis, or visa versa. Anyway, the important thing to remember is that I need a canoe. Why do some people STILL ask me "When are you going to get a real job?" What is a real job? Is it a job you HATE? Because that's the ONLY kind of job I ever hear people talking about. Ninety-nine percent of EVERYONE I know hate their jobs. Why would I want that? I have a job. In contrast to Tyler Durden's words in "Fight Club," I AM MY JOB! I'm sculpting myself everyday, and someday I'm gonna be a masterpiece. Before you go away today, pop back to the top of this page and look at that guy in the picture. Look real hard. That fucker's working his ass off. He's moonlighting, for chissakes! For those of you who would never ask me such a question, Alanis bless you. The rest of you, open your damn eyes and WAKE UP! Life's constantly in the process of being almost over, in case you weren't paying attention. -RSM
7/11: A shot of levityOkay, I realized after writing my last post and then scrolling down and scanning posts of past months that I really am BEATING A DEAD HORSE with all my wailings over women. And given that my most recent brush with the female gender was a dinner date reunion with a lovely young lady from my early college years who found me on GOOGLE, I thought I'd go online and poke around. For what, you ask? Why for myself, of course! Vain fucker that I am, it always pleases me to find links to me and pictures of myself in the top rankings of search engines. If others can Google me, then so can I. So I Googled me this morning, under their image search, and found a new picture up there that I hadn't seen before. Well, I'd seen the "scene" but not yet the picture. The photo below is a hotlink to go and view the wonderful Flickr.com photo archive of my dear friend and fellow art car artist nutball Amanda. She's a hottie with a cool ass car and a unique talent for collage art such as I have seen no equal. While visiting her archive, click on the smaller photo links on the right to view slideshows of her 3-D art and collages. The photo that Google brings up is a bit squinty and not so flattering as the next in the series, this one, titled not by my name but as:
And just so you don't think I'm Narcissus incarnate, I go Googling all the time for images and links to friends both present and past/lost. Oddly, I can't find frikken anyone?! So I go back to the pool and stare at my own lovely self and think, "How can I bump those other frikken Rick McKinneys down a notch to put me back on top?" Ahahahahahahahaaaaaaa!
7/9: Crashing into meWow. Been having some heavy philosophical email exchanges lately with friends far and wide. I typically try not to put too much time or energy into email, as it is a real time-sucker. With the telephone/cell phone, when I'm far away from one tribe or set of friends or place, I rarely feel the need to call friends far afield, or if I do feel the need I try and resist it because I often hang up feeling empty, awkward and disjointed, as though I've just soiled myself in public, or more succinctly, revealed to them that I am not busily attending to the here and now, that I am lonely or bored, that in the "wherever you go, there you are" sense, I'M NOT ALL HERE. This summer, soiled or not, public or private, I admit that indeed I am not all here. I am not sitting on a beautiful speedboat with a 6-cylinder inboard engine on a placid urry blue lake beneath cloudless skies watching the sun set over Shawnee Peak ski mountain with a chalet awaiting me back on land all to myself this week. Not entirely anyway. For I have one foot in an Arizona psychiatric hospital for authors too chickenshit to promote their new book (and henceforth beating themselves up about it mentally), a toe or two chasing my friend Rob into the woods of Oregon, a hand reaching out to touch the endangered manatee with whom I'm swimming in the warm coastal waters of Florida, wisps of my long, thin hair flying wild and reaching out in every direction to every woman I've ever loved or felt a spark of life with wishing any one of them were here with me now, on this boat in a dazzling sapphire lake in Maine. I'm not all here, because I am alone. "Companionship" comes one word of wisdom from an email, the speaker noting that far more important than romantic love at this point in my life is companionship. Okay, fine. I'll dig that. So bring it on, God. Bring HER on. Lay here down, Zeus. Serve her up, Satan. Make me one with everything, dear Buddha bro. Because without a companion this summer, I am as close to misery as I've ever been. Trying to avoid this misery, I toggle between Dad's weekend place in Maine and the Appalachian Trail hiker hostel "Hiker's Welcome" in Glencliff, NH. Here at the hostel there are people, hikers no less, MY people, right? Wrong. Well, half-wrong. I try, but I cannot seem to relate to any of them. It's a queer thing, inexplicable, but somehow because they are not of the Class of '04 (so to speak), because they are an entirely new crop and by NH three-quarters done with the trail and well-entrenched with their own cliques and experiences, I can't relate to them. And then most are men. I have no interest in men. I am up to my scalp in men. I have numerous male friends who I like very much, some of whom I love, and I simply don't need another. With one exception: a sympatico brother of a friend tied to no one and willing to run with the wolf. This wolf. This peregrine. This wanderer. Me. A Dean Moriarty to my Sal Paradise (read: Kerouac). Where is this man? Rob was a candidate. "Boundaries" says another friend in a July 4 email. And she's right. She's dead on. I need more boundaries, personally and in my writing. She's citing my book. She's not the first. A big pro New York agent kindly spent two pages praising my book but citing its overly-personal nature as spelling certain death in the hands of any big publisher. The main gatekeeper, the chooser of what books will be published this year by a major Ivy League school here in the east said the same thing, also very kindly and in an email that on paper would have run more like four pages. To whit: "perhaps your writing is a little too uninhibited." However, she also said the following: Regarding your book Dead Men Hike No Trails, I think you write very well. Your turn of phrase, your mastery of the language is delightful to read, such prose as "...Ohio River, pea-soup green and choked with skeleton trees..." or "... trickling pitter pat, then torn out of some hole in the sky like a thousand screaming children released for summer break" or "...divided by the speed of light in the indeterminate atmosphere of a wormhole." Which was nice.
Touching back briefly on the subject of my lack of boundaries and my overly uninhibited prose, I have also heard it called, by one friend, "The most naked writing I have ever read." Fuck it. That's me. What can I do? Here is a slice of my response in one of these ongoing email parlays I've been having with friends: I got up this a.m. and said to my friend, the caretaker here (staying at a hiker hostel), "I think God hates me." He replied, "I think you hate yourself." Ooh, heavy, and only cuz he's half right. I'm definitely dichotomous on this one: there is so much I love about myself, so much I value and am glad for which I alone am me and the ME I created atop the one born in 1966. I'm privately quite vain, but you'd never know it most of the time. I mean, it isn't self-loathing that drives the naked honesty of my writing: it's balls. But then again, my failings ring very big and loud in my head. Not even my father thinks I'm doing anything but great right now: the hike, the book, etc. But I just went limp this spring on the book promo thing and have been in self-loathing ever since. Why? Becuz I KNOW I'm intellectually capable, I'm just not doing it. Mentally, thus, I'm incapable at the moment. I think part of my blockage re: book readings/signings is that I live to write. My boundary is this: I can write whatever I want, things I would never say aloud. That is my freedom, my sanity, my release valve. But that's the line. Ask me to read the stuff and I'm often ashamed, can't do it. That, more than anything, is I believe why I am currently stuck. I CAN'T promote this book becuz it's about ME. I COULD and very proficiently did promote my hike to Hunter Thompson's funeral last year because, as I told so many reporters, "This isn't about me, it's about raising awareness of the stigma of depression as the trigger of so much unnecessary suicide." When it's about me, I'm fucked. The only reason I did the readings in Bisbee that I did is that my FANTASTIC PACK OF BISBEE FRIENDS wouldn't let my book go unfêted. They nudged me and helped me and came out in droves at the big reading at the popular saloon Hot Licks. Local bookseller Joan of Atalanta Books set me up for a signing. And hell, librarian Lauren practically tackled me into doing a reading at the Copper Queen Library. Then came Houston and the Orange Show. They and all my art car friends proved a great support. I need more nudgers, I guess. Nudge me enough, and I'm not totally fucked. Which takes us right back to companionship. In all the above cases, I had friends on hand cheering me on. Alone, I am impotent. Alone, I wither. Alone, I go to Florida and swim in my mind with the manatee. Cuz what's the point of sitting in paradise with myself? I am tired of myself, wearied beyond words with my own company. I don't hate myself. If I hate anyone, I hate the intangible beast in the bottle that robbed me of my last constant companion. But that was long ago. If it's true it takes one year to recover for every year of a broken relationship, well, I'm free now. So, God, if you don't hate me, SEND ME SOMEONE TO PLAY WITH! That's enough for today. I share all this with you, Reader, because I've been so remiss in my blo.., er, ranting lately. All my "juice" has gone into deep philosophical email discussions. I mean, it's all stuff I should be sharing with a shrink and no one else, right? So you're better off without it. Alas, such is the stuff that consumes my mind this summer, and I haven't much else to say. Reporting LIVE from a hiker hostel in New Hampshire and a speedboat on a lake in Maine, this is (and yes, I have yet another pseudonym concocted just for MySpace) your host and humble scribe, Gonzo DNA, signing off.
6/24: Christine from out the ConstructThen last night, Christine came out of the blue, or should I say the white, the vast white wide open construct of cyberspace - ZANG! like a bolt of lightning burning with all the bright light that she brought into our lives some dozen years ago in that odd little town in the Land of Weirdsville. Another internet freakmeout flashback incident. That's two in less than a month. That's weird. But it's good. And thanks to my Tyler Durden insomniac lifestyle of late, up all night staring at the flatscreen in my lap, I had no sooner got her emails than we were on the phone blabbing away like there was no tomorrow, or no yesterday rather. No time elapsed. Siddhartha's river, timeless. All Time happening at once. I like it. I'm liking it more and more. I've opened my arms this summer to infinite possibilities (in lieu of taking any real initiative with my book's publicity) and the Universe IS NOT letting me down. Strange and beautiful things are just dropping out of the sky. Without further adieu for it is late (again) and I MUST sleep tonight or surely start sucking blood from the necks of passing hikers, here's to you Christine, to us. The Survivors. It ain't easy outliving your friends, watching graceful angels drop and be blown away in ashen clouds of could-have-been, wisps of what-ifs. I'm sorry, for you and for me and for everyone who has dreamt their own crimson smashing James Dean exit from this sad world only to be left standing awkward and alone and alive while those we called friends took their lives and left no instructions for us, no reason or relief. I'm sorry. But we will heal, and we will be the stronger for all of this. Chin up, Love. -RSM In the words of the Immortal Hunter Thompson: We're gonna gnaw on their skulls, because it still hasn't gotten weird enough for me.
6/23: Siddhartha, Google & the flute with no holesHerman Hesse's Siddhartha was no doubt required reading for many of you, its 150 pages devoured, its message ingested in a collegiate moment, and the book in large part likely forgotten a long time ago. I, however, just read it today. Those of you in the former group will have to excuse me, then, for extolling the virtues of this masterpiece with which you are long acquainted, but I have to. I loved it. How could I not? It is the tale of a man who takes on, with great conviction, every type of living from piety to abject poverty to the excesses of wealth and power and sex to the point of emptiness and a wish to die, and back to a simple life of small pleasures, all without guilt or admission of failure, all with the knowledge that his path is his path alone, turning his back even on the Buddha, knowing that enlightenment is something he must gain on his own, that wisdom cannot be taught. It was a wonderful read, one that affirmed my own convictions and beliefs and ended with my heart in the author's capable and soothing hands, feeling good about myself, my ofttimes seemingly insane path, and best of all about the future. Not dissimilar to the ending of my own book, Siddhartha (though fictional and thus easily made fantastic) ends on a high note for the main character and, in terms of the fantastic,a very high note for humankind and all other manner of life forms in a Universe where all are One. Hesse makes me want to start tomorrow and within a matter of weeks crank out a 150-page triumphant tale of my own. I am that inspired. At that point in Siddhartha's life where the emptiness of worldly wealth and power fills him to the point of suicidal contemplation, Hesse speaks of his character's life as "that soft, well-upholstered hell." My God what a fantastic descriptive. What a great book title that would make: "A Well-Upholstered Hell." I love it. I abashedly admit that I have not read Steppenwolf nor any other full-length work by Hesse. I do own and have read, however, a kind of philosophy of Hermann Hesse, a book of the author's thoughts on various life issues, broken down by subjects such as religion, health, freedom, etc. It is from this book, picked up in a used book store in Las Vegas, New Mexico, that I read the words that formed the key that set me free of my own soft, well-upholstered hell years ago, a great love that wasn't formidable enough to survive an evil third party bent on its destruction. I have known no real romantic love since, however, a point I would normally grieve over and perhaps blame Hesse. But Siddhartha has, for today anyway, made any such complaint pointless and thus saved his creator my scorn. Previously I should have said: I am lonely and seek a lover, a partner, someone with whom to share my rich life of experience and adventure as the latter fruits have lost their flavor when tasted by me alone. But here Siddhartha imparts a bit of wisdom known to him (and also to me though ignored out of desperation). Of seeking he tells his friend Govinda: "When someone is seeking it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal." Siddhartha finishes the thought by telling his friend that in seeking "you do not see many things that are under your nose." Again mimicking Siddhartha, I say previously I should have said: Is there something right under my nose that I am not seeing? Someone? I wonder. But today I am taking a day off from seeking. Besides reassurances from Hesse, the gods have always favored me, and lately the Internet proves a strange friend. Very strange indeed. Two weeks ago, a person lost to me twenty years ago "Googled" me, found me easily, and wrote to say hello. Next week we will meet in what will no doubt be a bizarre case of Girl Gone MIA meets Teen Crush two decades hence. I'm gonna go into it as supple and bereft of expectations as possible. (Given the truth of my yearning this may prove quite the trick.) To bring things down a few hundred intellectual notches, I call upon Chevy Chase from Caddyshack who said, "Don't be obsessed by your desires, Danny. The Zen philosopher Basho once wrote, 'A flute with no holes is not a flute, and a donut with no holes.. is a danish.'" For those of you wondering where on the Planet Earth I am these days, I am in New Hampshire, a kind of "writer in residence" at Packrat's "Hikers Welcome Hostel" in Glencliff, NH, smack dab on the Appalachian Trail at the front door of the majestic White Mountains. I revealed none of this until today as I have been here under a thick veil of secrecy for two weeks leading up to my father's 60th birthday. I wanted to surprise him, and as I know he follows this site from time to time, it was necessary to omit my location until I landed on his doorstep a few days ago, totally blowing his mind as was my wish. Just the day before on Father's Day, I had spoken to him quite convincingly "from Arizona" where I was "floundering and unable to get my act together but yes, planning on coming east soon, Dad." I have been here since catching a red eye flight out of Phoenix on June 1st. It was a terrific surprise, and I made my father a gift of my time and sweat, cutting a new trail to the shore of Moose Lake and trimming the bajeezus out of several trees whose lower limbs had heretofore obscured his view of the water from his cabin. Now from his deck he can clearly see his beachfront and look with pride on his new toy, a speedboat with an engine bigger than the one in my BMW. This latter was MY SURPRISE as I had no idea he'd bought a speedboat! Oh what fun it is to jam down the accelerator on a 100-horse power boat on a blindingly blue sky day over crystal clear waters on a lake in Maine in June! Happy Birthday, Dad, and thanks for the wind in my hair! I needed that. Hiking is satisfying and all but damn! This boy bleeds with a need for speed! Many thanks also to Packrat and Blister Bitchen Sister, both currently astride the Continental Divide, the former for the hospitality of this "residency" and the latter for the wheels to get around the Live Free or Die state. I am humbly in your debt, both of you. That's enough for now. It's late and I need rest. Tomorrow being Saturday it felt like a good day to plan on living dangerously. As such, I am going to drive the 20 miles to the nearest Wal-Mart and yes, I AM GOING TO SHOP in the very nerve center of my nemesis, The Bajillionaires of Bentonville, Arkansas. And to really ramp up the angst, I am not going to wear my seat belt en route! That's right, because here in the Live Free or Die state one is NOT mandated to do so by the state and is thus perfectly free to go soaring through the windshield and land side-saddle and bareback on the moose that stopped one's car dead in its tracks at 60 mph! Good fun! I love this state! And now that Daddy has a speedboat just over the state line in Maine and Adam Sandler has moved back to his home state and we're partying again, playing miniature golf with hockey sticks and scaring the children, and Dartmouth is going to do a billion book print run of Dead Men Hike No Trails and my cousin Justin has quit his blog to realize his dream of making a feature film starring Jenna Whatserface from Survivor, and I've decided depression is just a buncha hooey and I'm gonna be happy forevermore, well, maybe the gods will work a miracle and my teen crush and I will still be pheromonally compatible and she'll marry me and I'll just LIVE HERE, free of course, or dead, in New Hampshire. Vaya con Dios y crash on el coucho de Christo. - RSM
6/17: If memory serves, sex is more fun than writingSitting on a wooden bench, a kind of adirondack chair for two out front of Hikers Welcome, the AT hostel I'm calling home this summer, I gazed out across Mount Mist admiring its treetop contours against the 9 o'clock mid-June sunset sky, and saw in it, as one does with clouds, faces and animal shapes. At its far right edge (for it is very much plateau shaped), I would swear I saw Bill Clinton, reclining as one might against the sloped edge of an Aztec temple, his head slung back, nose in the air, his body a relaxed contour of trees. (I hiked Mount Mist earlier in the day and saw nothing but trees, forever beneath the canopy.) Naturally I imagined him getting his manhood serviced in said position. I mean, why not? It happened. IT HAPPENS! Would that it were happening to me right now! That would be something to write about! But no. I have only the fading light of another New England summer day, a day perceived as largely wasted by my deeply ingrained, loathsome work ethic. I have a small coterie of fireflies flittering across highway 25. I have a blockage in my left ear that makes all sound seem to emanate from the right, even though I know that's wrong. There's a party, for instance, going on next door, to my left. It is Saturday night after all. I should go over there, introduce myself, make friends. But the funniest thought occurred to me and has thus far won out. It is this: "Let's go inside and write something original for the site!" God what a bore I am. But it's boredom as a defense mechanism. It's "I'll be boring and straight and dutiful and hardworking this fine Saturday night IF you'll get off my back about flaking out on the Dead Men book tour." That's it. It's all about Dead Men. I'm dead in the water with Dead Men Hike No Trails: not one sale from my site in over a month. Probably no Amazon sales either. Hard truth: it will not sell itself. My royalty checks come to me monthly in amounts that a cocktail waitress would expect in one tip from a party of four on a good night. I know. I was a waiter once. I was even a cocktail waiter. I don't cash the checks. I just stick them on the wall with stickpins and look at them now and again, sometimes with a sardonic chuckle but mostly with pride, pride not in the dollar figure, but just in their existence. Royalty checks. Royalty. It's about time for this Lord, this Duke, were granted his due in gold bullion. Inside the hostel, Phatt Chapp snores and I listen to the band Muse sing Apocalypse Please. Nice name. "This is the end of the world." I see lately why so many apocalyptic nutheads wax prophetic about the end. It makes things easier, more palatable for the losers of the world. Do I think I'm a loser? No. But I can relate. I can relate to Nicolas Cage's character in Leaving Las Vegas and to my friend Rob's similar stated desire to drink his way out of Bisbee, in a box. And to Stormy, shooting her way into the next world just hours after talking with me on the phone, never saying goodbye, just going.
But JUST WHERE am I going with this? In the words of the Pythons, I seemed to have strayed somewhat from my original brief. In short, sex is more fun than writing. One cannot prove this, but it is. And if sex in the form and proportions it once came in to this writer from his girlfriend of many, many moons ago would return as such, said writer would NEVER again complain about creative time and energies lost. Said writer would say PFFFLLLLT! to the alleged voracious body of readership that visits his site daily without recompense, without feeding his tiny little hierarchical pyramid of Maslow's basic needs yet wanting his all, his heart and soul, his inspirational letting of blood. Yeah, bugger off. Now I know why Jim Morrison burned his poems as he wrote them. There's just no sex in it, and worse, no love, none physically palpable anyway. So fuck writing. I quit. Until tomorrow. -RSM
6/10: Covering all your acronymsPCT, AT & CDT. This spring I have covered them all. In late April, I ran out to California to see AT friends Bama,T-Bird & Nemo off on their 2600 mile northbound hike of the PCT. I dropped in on them at the tail end of the PCT kickoff party at the southern end of the Anza-Borrego desert. I just asked hikers, stumbled around in the dark and found them among the 600 at the gathering, walked up to where Bama stood at a bonfire, total surprise. It was great to see them. The next morning I dropped them at the trailhead and off they went. I drove to San Diego and visited family there, then up to Idyllwild to visit friends. Then I got a wild idea and ran it past amigo Bruce who said "Sure!" Next thing I know, I'm section hiking the PCT with my friends 75 miles from Warner Springs into Idyllwild. It was great, and I've so much more to tell of that journey. But for now I am in haste, and I have strayed from my original point. For a month earlier, I had a close brush with the CDT as well. Eager to see my friend Blister Bitchen Sister off on her CDT thruhike, I drove four hours into New Mexico from Bisbee and picked Blister and friends up at the Amtrak station and spent a few days with them whilst they prepared, lending my car to the cause as they made trips to the Wal-Mart and the local P.O. to mail supplies ahead before setting out. It was a real treat to meet Blister's comrades: Packrat, Homebrew and Salamander. On the third day, I drove them the hour or so drive down to the Mexican border, took them over into Mexico on foot for a shot of tequila and a beer (a proper sendoff) and then bid them adieu. And now I have my sights set on hiking a bit of the AT in New England. So it is that this spring & summer, I will have experienced all three trails to some extent. Below is a little Quick Time movie I made of the CDT Gang in the final hours before they set out on their mammoth journey. Enjoy! Update! I messed up something when I first posted this mini-movie. Watch it again at its intended LARGER size!
6/9: Catching Up With Mad, Mad Time[Author's note: Everything below this line, from here to the Blondie's Heart of Glass clip that's been sitting like a page holder in this unread/unwritten book since last I ranted, or BLOGGED (Blech! I hate that word, seem slated to never get used to it. The Jiggleman RANTS dammit!) Anyway, it was all written sometime in April or May and never posted. (And there's MORE COMING in the next few daze, so check back as I flounder to catch up.) My apologies, especially for anyone I might offend with something I said herein. I'm NOT going to reread or edit any of this shit, for if I do, it will NEVER get posted. So, here it is. Naked, rough, insane. Whatever. Enjoy, as always, the bruised fruits of my brain. -RSM] April 3, 2006 Perfect Circle plays their Tilling My Grave Mix as I sit here in my new dumpster-found wingback chair at a 90 degree angle to the western window for optimum sunset viewing, contemplating having my art car Duke towed out to the Mohave and blown into a million bits by some pyrotechnic friends of mine from Burning Man circles. I'm free, but I want to be more free. I want nothing between me and the option to just walk off into the world and smell the flowers of a hundred countries. I'm bored with the desert and with solitude. I'm bored with the bars of Bisbee, or more succinctly, with being limited to two beers before driving back out here to solitude, and/or having to crash on friends' couches in town if I go so far as that third beer. I'm happy that my book is out, but now that I've finally published, well, a part of me just wants to detonate that bomb as well. Just walk away. Skip the flesh-rending, blood-letting self-debasement (a publicity campaign on my part). Just skip it. But then my book will go nowhere. Without sycophantic hack salesmanship on my part, the book will never make it big, or even medium-sized. It'll never see the light of Oprah day or the NY Times Book Review. On that subject, there's James, my honorary publisher. James purports to care about his future but is doing nothing to help himself, or to help me help him. He has allegedly inherited millions, and he's kind enough to pick up all the tabs at the bars and restaurants where we eat. He has visions of being a publisher, my publisher, loves my book and speaks of spending seven grand on a 1000-book press run of DEAD MEN in hardcover. He was kind enough to help with my first investment in my book, and I am grateful. But try and get him in the car to take him to Phoenix to meet his lawyer and sign important papers that will release some much-needed capitol his way, forget it. You know, money to buy a house instead of crashing at your girlfriend's house, money to buy a new car instead of an old one, money to go places, money to facilitate the doing of things that make him happy, being it helping others or blowing it all on himself, whatever. I just want to see him rise out his poverty consciousness and live it up before he drops dead. His health ain't great.
But I can't seem to help him. A recent cancer survivor in fragile health, he drinks like a fish and dumps a veritable pharmacopia down his throat daily (things not prescribed) and then he calls it food poisoning when he can't keep down restaurant food when we both ate the same dish. And he lies to me. Frequently. For four months we've been "going to get a place together" but naught has changed. And thus my sense of isolation in the desert grows. [Update June 1: fully five months have passed, James hospitalized, now released, now living in the space we were supposed to rent together, not with me, but with others. I give up, unable to cool the strawbale, unable to afford rent in town, abandon the sweltering heat surrounding Sanctuary, and fly away, destination & purpose vague at best.] So I drink. I sit here in Sanctuary and stare out the western window at the never-disappointing setting sun, and I drink. There's nothing left to do anymore. No woman in town will have me, none that I have any chemistry with anyway. Tonight I make a sunset run to the post office SURE that a movie from Netflix awaits in my box. I am sorely disappointed and spend ten bucks I can't afford on some movie called "The Core" about global catastrophe cured by a handful of science nerds and one crack computer hacker. Not bad, surprisingly. Fit the mood I was in. Tomorrow I give a presentation at the public library about my book, how I overcame depression to hike and write, how I got published, etc. I dunno if anyone will show. At my first-ever book signing at the Atalanta book store in Bisbee the other day I sold five books in five hours. The library won't let me sell the books, so I'm not particularly worried about my performance. I'm more concerned about my official "Book Release Party" at Hot Licks bar on Wednesday (prominent product placement!). I've got nearly a hundred books and I gotta unload a lot of them that night. Or not. [Postscript: I sold maybe a dozen, but it was a great damn night with so many friends adding their talents to the show.] My Dad said something in a letter the other day, something to the effect that you can have a hundred friends nationwide, but in truth they are all merely acquaintances. Only those you spend your time with are your friends. In that case, I haven't a lot of real friends, I guess. I thought I did. Yet here I sit alone in the desert, not a friend in sight. The spindly ocotillo with their scarlet tubular flowers are my friends. The black widow in her corner in the lower left of the outhouse. Orion in the sky crossing nightly, in bed earlier than me every night as summer approaches. My Miller High Life wrapped in down sleeping bag to keep it cold in the swelling heat of desert summer approaching. This computer. And that fat bottle of pills I keep around for when the purposelessness gets overwhelming. These are my friends, if indeed those not regularly around me are merely acquaintances. April 4 Librarian Lauren says she read my book in one night. Incredible. Alas, she was sorry at story's end to find I'd included no real solution to depression, no clear cut answer, no miracle cure. God, how I can relate. She's dealt with depression all her life and came to the conclusion after reading Dead Men that she's on a constant, unending 2000-mile hike. Every day she has to get up and keep going. Go, Lauren, go. I feel for her, her pain. I feel for her son, also struggling. I want to stick 16-penny nails in my temples, one for everyone I meet contorted in mental anguish. She's right. She's got it, dead on. It's a constant battle, one I certainly haven't mastered. She spoke of the "impulse of suicide" and said if only the impulse could be caught in time, a help line, a friend, whatever, there'd be less suicide. True. Undoubtedly true and part of my mission. But what about when your impulse never stops? What about when you tire of doing athletic things (anything!) by yourself and can find no one to do them with you? Or worse, friends are doing things - swimming, running, whatever, and you are already so bottomed out you can't summon the energy or enthusiasm to join them. So you're left with the suicide, a thing that for me long ago surpassed impulse and entered into REM dream sleep, day-dreaming, dream walking, curled-up-neath-the-sheets-away-wishing. Fuck it. It was a good exercise tonight, and the five people kind enough to show up at the Copper Queen Library and dear Lauren who stayed late without pay were a kind audience. They listened. They asked questions. I gave honest answers. Yes, I was on meds. Yes, I did try and quit em mid-hike. No, I couldn't quit em. Yes, I drank beer at every town stop. No, I wasn't thus a model citizen for anti-depression. No, hiking 2000-miles didn't cure me for life but it did heal me and keep me going strong for many, many months afterward. It fueled my kickass media-hyped hike to Thompson's memorial. "Honestly," I said, "it's only in the past few months that I've been having serious problems again." (I hated admitting that, but it had to be said.) And then, bang, came Lauren to my rescue reminding me and the audience at large that I'd experienced another suicide recently. Oh, yeah. Stormy. Almost forgot. Shoot my veins full of acid. Choke me with a belt til I'm purple. So tonight I sit in the saloon with the computer plugged in, screen off, and drink my nightly allotment of two PBRs. I do it cuz I can, and because I forgot to plug in and thus juice up the laptop while at the library. I got two films from Netflix today and am eager to get home to watch one. But naturally the two PBRs taste like "more," and so I stop at Safeway for a sixer. In the doorway I pass a guy I know named Miguel and a lovely woman, tall, lithe, familiar, an immediate sense of attraction. I say "Hey!" (my stock hello to people whose names don't immediately jump to mind) and then it hits me. The anger hits, the pissed-offedness that could be depression but isn't because I'm alive and feeling it. Miguel! Fucking Miguel, lucky bastard. In a town where every new female gets scooped up like cocaine spilled in a room full of coke whores, Mindy couldn't have been on the Old Bisbee radar more than a day when we met and exchanged phone numbers. But no dice, Loverboy. Miguel, whoever guy outa nowhere, snapped her up before me. Or during me, during my attempts, a few phone calls that met with non-commital responses from her. I grab a 12 pack of Miller High Life and slide it through checkout. I'm livid. I'm horrified. I spent my day today at the county health clinic, getting checked for STDs for no goddamn reason at all. Except for Stormy, the dead girl who before she killed herself sold me on an HIV test to "make sure I wouldn't risk her life." Well, just scroll down this page and back in time for the HIV story. Not much to it, except that the HIV test of weeks ago led to this next test. Hell, I'm not getting laid, the county's picking up the tab, I may as well get a total clean bill of health. And clean I am. Miracles never cease. Miguel was probably doing Mindy in the ass while I was having my scrotum groped by Nurse Nancy. That swine. But no. Let's be reasonable and peaceful about all this. There's a reason for everything, right? Just because Mindy and I hit it off at 4 a.m. in the dregs of a some wasteoid pill party months ago doesn't mean Miguel and she weren't just DESTINED to be together. Right? Aaurrgh. She could be a total psycho, a nightmare. She could have terminal cancer and not even know it. Miguel could have cancer and damn well deserve the company of beautiful Mindy in his dying days. Who knows? Who.. fucking.. cares? I DO! So I stomp the accelerator to the floor and send the Beemer roaring off into the dark Mexican border no man's land mile wide strip that I drive nightly to reach Sanctuary. And I toggle. One minute livid, placid the next. "Look at the bright side" and "the perfect woman is waiting out there for you, so obviously she wasn't it." What is it Tyler Durden says in Fight Club before laying waste to the pretty blonde boy's face? "I wanted to destroy something beautiful." I went home and got drunk alone instead. - RSM
April 2 Was there ever a man who cried so much as I? I need no trigger, can simply cry at the synaptic arrival of memory or thought to the front of my mind. But tonight I watch the film Iris with Judi Dench, and having comprehended its subject matter in the first few scenes, I haven't had dry eyes since. It's a film about a elderly woman writer losing her mind a little at a time. A writer no doubt! My God, it's tearing my heart out. I have stopped mid-film to say this. I return to it now, thoroughly engaged, enraptured, in love, enfolded in the tragedy yet mindful of the beauty, the brief beauty of this journey of ours. I guess when I lament the lives of people working shitty jobs (and I'm not talking about some poor child laborer in Singapore who has no choice), Americans with great dreams and promise who sell themselves short and sleep their lives away, it is for characters like Iris that I should wail and beat my breast, not the rest. For the Irises of the world knew and embraced their genius and pursued it at all cost and gave of themselves until their minds, like clocks of sand, ran out. For these, I cry tears of joy and sadness, the latter for our loss of them, the former for their conquest of this little parcel of time we call Life.
March 25-ish A 60-ish man named Ed referred to my recently published book today asking, "How did you find the strength to do all this, to hike and write and finish this book?" Ed referred to his own bouts of depression and how in such times he couldn't get out of bed let alone do all I had done. I wish I'd had a better answer for Ed, but in truth I was rather stymied. No one had asked me such a question. Many have expressed wonderment and joy at my accomplishment, but no one, that I recall, has ever phrased it just so. In its question form, it carried more weight. "How did you find the strength?" So stated, it resounded nicely in my drained skull. It was a high compliment, one not paid me by many. If anything, I still feel terrifically far behind my peers, and need only look around the tiny town of Bisbee to see artists and writers more actualized than myself. So, thank you, Ed. Alas, it would seem the strength has gone right out of me lately. Trail hiked, book written and edited, book published, another friend dead of suicide.. I'm wiped out. About twice a weak I palm my phone and begin to dial the number to the local mental health agency that will come pick me up and take me to the hospital. No ambulance, no cops or bullshit. Just a ride. They have me on "watch," and daily a social worker calls to see how I'm doing. I'm not doing well. But I have yet to pull that final card, to cash it in, to give up. And now I'm up against time constraints. In a week I have my first book signing outside the local bookstore in Bisbee. Then two days later a presentation, slideshow and reading at the library. And the following day yet another reading, this one likely the most challenging (it's at a bar!) but perhaps lucrative. And then there's the problem of the UPS man coming with another shipment of books, 75 books for which I traded the last of a tiny nest egg stored for me in my mother's safe, mostly for a housing emergency should I have wound up homeless. Anyway, I have to be here for the UPS man, and I don't know when he's coming. I was really looking forward to the "rest" of a few weeks in a psych hospital. Oh, well. It's a good thing I live in one of the most peaceful places imaginable. Into nature, of course! Well, let's just say after over 250 days of living in the woods I'm fairly proficient at waste dispersal and disposal. And "being a goddamn liberal" I was taught in my college years that the Bureau of Land Management is run by a bunch of corrupt idiots who give away YOUR land, MY land, to the irreversibly destructive practices of cattle grazing and clear-cut logging and mining and you-name-it for pennies on the dollar, then turn around and charge YOU fees to camp on their.. excuse me, YOUR land. So, for you Emelia especially, I SHIT on their land. Don't worry. They ain't gonna let YOU use it anytime soon, folks. TODAY ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS! TOMORROW YOU! And if they do suddenly come around and catch me, well, I'll just start squawking like a chicken and shout "I'M CRAAAAZY! I'M CRAAAAZY!" Maybe then I'll get taken to the nuthatch in style! And the police, while they're munching on Freedom Fries from Burger King and tearing through my house and car in the name of Osamalama Patriotactism looking for god knows what, well, they can meet the UPS man and sign for my books for me. Maybe they'd enjoy the read. Speaking of running around in nature with your pants down, I got a great compliment today on the phone from friend and fellow '04 thruhiker Just Frank. He said, "Yours is the most naked writing I have ever read." And he added, "And I mean that in a good way!"
4/11: Butchering BlondieThis, my recent Hot Licks Saloon rendition of Blondie's Heart of Glass pretty much speaks.. er, squeaks for itself. Many thanks to Liz the proprietor and my many friends who turned out for my book release party a few days later, for which Blondie made a nice warm up. -RSM
3/27: The shoe artist & the whale riderWhole-E Jesus! It's the 27th! That's fully two weeks without words. This just won't do. I'm going on strike. I'm gonna write a petition. I'll lobby Congress! I'll have my attorney write up a law stating that I MUST produce x-amount of verbiage per diem, and that of course I will be paid handsomely for doing so, and given a secretary, an agent, a publicist, a personal assistant, a publisher, a caterer, a masseur, etc. And Sandy. I must have Sandy. I KNOW she has a boyfriend, but heh! Things change. What if he dumps her or cheats on her? She needs ME. Shawnee says I'm a sinner for just thinking about it, you know, coveting thy neighbor's wife, all that. But what about chivalry? I ride up on a white horse, (or just visit their Manhatttan flat sans the horse) demand to know if this boyfriend truly loves her and is prepared to marry her "because if you're not I will, today!" Is chivalry really dead? And then there's Miss Barcelona, lovely, wonderful, but more unavailable than Sandy in that she lives in Spain and doesn't schprechen die Sprach, or speak English as it were. Impossible pursuit there. Miss O from Dead Men made a major reappearance in my life lately, then proved once again that pursuit of her is truly INSANE. Locally here in Bisbee, let's see.. what are my options. Um, um.. duh, none? I challenge any semi-attractive, intelligent, non-smoking, non-hammerhead drunk woman in Bisbee (not that any but my friend Kate reads this) to walk up to me and say, "I think you're great and I understand that you're literally withering for lack of a companion. I also understand your need of space, and that you need to travel to promote your book. I'm down with that. Let's boogie!" Ain't gonna happen. I pierced a cute girl's ear the other day in a rather erotic late night encounter that led to absolutely nada. That's about as close as I've come to sexual contact with a Bisbeeite since the girl who is now but a January ghost. Which completes my list of UNAVAILABLE women, name for name the ditto copy of the list of women I'm nuts over. And though death really puts a crimp in things, this last, in retrospect, really was a lovely woman.
I'd like to think it was she who walked right through me tonight on the sweetly-tiled stairs of a gazebo in Agua Prieta, Sonora. Hunter and I had walked over for a sunset stroll, four blocks from the fortress to the border then in. We ate from a street side vendor, excellent food. Hunter made the intelligent point that the onus gringos have about eating from such vendors is absurd given that the vendors go through so much meat so quickly that it's far more likely to be fresh than a sit down restaurant. Never thought of it like that. Hunter got his haircut for $5 while I bought U.S.-prescription level muscle relaxants at the pharmacy for $7 to soothe my lower back. At the town plaza or park, Hunter mounted the shoe shine booth chair and proceeded to get a $2 shine. I looked down at my seemingly ratty workboots and couldn't imagine the shoe shine man could do much with them. But once done with Hunter, and with assurances that he could clean them up nice, the man bade me take a seat. It was truly transforming. This Mexican "shoe artist" must have spent a half hour working on my boots. And as he did, and as they transformed before my eyes, I remembered that these "work boots" were a gift from my father years ago, a very beautiful and expensive gift and a stretch for him I knew at $150. I had almost completely forgotten. But as the boots changed back into things of beauty, I recalled it all: my father's visit to me in New Mexico probably back in 2000 or 2001. I thought of my father looking at those boots, and I loved him dearly all over again. Asked for $2, I paid the man five. Shit, I'd never seen such hard work and dedication and time invested and felt such renewal in the process. No way I was givin' him a lousy two bucks. And it was there in that park that I mounted the gazebo stairs and felt death pass through me like a gentle wind. It was clear as day, real as the boots on my feet. I remember telling Hunter at first about feeling a kind of deja vu, not wanting to freak him out with the death thing. But then I just said it. "Death, I felt death on those steps and I wasn't afraid. It was as natural as water seeping down a rock, and as subtle." Where am going with this blog? I have no idea. Returned from Mexico tonight, I crawled into Harrod's beloved little trailer, nuzzled up with my down sleeping bag, turned my laptop on its side and began flipping through old rants. I'm keenly aware that there is some VERY publishable stuff deeply hidden in the catacombs of my site, some writing that I can scarcely believe I wrote it's so good. Tonight I settled comfortably in an igloo in Alaska and reflected on my AT journey and the guts of what became the book. There's a whole buncha stuff on that AT page that didn't go into the book, and this page, The Final Word, is none of it in the book. But it's great stuff. Good reading, or rereading, for those of you who have now read the book. Check it out. Tilly's compliments and my whole mind trip off with the natives really put a smile on my mug tonight. I will have my first book signing out front of the local bookstore this Saturday, then a kinda scholarly reading/lecture at the public library on the 4th, then the real big shabang, the official BOOK RELEASE PARTY! at the coolest and biggest local bar called Hot Licks. I'm gonna be letting out a mighty big shout of joy over finally, after fifteen years or so of calling myself a writer, of finally not having to answer that "oh, you're a writer.. where can I buy your books?" question with dead air. Finally, I have an answer to that question, and a very fine book to back it up. HOO-HAH!
Finally, in the past weeks of crippling depression in the desert (some kinda weird crash after the first blast of books, my friend's death, the trip to Mexico, etc) I have watched a lotta Netflix and killed the BMW's battery on several occasions charging the computer to watch more movies (as I wasn't bathing, eating, or writing - just crying, sleeping and Netflixing). And although I saw many I liked, Amelie was especially fun, nothing moved me like Whale Rider. Holy Blowhole! Excuse me for being behind the times, I know you've all seen it, but I was on the trail or something and missed this gem until now. I must have watched it six times, and the really emotional scene where she finally makes contact with the whales about twenty times, sobbing like Piekea did during the speech dedicated to her absent grandfather. Wow. If for some freak reason you, like I, haven't seen it, DO! And that's it for now. Miss you Rob, you pirate with a purple sack fulla your signature gold doubloons. Stay beneath the fucking Corvallis radar and return to us in the Land of the Weird. And Justin, get back to blogging! You're damn good. You're a writer, man, and a writer writes every day. -RSM
3/13: A series of convincing daydreamsI think I'm losing my mind. I could just be in a wormhole or a Twilight Zone episode. I dunno. My body doesn't feel like it's my own. I mean, I hear myself sniffling from a lingering cold, but the hand that reaches out to wipe my nose feels alien. My toes are always cold. Food is steadily losing taste to the point where I don't care to eat. I have absolutely no desire to write, and nothing to say. And time is really out to lunch. Like, who stole February? Where was I? What did I do? And is that bald guy really gonna go on a honeymoon to Vietnam with my dead friend whom he allegedly married at her funeral (which I missed per my journey into Mexico)? The song Ruled by Secrecy by a band called Muse is playing over and over from my iBook and straight into my congested head via new $25 clip-on headphones, a weird funeral dirge of a song. Does it feel like you got knocked outa time and space recently? Cuz it does me. One minute I was all elated and dancing the pressed copper cobbled streets of Bisbee trying on my new published-author shoes, and next thing I know a month has passed and I'm balled up in bed calling the crisis line, balling my eyes out, sleeping 15 hours a day, then getting sick, and all the while getting nothing done in terms of promoting my book or setting up signings. But somehow I'm finding the time and strength to hold the hand of my cancer-addled amigo and tell him everything's gonna be okay when he tells me how he wakes up terrified every morning and daily wanders about feeling lost and suicidal. I get a little work done, very little. The local coffee house is the ONLY place I can get any web research done about how to promote my book. But daily I end up pissing away hours answering emails, evidence that I'm loved. Oh, yes Molly, you're right about that. And I am oh so very grateful for my huge extended family and so much love coming in from all corners of the U.S. But Jesus, I need a personal assistant. The only reason I consistently manage to get off the crisis line without going to the hospital is this: I just can't imagine losing another two weeks to a psych ward bed when I already feel like I'm waaaaay behind the eight ball on planning my summer's conquest of.. whatever. The book tour circuit? Some more hiking? The only thing I have cemented down is a late summer canoe trip with buddy Frank, the Mississippi from end to end, top to bottom, his brainstorm. In a way, I wish this we were launching next week. I feel ready, ready to leap, ready to go, ready to tour. I mean, I navigated Mexico like a pro last month, and half the time I was in shock. It's this sitting that's killing me, this waiting. And I gotta wait cuz I gotta have at least a few weeks before my first signing to promote it, and likewise the next, and the next. Except I dunno where the hell they're gonna be, or how to set those wheels in motion. I just sent a copy of Dead Men to an agent, a friend of a friend. She sounds great, and though I imagine it's a long shot (isn't everything?), I REALLY hope she just freaks out over it and sells it to another publisher and takes over the promotion end of things cuz honestly, I'm fucking clueless. Baby steps. Okay, fine. But where? Where do I step first? I just wanna sleep. I'm so frikken tired and all I do is sleep. And I'm seeing shit. Apparitions! I drive dead-dog sick to Tucson the other day to deliver buddy Rob to the train so he can go home to his son in Oregon, and whoosh, today I see him on the streets of Bisbee. Impossible. I remember that drive well. It was just south of Tombstone that I cracked open that cough syrup bottle of 10 percent codeine (legal, over the counter in Cochise County, AZ!) took a swig in salute to Stormy. The sun was blazing boiling lava bunkering down in the mountains to the west and all that red heightened by these crazy pink shades of James' that I threw on over my own glasses and Stormy laid out up front with me, her head in my lap and me petting her hair just like she was mine, like we'd make it, the two of us driving onward into forever, like she hadn't married the bald guy at her own funeral and was on her way to Vietnam in an urn. I just saw that film The Royal Tenenbaums. Funny flick. Weird. I like how Royal's (Gene Hackman) gravestone in the end said something about him dying trying to save his family from a horrible shipwreck. Let them never say I was bored. Crazy, fine. Just never bored. God Bless. -RSM
3/09: Lost in Awe
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Copyright 2006 Richard McKinney
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