November 16, 2002
I dedicate this day's rantin' rambling to all my amigos
con
guacamole who are struggling so hard in the so-called "real world"
and
waiting for that FedX guy to show up with the soon-to-ring cell phone
and the red pill to cure the ills of all the breakin' up relationships
and layoffs and lost opportunities and mean bosses and feeling like
they've wasted years and what to do? what to do now? Seems like every
few days I hear of another Humpty-Dumpty fall and I want so bad to be
there for you all to catch you, patch you up, give you hope. Anyway,
here's to you all, you know who you are.
Behind the wheel of a large automobile, fighting the gulf
coast gusts
of wind that torque the car's forward motion as I steer with my knee
and write like a demon.
Just listening to the intense and excellent lyrics of
that song by
M-n-M whatshisname, the Slim Shady guy, and thinking, "Man, I gotta
see
this movie." Because man oh man can i relate to that struggle and
the
desire to be known, to be heard, and to get out of this fucking rut of
poverty. So, heh!
Have I mentioned amidst all my bitching lately that I'm
having a:
GREAT FUCKING LIFE?
Yeah, that's right. You heard it here from Mr. Melancholic
Blah Blah
Blah. Despite the little ills and travails and trials of getting my
meds and getting fed and fed up with the feds and staring at maps of
the USA and wondering, "Where to?" and getting all wiggie about
that..
I am:
DOING IT!
I AM HAVING A BLAST!
Mind you, I'm more than ready to park the old beater cars
and drop down
half a mill in small bills on a surf-n-turf real estate deal, a house
on the beach and a cabin in the mountains, a place to call HOME that's
solid, tangible, instead of this ethereal concept that I currently
reside in.. comfortably, for the most part. Mostly until I start
comparing IT to the world of rents and bills and leases that lock you
down and give you the sneezes. See? Made myself feel better already
just thinking about ALL THAT CHIT THAT I DON WANNA DEAL WITH NO MORE...
So I am.
Wow! What a great adventurous year I've had. And if a
mentally-torqued I headcase wandering scribbler who rarely shaves or
behaves can do it, SO CAN YOU!
Got to live in Maine this summer, deep in the woods, gettin'
Shipwrecked nightly on Maine-brewed Shipyard I.P.A. by gigantor
bonfires and swimin' in a pristine lake, a lake the water of which I
could just take gulps of as I swam, so clean it was, and dream of the
6-acre island that sold just nearby for $100K, my first feeling that
"Hey, this is within my reach! I might really get my island afterall!"
I got to live inside of Mardi Gras, the way the locals
live it, thanks
to friend Jules and his friends and great family. I got to fly all
over the frikken country like a rock star and made it everywhere I
wanted to make it, to all the best gigs, the happenings, the gatherings
of the tribe.
I got into eBay and have made a little money doing that,
but more so
the experience of helping my old friend Dan has been good for my
psyche, my soul.
I got to run wild for a month with a beautiful girl whose
wide-open
heart and love-giving policy both awakened my ticker and allowed me to
travel, worry free (financially anyway - many thanks Cricket) across
Texas in Duke and, when the car couldn't make it all the way to San
Francisco, to jump on a plane and BE THERE NOW in a way that was so
refreshing I really had a hard time breaking from it and returning to
my low-budget crusade when Cricket called it quits in late October.
"I watched attack ships on fire off the shoulder
of Orion... Now
all these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain." -Rutger
Hauer, Bladerunner
I got to get my credit all restorated just in time to
save my ass as
the beer-bottle wall of my longterm love and life and home in New
Mexico came crumbling down. Then I got to, in true Thompson style,
"run a savage burn on one Vegas hotel, then just cross town in a
new
car and do it all over again."
In my case, I just lived off half a dozen credit cards
til they wouldn't let me spend no more, then I melted `em
into little plastic fake money flack jackets for my army of trolls on
Duke's hood. On the one hand, I ran a savage burn on New Orleans
utilities; on the other hand I totally furnished (from thrift stores)
repainted and decorated and repaired a shithole dive shotgun shack into
a friggen art installation, then just walked away from it all, no
deposit return, no word of thanks from the landlord or compensation for
my upgrades, nothin. All in all, I figure we're even, NOLA and me.
I got to shootup another fat armload of art car love juice
when Duke's
engine failed again in Houston in April and the whole of H.A.C.K., the
Houston Art Car Klub, gathered together to buy me a new/old junkyard
engine to get me on my way. And when I woke up one morning back in
NOLA in May hungover and freakin' from a long night of dollar doubles
at Ms. Mae's and realized I had no car and no air conditioning (and
shithowdy the little red line was rising high already in May and the
sweat poured out of you like piss through a gallows trap door), a great
guardian angel, a great man, a graduate suma cum loud (sic) from the
Sixties, but a man who would likely wish to remain anonymous in this
case, came to my rescue with just one phone call. And so, despite
being penniless and lost, I was packed into a U-Haul and gone outa NOLA
faster than you can sing the lyrics to that song "There was a house
in
New Orleans, they called the Rising Sun..."
And back in Houston. And working on Duke. And hating Duke.
And
everything that could go wrong was going wrong and somehow in
manipulating that 600 lb. block of steel into that car I threw my back
out and thanks to Cazz and chiro Dr. Jackson, the latter saved my ass
with a crack here and a torque there. But Humpty-Dumpty Duke just
didn't wanna get put back together again it seemed, so one morning I
whipped out my Golden Ticket from Southwest and said adios Houston,
humidity, Hunter my host, and a loaded down Duke, loaded down with
everything I owned. I packed two bags and was on a plane within two
hours of making up my mind to flee.
I got to relax then, for a full month, in the blissful
and quiet
surrounds of my one-time home Idyllwild, CA, and I slept where Bruce
sleeps but wasn't sleeping as he was in Minnesota and accepted his
hospitable absence. But Idy just wasn't the same without him, and
after a few trips down to Temecula to visit Mom and Mandi and my boys,
my sister's kids Jake and Maddy, I hopped another plane bound for New
England.
Thus began seven or eight weeks in Maine in which I went
absolutely
bezerk with a chainsaw, a lot of gasoline for big fires, and two house
jacks with which I picked up and righted the woodsy and heretofore
Tippy Cabin of Greg Day and his new wife Niccola. The latter project
did two things for me: it broke me physically, reminding me of my age
and severe lack of exercise over the years, and it filled me with pride
to totally restore an off-foundation & partially rotted out cabin
to a
place entirely livable, (at least by my Grizzly Adams standards). God
Bless Greg and Niccola, now pregnant with twin boys! Wow! Meeting
them was a highlight in this summer's adventures, for sure.
And meeting Harrod in Boston, of all places, when he came
in July to
show his rough-cut of Wild Wheels II. Harrod and I meeting one another
all over the place this past year. First in N'awlins at his mom's
place, then week's later at the umpteenth annual Houston Art Car
Parade. Then Boston, then Burning Man, then Art Car Fest. We are the
Jet Set Vagabond Elite, and we move and meet in fast strange ways.
Then came Burning Man, preceded briefly by a visit to
Mom in which I
got to hear things like, "Well, what did you expect? You gotta pay
yer
bills or they shut things off." That and a supertacky, ill-timed
pique
of anger on the part of my stepfather, (whom I love despite his extreme
conservatism because he's good to my mother), who got all hot and
bothered over when I came to the defense of
the redwood forests, saying that recent media bullshit about Bush
considering opening up more forests to logging to prevent fires, blah,
blah, blah.. you can see where this is leading. I was sick as a dog,
and he came at me like a mad dog, and I wished for a moment that I was
deaf as dear sweet Kalina, and could just smile and nod as she does so
charmingly, so innocent. But God Bless Mom for that Manchester
nightmare bailout motel room, the details of which needn't be gone
into.. just thanks, Mom.
Yes, then Burning Man. Oh, what a lucky man
I am to have gotten to Burning Man this
year again, this marking my sixth year, I believe, and wow was it ever
better than ever. I have copious notes, much written on my palm pilot
and saved but not yet sifted through and playa-dusted off to make any
sense of. Back to Rutger's character in Blade Runner, I think to
myself, "I watched temples and giant effigies of man burn and spin
off
mini-tornadoes to the roaring awe of thousands of tribal wild ones..."
But unlike Rutger's character, though certainly like the
film on which
he is forever preserved, "all these moments WILL NOT be lost in time
like tears in rain, for I am besting time, defying decay, and stomping
into the dirt the very things which make us forget. I am doing this
right now, with these keys and these sore and whining fingers. I am
wrapping memory and great moments in layers of cyberplastic ziplock
baggies for the preservation of time eternal.
And it was just one great BANG after another. Sweet Raya
taking me the
night on the burn, taking me into her tent and raping me in a way a
heart-gone-cold needs to be raped to be awakened. That wonderful night
of the Burn. The wonderful ecstasy of it all.
Then Reno. A few weird but restful nights in plastic hotels
in plastic
town full of, what did Thompson say? "Used car salesmen from Omaha
still awake at 4 a.m., still humping the American Dream." Something
like that.
Then Dearest Dave my Amigo without peer lobbying, as is
his forte, to
get me to Albuquerque and winning out at last and bing bang back in
another airport, another Golden Ticket in hand. And somehow getting on
the plane despite not having the piddly $5 for the frikken 9/11
surcharge. God Bless America. I got on.
And I wasn't in New Mexico 24 hours before I got off.
Thank you, Jill
Ann my sweet. And then WHAM! Cricket and rug burns on the knees and
gettin' kicked out of my first party back in town - a great honor, I
might add. Kicked out for taking snapshots of some little hammered
tramp making out with another girl, but said hammered tramp didn't want
it to get around that she was, well, perhaps a little bit lesbian. And
the complaint went out and Chris the host showed me the door and I took
it.
The next few weeks are really a blur. But they were good
weeks. Dave
dropping his motorcycle, not at speed mind you, but for lack of it
whilst whacked out on K's and going so slow that ooops! the bike just
fell over. The foot shifter broken, I kinda lost out on my transpo
whilst in town but got around just fine despite it.
Then Whammo I'm on a plane with this girl I hardly know
who, and I
never even asked how, apparently had the means to get us there and pay
the gas to get Duke to from Houston to SF (could have gone on a fucken
cruise to Greece for what the girl shelled out that week on that
frikken beast of a car of mine). Touchdown in Houston. Hunter
retrieval. Next day frantic unloading of ballast and whoosh! We're
off.
And we never made it. But no matter. Duke is safe and
we made ACFest
West and the tribe was all there, and the moment I was spotted Kathleen
and Kalina and Gretchen and Jan and Joanne all swarmed me, welcoming us
with open arms, so happy to see me and my new girl and the feeling
hugely mutual.
Then Boston beckoned. The little issue of that car I'd
bought off old
Don Vito that was still sitting in his yard in Malden, MA. That and
the need to inventory as much of Dan's antiques as possible for slow
sale on eBay over the winter.
Two weeks there was quite enough, and the moment I saw
my breath one
night at a gas station, I said hasta la vista baby and was on the
interstate south in minutes. Slept that first night for four hours in
a rest stop on the Jersey Turnpike in a car which, as it turned out,
was an exact match for the one the they caught the sniper(s) in two
days later. Weird. You just can't make up shit like this.
Then Swami Bruce from Idyllwild down in D.C. doing some
work. Lunch
with him at some Thai joint and I'm on my way again. Some shitty motel
that night and I'm starting to feel like Cricket's going bye-bye
somewhere way out west (I was right) so sleep is fleeting and the sun
is up again and it's Savannah for lunch that next day, beautiful town,
would consider living there, easy. Then boom. Florida and Daytona
Beach and a shitload of yuppie Harley riders and my cuz from New
Hampshire slaving away slinging pizza.
I cut loose and head to Disneyworld, delusional I guess,
hoping against
hope that I can lure someone down there to go play in Disney's
waterparks as an early birthday throw-down (for right outside Savannah
Cricket informed me that she would not be coming after all to meet me
there as planned.) Could have been fun.
But the adventure! The adventure IS STILL GOING, don't
forget that.
So it's back to Dayton and you can read all about my three night's of
GonZo madness there on Jigglebox. Then adios Cuzin and a bee-line to
get "home" to New Mexico to be with Cricket, then another crushing
blow
as she pulls back and my heart goes through the floorboards of the
idling car at some rest stop on the Texas/Louisian border.
Got lemons? Make lemonade. I exited the I-10 60 miles
east of Houston
and headed due south to visit Matilda's grave and BE HERE NOW, here in
the paradise on stilts, this pelican parade of purple seas and tug
boats and electrical storms that wake me in the night like Mom and Dad
or Sis waking me Christmas morning saying "Santa's been here!"
But for
me all the joy is in that thunderbolt that rocks the cottage and the
"Yeh, yeh, yeh!" anticipation of the next one as the ozone cracks
like
amyl nitrate under your nose and the whole bay lights up FLASH FLASH
for milliseconds and it's one, two, three, tear open the pretty paper
on the box and stow the bow and BANG!
The thunder NEVER disappoints, not even when all you got
for Christmas
was a pair of brown socks. Thunder and lightning THRILL ME to the
core. I hope that Heaven has thunderstorms aplenty. Cuz I wanna wake
bedazzled and go wow! wow! and when it's over lie gently down again on
my feather pillow and fade away, soft as the whistle of wind through
the cracks in the window frames and doors. I wanna sleep the sleep of
angels, for nothing beats the sweet dichotomy of the raging boom-boom
mortar fire of the gods and the sweet silence that follows. Yin and
yang. Dim and Bang.
And the adventure is far from over my friends. Two hundred
bucks cash
to dress up my car for Dia de Los Muertos? And now this latest gift
from the Muses: a gig in Alpine Texas fully 2/3 of the way to
Albuquerque paying $300 gas with comped lodging to boot?
The stars they are aligning. And there's nothing more
powerful than a
bull brazenly beating down the doors to destiny, their chosen destiny,
the one that makes them dream dreams the size of planetary moons and
shoot the moon and go for broke and be, be, be, whatever fella.. you
can be IT.
Tag. You're it. Now what you gonna do with it?
Just NEVER give up. I ain't gonna. And if you ever need
help
remembering where it was that you were headed when the billboards and
flash ads and nightmare crap reality TV and slick magazines fulla other
people's dreams scrambled your signal with all their bullshit
rE-Ail-i-tee... Call me. I'll remind you.
We're going to the top, Baby. Fasten your seatbelts.
I'm drivin' this little piggie all the way home.
-His Lordship, RSM the Duke of The Blind Bowling Tournament
of the Gods
