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November 23, 2002 
Wow. Beautiful now, just past the hour of the setting sun, that divine final moment before dark. A large river or lake. A bridge over a mirror. A mirror into another world. Out of trouble. Into the zone. Getting dark now. Air vents off. Windows, only ever opened a slight crack so as to avoid ferret disasters, closed now. I raised my antenna back there in Del Rio hoping to get my email. No such luck. Welcome to the Edge. A National Park Service sign. This must be the opening to Big Bend. The sky all fair pastels now, contrast up. The black of night nearly here. Three hundred and ninety-eight miles so far, and Tank Girl says we're about halfway. Yikes. The horizon out here flat as a straightedge. And they say there are no straight lines in nature. Well, I'm not straight, that's for sure. Feeling that little hash muffin as it swaddles my skull in cotton and lace. Amistad National something or other. Tank Girl's rig appearing all pixelated to me now in the last waning light of day and the first real heavy wave of muffin madness. Time, I think to put this thing away and drive. -RSM And so I did. And what came next I'll tell in snapshot phrases, the stylized stuttering syntax of my wild mind. But before I go on, let me say that in wild mind I speak not of something unique to me, but of a place in all of us, a place where anything can happen. A place, a concept, an idea. Wild mind. Introduced to me in college by a woman author and writer on writing. She spoke of a dot, a tiny speck in the bluest of a midday clear big sky. Pick a point. That is your wild mind. You nasty little magic muffin running amok in my road-beaten brain running down halls, opening doors come in here! you say look in this one! I look inside and see.. Heaven, sings the breathy female voice if you were mine, she sings I wouldn't want to go to.. but You! You little muffin man preadolescent prankster you quickly tap my untold truths and all the demons and melancholy stickpins lurking behind every verse look inside this one, you say as you open another door and I float on the sad currents of old romantic music down the hall and through your opened door because the hall and the door and the journey are mine I drop like a stone trip over the threshold and tumble straight down into the blackest of black holes and am gone. Meanwhile back on Route 90 westbound a black brougham thunders across Texas. A boisterous caboose it follows the car ahead with ritual precision deaf to the lump of sobbing man strapped in and connected to the machine by a foot here a finger on a wheel there the term power steering never more poignant and true than now. I hear a voice. Barely. It can't be coming from the radio not out here on the barren ocean floor as old as gold and older millennia old to find water five centuries ago to find gold or the gold-stoned conquistadors who stomped this terra on the last desperate leg of their quest. No. This is the sort of place where you hit SEEK on the stereo and the digit counter just whizzes away whilst overhead a thousand bats swoop parabolic picnics biting at the air for bits of sound from faraway transmitters find none. Not the radio. Not the bats or ghosts of conquistadors. What then? That's when I remember the headphones on my head. Big old-style headphones that sit on your head like a fat housecat muffling all outside sound so that you can hear.. The music. Oh yes, the music. When did the music stop? Where have I been? Who has been driving the car?  You. You! You nasty little magic muffin running amok in my road-beaten brain I tear off the headphones and fwooooooosh! the world of sound rushes in and with it the voice I now realize is mine saying (repeatedly) I'm so lonely I'm so tired of being alone. It's a not unfamiliar refrain of late. The speedometer needle dances in the black space beyond numbers silly old speedometer from the Reagan years when all the nation was 55 so the engineers stopped imagining at 80. Then one, two, three, SNAP! My body reacts and the needle swings left fast as my foot hits the brake in rapid response to the flash of break lights ahead. Tank Girl pulls off the road and into the glaring light of a gas station and in sight of M. and S. who were traveling ahead and I I gotta pull it together. As fast as I can I shut off the tears and stifle words I can't believe my ears are hearing: I want to get married. I want to have kids. I want to be normal. I'm so damn sick of being.. This.
-His Lordship RSM the Duke of the Synaptic Black Hole
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