November 8, 2002 Dateline - The Robert H. Dedman Auto Ferry, Galveston Bay For all the bitching I do and have been doing as I tear UTMB a new asshole, I gotta tell you, I LOVE riding this ferry. Or these ferries, I should say. I see one now headed in the other direction named the Robert C. Lanier, and I believe there are more in the fleet. As soon as you get on and the ferry gets underway, a prerecorded voice says, "Welcome to the such-n-such ferry, a toll free service provided by the Texas DOT." Did you folks back east hear that correctly? TOLL FREE! As I remarked to one of the traffic control guys working on board here, you just gotta love Texas. You can't drive 20 miles of interstate in many parts of New England without hitting a toll booth. Fifty cents here. $1.25 the next one. Two dollars here. Adds up. Just driving up to Portland, ME from Boston to register this car, I tossed down $12 in tolls! I couldn't believe it. Yes, the West really is still free in many ways. And as Jim Morrison said, it is the best. I really firmly believe that, and after my past year's wanderings, I believe I am something of an expert in the area of domestic travel. Just wolfed down a patty melt from some place simply called "Pancakes" on the outskirts of UTMB, and pretty much the last eats before you hit the ferrylanding. Patty melt with glazed onions and a side of slaw. Mmm-mm. I needed it, too. Polished off nearly a whole bottle of Merlot last night, G taking little devilish sips (first time I have ever seen that girl drink a drop of alcohol!) and woke thus this morning feeling a bit like a road kill marionette. Plus, I just got done getting dorked, porked and forked in the head by a gaggle of bureaucrats who I foolishly thought might help me today. They didn't. I came away with 3, count em! Three 30mg tablets of Remeron and zero Wellbutrin. The higly convoluted indigent (god, i love being called that) health care program here at UTMB allows for the med-needy to walk out with a three-day supply of meds, at which point they are to go out into the community and seek help from far-less-privileged (aren't hospitals just wealthy as fuck?) and underfunded clinics for "the rest' of one's needs. Excuse et moi, but three days? What are they nuts? They might as well just laugh at you (Dr. Miryala all but did) and hand you a cyanide capsule for all the good 3 days of psych meds are gonna do someone as mentally & chemically reliant on them as I am. Three days. Good joke. But the joke gets better. Because Herr Doktor wrote my script for 150 mg pills of the Wellbutrin. I guess I should have thought of this and I certainly WILL next time, but pharmacies are far more likely to carry the 100s than the 150s, and sure enough, UTMB, as gigantic a hospital as it is, doesn't carry the 150s. Fudge a little logic and some basic math into this problem and you might derive, as I did, the following: give the patient the total milligram equivalent, but in 10mg pills instead. Right? Sorry. No dice. In the rock, paper, scissors world of policy, logic & human cranial limitations, logic loses out every time. So I didn't get my three-day supply of Wellbutrin. Nothin, nada. One could respond to all this, "So? Quit your bitchiness, McKinney. You got three of the other drug, and three is better than nada any day." Right. Not really. Anyway, just pulled over to take a picture of a giant hay bail turkey, you know one of them round rolled bales? Well, somebody stuck a head and a tail on it, made it look like a fat ass turkey, and G was gigglin about it and wishin she'd taken a picture of it, so told her I would next time I went that way. The weather today outside stale government offices and scary monster mazelike hospitals is just fucking beautiful. Sun! Tshirt weather. Hardly a cloud in the sky. The bay last night like glass, intoxicating. And I got laid! Well, sorta. I should say I laid down with a woman, we snuggled, the snuggle escalated a bit into groping and grappling for purchase and before long I was down between her legs enacting a pattern ingrained in me from childhood perusals of my mother's sex books, and I'm not talking heaving bosom novels, I'm talking "scholarly journals" such as "The Hite Report" where back in the sixties or seventies a couple of scientists studied "the orgasm" and interviewed women about their sexual experiences and what they liked and what their love-lives lacked. So what did I learn from all that? Why, lick the pussy, of course. Lick the pussy, find the clitoris, get the woman off first. I was a strange child. Long story short, G got hers last night. And I'm glad. Sounded like she needed it. Me, on the other hand, well, let's just say it hasn't been all that good lately with women and me. I got a good bit of stroking, but I just don't respond that well on the "first date." Mind you, this was not my first time with G , but the same thing happens when it's the first time in a long time. Giving up on her efforts, I took it in hand, so to speak, got hard, but man-oh-man did that trap door shut fast when I tried to enter. You could almost hear the clamshell snap shut. I said, "I have rubbers," but still the answer was no. So, there you go. Following last weekend's "Three Miracles," that of the free ferret, the $200 I got for painting my car up for a parade, and this incredible beach house where I stay for free, well, this week has been all work and no pay. Fuck it. I write and I write and I write. I run headlong into the fog of uncertain tomorrows, fill my lungs with this fresh salty bay air, awake at 4 a.m. to pee and am privy to silent night so divine that anyone else in the world lucky enough to hear it must feel, as I do, that NOTHING but that silence matters. And if such a silence, in this case not a true silence but a hush that allows the tiniest creatures to be heard, the tiniest sounds to amplify, if such a hush is all there is to Heaven I will be happy with that. -RSM Write Me! ©2003 Rick McKinney ALL RIGHTS RESERVED