One Misadventuring Youth

A quartet plays Hayden from the piazza
as satyrs play tricks behind marble relief.
Ruth and I, lounging on an iron behemoth
note its geometry, like omega symbols,
and the electric blues of the Sarasota bay.

Into the trees like gibbons,
then into the expanses of her eyes.
We glance, obscured, at curious tuxedoed men
and long-stemmed cigarette brides
letting 1920s ghosts fill the air
where their voices ought to be.

We come from a place where dryads strum lutes
on crystal shores, and rambling sages kiss
our drowsy eyes. Where the flora conforms itself
to the contours of our bodies and lulls us to sleep
on leafy carriages.

An absurdist drama, a top hat parade
for two happy banyan tree emigrants.
Two contemplative sprites drawing aside
an acid-washed veil.

Honestly. I will live here as soon as possible.

I arrived yesterday in The Arkansas River Valley after a full night of systematically hampered driving. First on the Colorado border, where at two in the morning (Mountain Time) I ran hazardously low on gas in the most uninhabited stretch of highway I’d ever seen, forcing me to camp for four hours in the parking lot of a gas station until it opened in the morning. Then again in Colorado Springs, frustratingly close to my destination, where my atlas wasn’t specific enough to navigate without a fair share of backtracking and crisscrossing the little metropolis. I’ll remind you, dear imaginary readers, that these exercises can be chalked up to character building, and NOT excuse enough to use wretched Mapquest (the scourge of time-honored, true adventure traveling).

Once here I did some wandering in San Isabel National Forest, in a beautiful spot up a very treacherous unmarked dirt road that laced around a mountain stream fed by the snow one can still see melting atop the peaks. It reminded me very much of the kodachrome photos my dad’s family brought back from their legendary cross-country RVing days in the seventies. I got a great feel for the diversity of this particular area betwixed a few different ranges. The collegiate peaks, so I’m told, boast at least fourteen mountains rising above 14,000 feet; they are very alpine and grey, and comprise (as far as I can tell) the monolithic western wall of this valley. To (what we’ll call) the east is a system of volcanic mountains that are more reminiscent of Arizona or Utah, rocky orange crevasses covered in dusty arid cactus that seems a perfect backdrop for the indigenous ram, prairie dog, and occasional mountain lion.

My river rat aunt is my guide here. She lives the quintessential adventurer’s life, leading snowmobiles in the Utah winter (apparently great ski country) and spending her summers here in the whitewater of the most popular rafting destination in the country. We camp (autobed style) on some gorgeous public land, where most of the other guides stay for affordability’s sake. What an odd notion, that people spend small fortunes to live in cramped flats in close quarters with millions of other people, when you can live in the blinding portraits of God for free.

After a warm welcome of dinner and riveritas (sort of a cheap, bastardized take on a margherita) in a friend’s ritzy hacienda tucked in the hills, we bedded down, not long before I learned that cool nights translate to frigid mornings here at 8,000 feet, even in the middle of July. Today I braved the icy waters (because I’m a masochist) of class 3 rapids at the headwaters of the Arkansas. Fourteen miles of relative fury, though not quite hair-raising after some of the tempest-tossed beaches I’ve braved back east. My gut’s ready for class four, even if my skills aren’t.

Now, with a somewhat hazy view of the peaks (thanks to California’s wildfires), I’m sipping kiwi peach tea on the front porch of a groovy café in Buena Vista, musing about what the Haight has in store. Four more days, then I’m trading in my paddle and sleeping bag for a bus ticket and a couch.

Ps: As I finished writing the strangest old man came up to me and started telling me his life story. He’s been saying the craziest damn things about women being eaten by alligators, using internet girlfriends to push his van instead of gas, telling me every route and every free meal you can possibly scrape out in the western United States. People are strange when you're a stranger.

I’ve been more than a week ramblin’ now, and it’s been pleasant. My stay in Missouri has been idyllic really, awash in the unbelievable greenery of the Ozarks – with the requisite ticks, chiggers, and mosquitoes, of course. Which, I guess, is a decent enough metaphor for the time spent here.

I am reminded of why I left Missouri to begin with. It’s not the inconvenience of reaching civilization, the daft villagers, or the silence of the wilderness; it’s how lonesome a guy can feel away from the likeminded. I know if I stay much longer I’ll have traded wasting my summer on the coast with wasting my summer in the hills.

I do feel somewhat enriched, however, by lazy days spent picking the plentiful black raspberries that grow on my mom’s hill, and long nights down in Springfield enjoying the bluegrass and blues scene. On that note, I think I might buy an old cheap banjo from my guitar dealer while I’m here if he can cut me a deal.

I attempted to kayak on flooding Stockton Lake last week and was capsized not 300 yards from the outset by a strong lapping wave to the broad side of my sad little vessel.

But with my funds steadily dwindling, I can feel the familiar urge to move on in my marrow again. And if there’s one thing I have in spades, it’s options. I have an aunt guiding whitewater rafts on the Arkansas River in the Collegiate Range in Colorado, and one in the Haight Ashbury in San Francisco. It’s a long haul, but seems quite worthwhile. Then Jen’s invited me to follow around Gogol Bordello in the Northeast, through New Hampshire and Connecticut in August.

Looks like I have a busy summer ahead of me…

The sight of deer lacing through the misty dawn validated a long, monotonous escape through the bulk of Florida. Then came the sun and the Georgia landscape: the first hills I’d seen in months, and a welcomed lack of the Sunshine State’s ubiquitous scrub pine. I-75 bisects Georgia diagonally, through an eternity of billboards promising cheap peaches and the world’s widest variety of porn.

Tennessee must be the jewel of the South. Stout little green Appalachians in endless droves, all focused around the music capitol of the world, Nashville. My progress was killed in traffic on the outskirts, and I missed my exit in the confusion, so I thought I might take a little reprise amongst the buskers and Elvis statues. I ducked into every bar and club downtown, each stuffed with apparent tourists and country cover bands. No bluegrass, old-time, blues, or western – all contemporary crap! I did, however, find some little gems on the streets amongst the bums. One lonesome girl who couldn’t be older than sixteen was pickin’ a mighty fine banjo in an alley. She was stoic and silent, and I wondered where she came from.

I stopped into the Country Music Hall of Fame gift shop, and would you believe it, they had a jazz band playing out front! What a crazy mixed up world.

Out around Paducah, I took a little nap in my patented autobed before braving the remaining ten hours through impossibly foggy state road 60. I arrived in Bear Creek, Missouri just before collapsing at my mother’s doorstep at 7:30 this morning. Now I’m enjoying another cool dusk (it still gets into the sixties around here!) and a cup of coffee in front of some old players at the family pizza place. The singer said that they’d written “a boxcar full” of good songs. Is it weird that I have to drive a thousand miles north to experience southern living?

Not sure where I’ll go from here, but I suppose I’ll spend a spell relishing Stockton Lake in the kayak. I know if I linger too long, that familiar Missouri ennui will creep up and give me the blues.

Cash spent: $325
Time Ramblin’: 1 day, 19 hours.

The Gogol Bordello show in Lauderdale was ineffably great. The most raucous and wonderful stew of gypsies, punks, hippies, skinheads, and accordions in which I've ever come to be (shall we say) a vegetable. We met everybody, including Eugene Hutz. Dusty Rhodes (of Dusty Rhodes and the River Band), who's been touring with Gogol for a few weeks now, says that Eugene is an anti-American elitist. When I took Jen's pic with him, he seemed somehow...off. He seemed like an organ grinder monkey when orbitted by swarms of would-be sycophants. An enviable conundrum, if you ask me.

Perhaps the presiding question in my life will be:

will I forever ask questions?

The devil is in the basement, gnawing a bone.
The devil is the basement, firmament of home.
The devil is not a pretty woman, nor driving a train.
He's just a billy goat sinking down the bathroom drain.

My once-quagmire home is the color of peanut butter,
and the bougainvillea has been stripped away.
Virgin weeds, pallid flower crowned
snow dusting, a labyrinth amplified
by sultry summertime blues.
Mother turns the soil
into memories.

Given the ratio of space to matter, I would probably just float aimlessly through the void. Food and water -- useless. It serves to reason that you could only have a finite amount, only prolonging the agonizing moments spent slowly digressing into insanity. I'd go out with my dignity, by God. Give me a few Dylan records, one decent pizza, and a loaded revolver.

I wish I really knew the intricacies of food. No, I don’t want to be Emeril, “bamming” on live television. Nor do I want to work my ass off at the French Culinary Institute to land a divey line cook position at The Greasy Spoon in some third rate town like Minneapolis.

But hey, just to hold a conversation with Tony Bourdain -- that would be swell.


Also, an interesting note on Bourdain. In Kitchen Confidential he goes on and on about how much he hates the celebrity culture that culinaria has recently attained, and such hollywood glamour chefs as Bobby Flay. IRONIC!

postscript: I believed "culinaria" is a term I just coined.

Breath makes specters in a Seattle basement.
Inhale mildew, moths, critters
telling secrets in the dank
caverns of living;
exhale little dancers,
wisping inert liberty.

A chair trembles in a corner,
dusty snowdrift wafting,
nervous that its wintry pine
might offend.

Friction! A union
of two satisfied surfaces
and a little bloody sliver –
infiltration, success.

I'm looking for someone with an unquenchable thirst for adventure, and a penchant for wandering. Applicants must be adaptable and care little for comfort, money, or solid plans. Spontaneity is paramount.

I'm willing to contribute my spacious, reliable vehicle and $1000 for directionless travel. Must tolerate the music of Woody Guthrie, by which I cruise.

Driving home tonight
forgetting the mechanical noise
ubiquitous in a small city
I hear an infant
crying from an open window.
I remember open windows
tiny gusts dancing room to room
in a little blue house
when a torrent would make
cob webs of the powerlines.
Sometimes when I steal a moment
to walk past a little blue house
I am surprised it is the color of peanut butter
and the bougainvillea
has been stripped away.

What kind of trance is this? These sharp edges of the earthy earth, this amorphous sun possessing me with beta carotene, this amalgam universe, all pointing towards the absurd truth:
I was a turtle; I am Frankenstein of boundless insiiiiiiight! Ha ha! You are Cosmic Boris Karloff!

I’ve been relatively prolific lately, I’ve written a few songs in the past month or two. This latest was inspired by a book of photographs my mother found in some thrift store in Stockton, Missouri, called “Scenes Along the Road” detailing the various travails of Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg and that whole wonderful crew. Some on the lyrics were directly influenced by Ginsberg’s own liner notes throughout the book.


These are scenes along the road
Of men in tombs with grayscale souls
All ragged run and scared as hell
All torrent mind and madness shell
The riot of their actual live
The lusty sweat of endless night
Let’s just pray alone awhile
Let’s just try to force a smile

With swollen palms on a wrinkled face
With drunken laugh, with shallow grave
A streetlight beggar is a sage
In the concrete canyon, the iron cave.

Ashes in the morning rain
Yellow leaves from the window pane
Sex on strange kitchen floors
Stolen streetcars, darkened doors
What are they but truckstops now
Viewed from ninety miles an hour
Let’s just pray alone awhile
Let’s just try to force a smile

A haiku and a fifth of rum
Sleep with the dogs, rise with the sun
A Bodhisattva in the yard
On Desolation Peak near god

Billowing steam elegy,
a steady locomotive baseline
for Texarkana by first light,
stray limbs of the sun – a sparse lantern.

Rabble rouser
echoes scoff through the landscape,
those streaming facades, bisected,
each cragged edifice
too old to hear
a weeping fiddle’s groan
from the grating bowels
come up through tuberculosis lungs.

Caustic harmony –
is your course prearranged?
While lows wallow in piney gloom,
seep into groundwater tombs,
and collect on the dinner tables of indifferent ferns,

fortunate altos exchange notes with molasses air
and foxtrot on an idle breath
from the Ivory Coast.

The whole blue treble clef,
in mournful waves over patchwork tapestries
and the lost ethereal interstate
where wraithlike men lay newspapers under bridges,
might sleep in the worn dales
of a Gulf sailor’s face

the sharps, to penetrate

if dusk is an engineer,
and stillness, his freight.

Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, and Muddy Watters probably laid the foundation for the great music of the 20th century.

When the Bodhisattva speaks
"Is heaven in the ground?"
we swing down
from knotty tamarinds.

Where once tempests plundered
in monsoon jungles,
now there is divine still.

Whisper the antediluvian memories--
was He the wisest tortoise; the jackrabbit king?
He was the ancestor of all monkeys, once.

Quiet now!
A sermon from incarnate compassion
before nature's almsgiving
by the water wheel.