Awake On Moose Pond Wednesday, May 18 2005 From the waters of Moose Pond in Maine Siouxie & the Banshees belt out their beautifully bellicose aggro-femme-erotic moosic in my newly restored stereo skull (been head-cold deaf in one ear since Monday), and the Universe is a two-legged squirrel with handlebar mustache pogo dancing on a porch in Damascus, Virginia. Oh, and it is ALWAYS Trail Days. From here on out, I will daily live that kind of joy, that zenith of zeal and squealing rain-soaked and soaped up bikini dancing in the streets irreverent joy. I will make it my mantra. I will dance with Gaia on the squirt gun battlefield until the fat lady sings. I will howl and hoot and moon the drum circle fire crowd and laugh myself to sleep in the mud. I am awake, Lord, born again. Not in any confining religious sense, but awake to the miracle. I see now, and what I see is perfect beyond any judgment of good or bad, just perfect, chaos and cacophony included. A tiny yellow inch-worm crawls up my arm where I lie sunning on the grass beside Moose Pond in Maine. I wonder for a second if he's as harmless as he looks, and a line from the film "The Fifth Element" pops to mind, the one uttered by the general just before the geneticists begin the reconstruction of Milla Jovovich's sumptuous twig of a body. "Okay, but Mr. Perfect better be nice, or I'll turn him into cat food." A short time later, I feel a bite on the back of my neck and reflexively terminate the biter with a swat of my left hand. I look at my hand and regard the remains of Mr. Perfect. Bad little inch worm. Well, you're cat food now. As I wipe his guts off on the grass, I wonder if perhaps he just wasn't in the wrong place at the wrong time, if perhaps a stinging fly stung me and the worm just happened to be nearby. Ah, life. We'll never know now, will we? Such a conundrum. Dad's lakeside cabin will be my home for the coming weeks of late May and early June. Before me now lay five days of utter peace in which to edit my latest book, then a few pleasant catch-up days with Dad, then another five of silence, then one more week of same. Transported here by a maddening series of fast runs across America, I am at rest at last. The race began a week ago last Monday when, upon hearing that my potential CDT hiking partner couldn't get away until later this summer, I jumped in the Beemer, bleeding as it was from the steering box but not fatally so, and zoomed 16 hours north to Denver in time for a 24-hour visit with old Idyllwild friend Marie and her husband Russ. The following day, Party Girl Molly swooped down from her new home in Pine Dale, Wyoming to grab me en route to our mutual destination. Twenty-four hours of tag-team straight-shot driving later, we arrived in Damascus, Virginia for the annual gathering of Appalachian Trail hikers past and present, the gathering known as Trail Days. I would like to expound further on all the fun and hugs and sweet gathering energy of that weekend, but I cannot now. The brief images above will have to suffice. I am under a self-imposed rant fast, call it a Lenten abstinence from new material. I must abstain, and thus remain not in the present, but in the past as I labor hourly, daily in the coming weeks to edit what will be, at long-last, my first published book. Whether I sell it to an esteemed house like Grove Press or self-publish it through a small publish-on-demand press, I WILL publish this one. The sooner the better. Special thanks to Baltimore Jack for the reference and Blister Sister (pictured together above) for the final long-run ride up the eastern seaboard from Virginia to my father's doorstep in Fryeburg, Maine where I now work night and day to put this beautiful beast to bed. Took 55 hours in cars to get here, and dammit I'm gonna make it worth it. And then? Why, another hike of course! If all goes as planned, my Loyal Rantian Readers, your Lord of Letters will be tackling 14,000-foot peaks this July in an organized, sponsored and well-promoted southbound section hike of the Continental Divide, destination: Hunter Thompson's public farewell outside Aspen sometime in August. Purpose: to raise awareness of the disease of chronic depression and its death toll of 30,000 lives annually in the United States alone. That's one person every 17 minutes, or four in the time it took to write this entry. I remember when "AIDS Awareness" hit full-scale in my college years. I remember being told how many people it would claim in my pool of promiscuous peers alone. I was frightened for my friends, for my countrymen, for the world. But I still had the audacity to stand up at a giant lecture hall AIDS conference during a how-to demonstration of oral sex on a female with a latex dam and say aloud, "I'm sorry, but who here has ever or would ever use one of those? I mean, I sure as hell won't." My comment was greeted with a mixture of grumbles, laughter and one helluva good show of raised hands. Fifteen years later, I personally know of no one who has died of AIDS. No one. Suicides, however, are become a plague in my life. Hunter Thompson's suicide was the most recent to touch my life, but not the only. In the past two years in my microscopic universe alone, depression-related suicide (of which 95% of suicides are) has claimed a dear friend, a mentor, and four acquaintances, and sent two other very close friends to the hospital just shy of taking their lives. And I can't even begin to describe to you how badly I battle with it (though it bleeds through my prose often enough). I intend to do all I can to stem this tide, and I start this summer. Actually, I started in March of 2004 when my feet first hit the Appalachian Trail. I wrote and published 150,000 words to the web during that hike with the aid of my cousin and my Palm VII handheld email device. And as I read through that material this winter, I came to realize that mine was a walk AWAY from suicide, and an attempt (however addled by my beer consumption) to defeat my own depression. So it is that my Appalachian Trail memoir will be a kind of "anti-depressant" unto itself, a philosophical pondering of what it means to be so sad you want to die and how cleansing is nature and the simple act of walking through it. So excuse me, Dear Reader, as I take the rest of May and likely most of June to prepare my book for publication and myself for my next big depression-defeating Stomp On the Terra. In the meantime, there are hundreds of pages of rants on this site. My cousin Justin is particularly fond of the rants from Maine in the summer of '02. And Justin has a great blog going to which I would direct anyone who, unlike this former reporter, reads the news and perceives its ironies an absurdity. And rent the film "What The Bleep Do We Know?" Fantastic. I love Quantum Physics! I felt upon watching this film that I'd once known all these things, and indeed I had. I based my first novel on the very principles discussed in the film, all of which had been gifted to me by my wonderful mentor Chris O'Connor, now ten years in the grave. It would seem that with her death and the publishing-scam death of that novel, I fell prey to that poppy field just outside the Gates of Oz and have been sleeping ever since. It would seem. At any rate, I am awake now, and there is work to be done. Words to write, trails to walk, peaks to climb. Adieu. -Peregrine   Copyright 2005 Richard McKinney All Rights Reserved (Just ask & I'll likely let you reprint anything!)