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November 9, 2002  I'm on the ferry again, heading back to Galveston, this time for a clinic appointment at St. Vincents to try and get more pills out of this ever-swelling time investment. But naturally I am running late. I hope they'll still see me. Last night, I wasn't back at the cottage ten minutes when TG arrived for a visit. I can sum up our time together last night real quick, as that's how it went. Put the oarlocks in the boat (she had picked them up from Stefan for me), tossed the boat in the water, rowed across the channel, fought off mosquitoes a bit but really enjoyed the row and the ruby sunset and the birds. On the way back across the channel, in between huge barges going by pushed by hearty tugs, I stripped down to my jeans and leapt off the end of the boat and onto The Bucking Bronco Bouey! Man is that a kick! If you ever get the chance.. mmm! I highly recommend it. Those big heavy duty plastic buoys make perfect ridin and the trick of course is balance and how long you can stay straddling the thing before it throws you. Wonderful. And then along comes another tugboat and barge and we wait, sipping our beers, me my feet dangling in the gulf-warm water, cool, but by no Atlantic or Pacific standards could it be called cold. Row back, tie up the boat, shower off, a brief meal and conversation over a shot of some really fancy scotch whiskey and then winkety wink, blink, blink, blink and suddenly I was soooo nappy I could barely see. Crawled into bed at 7:30 intent on a brief nap, and that was that. My cell phone woke me at 9 with its vibrato crab walk cross the table, but no sooner than I had silenced it than i was out again. [later..] Now back on the ferry A-GAIN! Going home. I think this makes like my 10th ferry ride now or something. Now that the Chevy is all arted out naturally the ferry staff are all getting to know me. This trip marks the first time I have had to wait in line to cross. I imagine it gets pretty bad at times. Summertime. Ugh. I've been lucky. I've been invisible, too. Until now. Ugh. I REALLY liked the anonymity of the Chevy as it was. Oh well. I'm just back to ignoring people and avoiding their eyes at all costs. I mean, I can't afford the cost. I can't afford the criticism and I can't deal with the attention at this burnt-out point in my life, period. What did Hermann Hesse say? "Chaos demands to be recognized and experienced before letting itself be converted into a new order." This of course applies to more than just the Chevy. It applies to my whole journey this past year. I have every intention of scraping off what-all I glued on the Chevy and repainting it all one solid color again before I hit the road again.  Something in my head about where angels fear to tread. Would an angel fear to art out their car? Hesse also said "If not for the beast within us we would be castrated angels." Mmm. Gnaw on that one awhile, why doncha? So, yeah. St. Vincent's medical clinic for the poor on Post Office Road in Galveston. Cute blonde med student Rachael asks all the usual questions, takes vitals, all that. Forever something odd about discussing the regularity of my bowel movements with a girl/woman I could be, should like to be dating. The upshot of it is that now that i don't have insurance and am not paying thru the ass for physician services, I don't mind them using me for their med students to practice on. I REALLY resented it when, without fail, my HMO in New Mexico would send in a med student to grill me then follow it/him with the real doctor who would repeat the same fucking Q's. The fucking gall! Hey! Who's paying whom here? If you're gonna fucking experiment on me, you better pony up and NO you may not have my insurance card for billing purposes. Bite me. Okay. So Rachel was nice and I'm poor now so it's okay to be poked and prodded by a sexy young med student. And today, after three days of chasing down the elusive psych meds, I am happy to report that these folks gave me a whole weeks worth. Whippeeee! And they're gonna outright buy me the whole month's worth next weekend if they can't get samples por nada from Big Brother Pharmaceuticals, inc. in the coming week. So, that's nice. Good people. And Galveston? A nice place. An island, I guess, though I'd never noticed on map. Where I'm living out here beyond Bolivar on the gulf feels more like an island, what with having to take the ferry over every time I wanna get here. A cruise through the neighborhoods of Galveston reminds me a lot of New Orleans, but not so packed, not so polarized (in NOLA you'll have a mansion a block away from a row of shithole shotguns). And the energy here is more mellow. Spied a couple of old wrecked mansions I would love to get my hands on and sink my tool belt and 1000 hours of loving sweat-equity into. Someday. Naturally, the folks at St. Vincent's clinic want me to stick around, get into their system so they can better help me. Kinda like how important student attentence was in school. If you didn't show up, the school didn't get the funds from the Gov. The social worker at Maine General in August, ME was the same way, and in New Mexico this summer they gave me meds and a smattering of appointments to show up to for income verification and therapy and more meds. When those appointments came up, I was in Boston. What's a guy to do? Say "Okay, I'll stay and get into your system because it's the right thing to do and i need to settle down, blah, blah, blah." I can't do it. I just can't. When med student Rachel asked if I would stick around for a three weeks until they could get me plugged into the manufacturer free-sample system, I answered her the same way I answer my mother, my sister, and every friend I have in every far-flung corner of this country: i just don't know. What if tomorrow when you arrived at work, sat down in your cubicle and prepared to begin your day of ritual whatever, that FedX guy from The Matrix showed up and out of the envelop plopped a ringing cell phone and the voice on the other end of the line said, "You are free to go. Just stand up now and walk out of that building and out of that job and get in your car and go anywhere you like. Anywhere.  "From now on you'll no longer stress about money because you know it will always be there when you need it. From now on you'll never go hungry, you'll always have a roof over your head, and you'll have all the materials needed to create what's needed, because in this world is there exists such surpluses of goods and services and love that no one need go without. As an added bonus, you can at long last go any place you've ever dreamed of going. You can live there if you like, or you can just visit and move on. Now go." Sounds nice, huh? But what the voice doesn't tell you is that with this new path of freedom there come no instruction manuals, no schedules, none to discipline you but yourself. Oh, and by the way, no one will understand your path. No one. Sometimes not even you. Welcome to the world of the profoundly free. -His Lordship RSM the Duke of The Blank Page
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