When the angel let me off when he turned off on I-16, I slept out in some piney woods. The next morning the was a heavy dew that left my clothes and all my stuff damp and clinging to my body. These clothes had not been washed since Texas on the way out to California and were smelling fairly ripe. I knew the chances of me getting a ride wouldn't be affected too much, but the smell of me was not going to enhance the chances of me getting a long ride.

Occasionally I would get a whiff of my aroma that others smelled. It was not an odor that stimulated strong affection of any intimate quality. For the most part, however, I didn't smell myself because I was acclimated to it. When I did smell myself though, it reminded me of some of the older people around in the small towns on the Coastal Plains of the Carolinas where tobacco is king.

Farming exists as the main source of income for the people of this flat country. When I was a child the physical work associated with this way of making a living was extremely laborious. Mechanized farming had not arrived yet, and all the work was done with mules, horses, and people. Just about all this work was accomplished with hand tools and a few horse-drawn machines. Lots of people were used, and there were a lot of people around to be used. Practically every farm of any size above subsistance level had houses for these people to live in. Many were not much more than huts with fireplaces and chimneys. Water came mostly from hand-dug wells and a few had pumps to draw the water, but the usual method was to use buckets to lift the water out of the ground. Quite a few houses were built near springs where the water came out of the ground year round. For the most part there was always plenty of water because the flat farm land were essentially just ridges between the huge swamps that surrounded them.

Taking baths was not as convenient an event as it is these days. In summer it was easier to bath because we would stand under the eaves of the roofs of the houses to take advantage of the water dripping down from there. Otherwise, taking a bath meant drawing water from the well a bucket at a time and filling the galvanized wash tubs used to wash clothes. If you wanted warm water to bath in then you had to heat it in big black cast-iron kettles heated by an open wood fires. To have the fires you had to have wood from the forest, and to have wood to burn from the forests you had to cut them down by hand, use the mules to drag it to the house, then saw it in pieces and split it up by hand. By the time you did all that you would be drenched in sweat, all of which made you and your clothes stink like crazy and exist as further need to take a bath and wash the clothes. In cold weather, it just got more complicated. I think this is why people took to dressing up to go the church on Sunday. Generally, baths were taken on Saturdays, so when they put on their Sunday clothes they would be fairly clean, and the Sunday clothes would only have to be cleaned every coupla months instead of weekly or semi-weekly.

I mentioned the way some of the old people around smelled. Being old meant that they didn't always have the strength to do all the work needed to stay clean. I was around old black and white men who wore the same clothes all year round both in warm weather and cold. Even on the hottest days of summer they would be wearing overalls, heavy long sleeve work shirts, and coats. They claimed they stayed cooler that way because it insulated them from the heat and the cold. The perspiration had turned rancid and even mildewed at times, and you could smell 'em coming twenty feet away. They didn't smell themselves at all, and laughed if you said something about about it.

I figured I was about at this stage of ripeness as I got out on the road again and tried to catch a ride. I was at the intersection of two Interstates, the traffic would be moving at high speed, and the chance of me catching a ride was unlikely. Even if somebody did stop for me, they were likely to tell me to get out and speed off once my unsettling aroma hit their noses.

Eventually though, I did get a ride down toward Florence where I-20 ended up at I-95. It was a short ride that only took me about fifty miles. I don't remember much about who I got this ride with, but they left me off at a crossroads in the middle of the huge fields of the coastal plains. There were a few stores there and a motel. I had stopped there many times while driving and I knew this area like the back of my hand. The old tobacco barns used for curing bright leaf tobacco were beginning to show up, and for all essential purposes I was home. I only had about 150 miles to go before I got to my house. Typically, this would be the longest part of the trip. By now, it was the only thing on my mind. Not only would I be able to clean up and rest, but most importantly I would be totally alone without anybody watching every move I made.

There was not a lot of traffic at this intersection. People stopped at the restaurants attached to the gas stations to eat. The local people used the stores there basically as a convenience to eat at the restaurants and get gas, but this intersection was surrounded by small towns that the Interstate had avoided and they usually did most of their business in these small towns. It was not the kind of place that a lot of distance travelers stopped at, so I stayed there at least four or five hours getting nowhere fast.

When I finally did get a ride it was in a pickup with an older man who liked to brag about how he had raised himself up from rags to riches. He was quite pleasant about it, and his tale was not told with condescension in any way. I liked him. His story was full of wine, women, and song. He was married to a woman that was thiry years his junior, and he had a coupla of children by her. Wnen he let me off a couple of intersections before we got to I-95, he gave me a five-dollar bill to get something to eat with.

The intersection he let me off on did not have any building there at all, and there was no entrance ramp. This put me directly out on the Interstate about ten miles from I-95. I started walking and hitch-hiking what little traffic there was, but didn't get a ride. When I finally arrived at I-95 I was wet with sweat, and very tired. I was starting to see the hallucinated streaks running across in front of me. I decided to get something to eat to see if that would help me relax, but again of I was at the intersection of two Interstates and there was no exits to where a restaurant or convenience store nearby. I had to walk about five more miles to get to a pancake franchise. My feet were swelling up from all that walking.

The pancake house was mostly empty. It was all plastic and chrome and designed for travelers on the Interstates, but the people working there were very kind. Despite the fact that I looked very seedy and stunk to high heaven they chatted with me and kept my coffee cup full. Despite my tireness and a little grumpiness at having to walk so far, I felt comfortable to be among the same kind of people I was raised with.

When I felt a little better and got back on the road I was faced with not being able to find a good place to stand where there was room for people to pull over and stop to pick me up. Nobody even tried. No blame. I started walking toward Florence on I-95. I didn't think it was that far away, but my judgement was based on driving more than walking. It was further than I thought. My feet were really hurting now, and the hallucinations come back. I started feeling sorry for myself and cursed myself and the wild wind for being the fool that I am. Finally, I got to the intersection of Florence and was in pretty sorry shape for the doing of it.

The intersection was one I have stopped at a hundred times and more. It was getting dark and I was worn out, and although I was only a hundred miles from home I decided that I'd better get some sleep and start out again in the morning. I knew exactly where to go because I had spent the night in Florence at the beginning of my trip. It was not an ideal camp site, but I was familiar with it so I trudged on past the motels and convenience stores, waded through the briars and underbrush to get to my spot. and collapsed on the ground to fall asleep.

Sleep simply wouldn't come. I laid their listening to the crickets and frogs for about an hour with my eyes closed, but my exhaustion was such that I was too tired to sleep. I thought about getting up and leaving my pack hidden in the bushes there and walking back up to the intersection, but once I stood up and felt the pain in my feet, I negated that and lay back down. After a couple of hours I eventually dropped off into a restless sleep full of dreams about home, and the reasons I had left to go on this crazy trip in the first place.

Wanna rant a little today about music. I didn't like much of the popular music when I was a kid. It only reminded me of the constant angst I felt as a typical teenager. I preferred the old folk songs I was taught earlier on about life in general that seemed broader than the puppy love stuff that came into being during my pubescense.

What I didn't know was that most of that stuff would be criminalized by the time I was in my mid-twenties, and I wouldn't be able to perform it publically any more. I was a child of my times. My whole way of life would be criminalized, much less the music. Stephen Foster would be no more. From "Carry Me Back to Ol' Virginny": "Gone are the days, when my heart was young and gay. Gone are the fields, of the cotton and the hay. Gone from this earth, to a better land I know. I hear those familiar voices calling, Ol' Black Joe." It was the State Song of Virginia. I lived and learned in that world.

I hated Beach Music, but I did favor Rock and Roll. I think Rock and Roll found dominance because of everybody getting sick of all the puppy love pop songs. Country music did have some appeal later when I was off in the Navy and getting drunk quite frequently. It definitely described those times in San Diego when I was hanging out at Carl's bar trying to pick up the Navy wives whose husbands were out to sea.

By my mid-twenties I got caught up in Timothy Leary's theme, "Tune in, turn on, and drop out. I listened to the Beatles "Sargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album during my first LSD trip, and I was very impressed, but not nearly as impressed by that music as I was that same night with listening to Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" with real cannons. That event was the real beginning of my attraction to classical music although I had played various pieces in the bands I had been involved with.

What I really hate presently, is how the commercial world won't let all that horrible music of my youth go the way of all good things. I hear it in TV advertisements every day. Practically every band that had a hit record has done some sort of revival tour, and those Oldie, But Goldie album offers drive me crazy. They remind me of my age constantly. I didn't realize I was middle-aged at 35 until the constant stream of advertisements for music of the 50's, 60's, and 70's kept blasting away at every bastion of denial I ever pretended to. By the time this pitch for nostalgia reached touting the music from the 80's and 90's, I knew I was an old man.

Now, I hardly listen to music of any kind any more. There is too much pain involved. All the new music reminds me of just how stupid I was when I was a kid, and the stuff that was around when I was a kid reminds me of how stupid I am now.

I woke up to find myself laying on a soft bed of pine needles. The terrorist that had left me at this intersection long gone from my ex-is-tense. The noise from the trucks on the Interstate was far enough away that I could actually hear the birds singing. The rain that had plagued me for the last coupla days was gone and it was a fairly warm morning. I knew I was still in Georgia somewhere between Atlanta and Augusta, but exactly where I was I didn't know. I did know I had finally gotten some restful sleep.

I was still bone-weary and both my body and clothes stunk to high heaven, but the hallucinations were gone. I remembered that there was a gas station on the other side of the Interstate, and that if I wanted I could walk the half mile or so over to it and get some coffee. I didn't want coffee bad enough to take whatever they were serving at a gas station to walk over there.

Whoever designed this intersection must have been considering the future needs of the Interstate. The on-ramp was at least two hundred yards from the overpass bridge and it had a lot of room for shoulders on both sides of it. The road that melded with the Interstate must have been a half mile long, and there was a steady stream of cars and trucks using it. I figured I'd get a ride pretty quick. I picked up my stuff and headed toward it.

I don't remember the driver who took me to the next place I was put out. I remember the set and setting pretty good. I didn't like it. It had the same spacey setup that made it easy for any driver who wanted to pick me up to pull over without any problems. The trouble was that there was no traffic. I stood there for two hours and only one old pickup with three people in the cab used the on-ramp to get on the Interstate.

I still had a couple of dollars left from the money the guy in Meridian had given me. I decided to look for a cup of coffee. I did remember the guy who dropped me off here said there was a truck stop here. I didn't see any buildings on the other side of the Interstate so I turned left to see what was up that way. About two hundred yards away I saw a truck parked on the right hand side of the road and what looked like a driveway across from it.

As I got closer to it I began to see the signs that something was up there, but I had to get there to find that the supposed truck stop was burrowed up against a hill after you turned left on a small road that ran by it. When I saw the actual building I was disappointed. It might have been a thriving business at one time. It looked like the original owners had been possessed by a pie-in-the-sky attitude when they built it, but that must have been a long time ago.

There had been a cafe there once. Some of the booths were still scattered around, but it was easy to see that nobody was running it now. There were two doors in front. One entered the cafe and the other to do business with the service area. I tried the door to the cafe but it was locked. I went inside the other door to find a group of about four or five men sitting around the cash register in wooden chairs, and a middle-aged fellow black hair and greasy hands behind the counter. They stopped talking the minute I walked in the store, and just sat there glaring at me as if I had intruded on their plans to bomb an abortion clinic or a black church. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. Predators.

About all this place had to eat was some candy and ready-made snacks. They had soft drinks in a surprisingly new-looking refrigerator with a sliding glass door. The smell of leaked freon was strong. I guess the old cooler had run outta steam. I bought two giant-sized Baby Ruths and a Mountain Dew. The price was high. I didn't say a word, but paid up and got the hell outta there.

As I returned to the Interstate on-ramp I realized that my whole attitude had changed. If these guys decided to have a little fun with me I was pretty well screwed. There was no where to run and nowhere to hide. I could take to the woods, but they knew these woods mo' bettah than I ever would. I arrived back at the on-ramp feeling the fear. I wanted a ride out of there in the worst way.

I didn't get that ride all day long. I had calmed my mind to some degree, but I could still feel the tension that had come over me at the truckstop. Simply speaking, there was no traffic on that intersection, and the few cars and pickups that did get on the Interstate there were such that they only heightened my fear. They were all locals and some of them even slowed down to get a better look at me. I developed this rather complex notion that some of them were spying on me to see if I'd gotten a ride yet, and were just waiting for it to get dark to take me by surprise if I went off in the adjoining woods to sleep.

As the Sun got lower in the sky I had worked myself into a frantic jabbering mess. I kept looking at the Sun as it sank toward the treetops, and I figured that once it had gone down I was a goner. My reasons for moving to this state of mind was not without foundation. A group of similar types had trapped me and a female traveling companion just north of Lake Okachobee in Florida once, and we had barely escaped with our lives.

Just as the Sun touched the top of the pine trees and was threatening to disappear for perhaps the last time in my life, I was saved! A light-blue new Pontiac sedan came down the entrance ramp with it's headlights on and stopped with the passenger-side window down, and a high-pitched voice called out,"Where you going big fella?" God had sent his angel, and in that moment I gnew that the danger I had felt was very real.

I practically clawed my way into the car. The back-seat was full of stuff that looked like salesman's samples, so I put my bag in between my legs in the front seat. Immediately I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I turned to look at the driver in an attitude of gratitude. Turned out that we both knew each other immediately. That's the way it is with angels, they're all beautiful when they act in that capacity. Some of them even gnow they have that capacity.

This one did. He was about my age and had the look. Silver hair with blue eyes. It was too dark to see that he had blue eyes, but I gnew he did anyway. We had met a thousand times before. He shoulda been dead of old age by now, I had met him the first time in the Los Angeles County jail when I was eighteen years old, and he looked the same way forty years earlier.

He ignored my attempts to thank him for showing up, and instead started talking about this guy he had tried to befriend who had stayed in his house for a few months, and then stole his change jar when he had left that had contained at least two hundred dollars worth of silver coins. He said that was the thanks he got for trusting a guy who had been in prison. He had bought him a whole new wardrobe of clothes, introduced him to his friends, wined and dined him like royalty, and emphasized that he had not asked too much of him sexually. He had loved that boy! Still did!

After a while, he told me about his ex-wife and children, and his business that involved interior decorating. He was, in fact, on his way to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina to visit his oldest daughter right now. She was the only one that treated him with any respect after the divorce. The others simply could not abide with his decision to come out after they were all grown up and educated. He thought that was extremely fair of him. He should have done it way earlier. He had understood what a shock it must have been to find out that their father was gay after all those years, but his wife had known about it the whole time they were married. She had tried to discourage him at first, but soon accepted that things would never change, and took what she could get from him including four children. He had always provided for them in an extremely generous manner... why should she complain?

I decided to ask him a question that had been on my mind for a while. We had at least two hours to go before he had to turn off at I-16. I asked him how early in his life had he known he was "different", and at what point had he decided that the difference he felt was that he was homosexual?

Immediately he shot me a look of complete disdain. He didn't want me to ask him that question. I sensed that he had spent considerable time thinking about it himself, as I have. He hemmed and hawed for a while and changed the subject several times. He decided he should call his daughter on his cell phone and verify that she was expecting him to show up. they talked for a long time as we drove along. He didn't want to talk about my question. Instead, he began to tell me about all the men he had seduced in his life. Thousands. I asked him to clarify for me the expression "tricking". This is a term used by so-called homosexuals who seem to enjoy seducing "straights" into having sex with them. In effect, they "trick" them into doing something they really don't want to do just to show them they can be had. In a way, it's all about personal power.

My angel got quiet after this comment. When he began to talk again he said that he agreed with me. Sex was a medium for communicating with others on a much deeper level than was possible as "just friends". The trickery involved was a method to achieve the bond necessary to communicate something beyond the ordinary. He stated that when it wasn't possible to do this for others on the level of ordinary intimacy, sex was a way to make that connection to make it happen. When a need for intimacy arose in a situation between two men, most men have a tendency to think such overtures are sexual by nature, and if that's what they take the overture for, then it's just easier to let it go that way. His willingness to do whatever it took to get his work done was the real basis of his being "different".

By this time we were approaching Columbia, South Carolina where I-20 and I-16 cross paths. We rode in silence as he drove through the city. We discussed where I wanted to get out to be able to catch a ride at the intersection, and when we got there he pulled over to the shoulder of the road. As I prepared to get out of the car he put his right hand on my shoulder again, and then reached over to shake hands with the other. Very quietly, he thanked me for the conversation, and then I was back on the road.

This was the intersection of two Interstate Highways and there was no commercial places to get something to eat. I found a patch of piney woods to sleep, and closed my eyes on the often strange world of the senses.

I don't seem to remember much about what kind of rides I got from Meridian. My fatigue was building up to the point where I had gone on autopilot. Sometime I think this state of being was the real reason I went on the road hitch-hiking. To get to this very state. When I get this way the world seems very different. It's like I have to deal with what's sot before me one task at the time. I can only gather enough energy to perceive the immediate situation, and if I survive that, then I become immediately emerged in the next situation without remembering the last one. This has always seemed to be announced when I begin hallucinating those streaky colors that flash across my vision. Exactly how much of the world around me exists as real in a normal rested state is gone with the wind.

I do have some vague memory of a young black man picking me up and giving me a ride. He was studying for the ministry. He came on to me with his spiel slowly as if he were attempting to bushwhack me with it in some vulnerable moment. He appeared to have a quiet demeanor in general, but I could sense the intensity brewing just below the surface. He seemed to be at a point of flux where he could go one way or the other with the ministry thing. It was for sure that someone had gotten hold of him and was trying to lead him into the clerical life, and he was not all that sure he was cut out for it.

Our encounter was not the best thing that could happen to him if he expected me to support his decision to go into the ministry. I didn't care one way or the other. I had more or less made my peace with God after a long time. I felt like all he wanted was somebody to tell him how they honestly felt. Honesty doesn't seem to show up on that regular a basis in many people's lives.

I don't remember much in particular about our conversation. I only remember his intensity and his eyes. I think he was taken aback when I told him I thought most preachers held the Bible above God. I asked him about the church he worshipped in. He told me exactly what I expected to hear, and indeed, was pushing for. He said the pulpit was elevated above the church pews and that a large Bible was plopped above it as the highest object in the room so that the audience had to look up to it physically. The actual altar was below the pulpit. The only thing higher than the Bible in the room would be the preacher when he stood there. We talked about graven images. I asked him if he could tell me the difference between worshipping a Golden Calf that was lifted up on a pedestal and worshipping a book lifted up on a pulpit with the only thing above it being man. I saw the light change in his eyes.

We rode down the road quietly for some time. I asked him how far down the road he was going. He told me that he had passed his turnoff a good ways back, but had kept going just to be able to talk with me. We were on that long stretch of I-20 between Birmingham and Atlanta. Intersections were far and few in between and I knew if I got put out at one of the more isolated ones I could be there for days. He said he needed to turn around and go back to catch his exit. The place where he pulled off the Interstate was one of those places. I asked him if I could ride back with him to a little better intersection for catching rides, and he agreed. He seemed intent on getting me out of his car. I knew why. He was the sort of person who needed to get off by himself to replay the conversation we had. I saw signs by the road that announced a coupla service stations at the next exit and told him this exit would be fine. He took the exit ramp and stopped at the top to let me out. He said he would pray for me. I figured he really would, but also, that he would be praying mostly for himself. No blame.

I caught a ride with a bread truck man almost to Atlanta. He told me all about how he was getting ready to break up with his wife. I told him it wouldn't do any good, that the next woman would just become the same woman he wanted to rid himself of just to please him. What his women became to please him did not please him.

He got worried about somebody reporting him to his company for picking up a hitch-hiker, so he told me he needed to let me out before we got into Atlanta proper. He pulled over and let me out. It was about a mile and a half before we got to the exit for Six Flags Over Georgia. It was a good walk. Traffic had gotten heavy this close to Atlanta, so the walk was a kind of wobble because the draft of the big semis passing within three or four feet of me would whirl me halfway around as they hurried by.

Once I had made my way to the intersection and got set up on the entrance ramp to the Interstate a man who sold vegetables at the farmer's market picked me up and took me on into the city. When he got off to go the market he couldn't find a place to pull over because of the traffic, and so I ended up about two miles from the Interstate. The farmer's market wasn't very busy. I found a restaurant nearby and got some coffee.

In a little while I found a halfway decent place to hitch, but the traffic was going fast so they could merge with the traffic at the bottom of the on-ramp. It took a while to get a ride. When I did get a ride, they took me to the first big intersection just east of the loop around Atlanta.

This intersection had a lot of gas stations and convenience stores there. It served a bedroom community for Atlanta. There was a lot of traffic going to and from Atlanta, but there was very little traffic headed east from it. I stood by the road for a while, but I didn't have any luck getting a ride. Behind me was a open field that had a fence separating the intersection from a group of apartment building. Just inside the fence on the Interstate side was a concrete drainage box with a flat top that stood about a foot off the ground. I lay down on it to try to catch a nap. I felt like somebody had beat me up for a good long time. I dropped off for a little while, but the Sun was so hot I woke up sweating. I was too tired to sleep, so I decided to get back on the road.

As I crossed the field to get to the on-ramp I heard some tires squealing. I looked up and saw an old '56 Ford Fairlane had slammed on brakes and backed up to get me. The guy inside was waving at me to hurry up and get in the car. I half-heartedly jogged over to him and got in. He took off fast spinning his wheels and the combination of the old car and the wheels squealing reminded me of my youth.

The only way I can describe the driver is frenetic. He portrayed an intensity that seemed appropriate to all that tire squealing. His face looked like a hawk. He seemed frozen in time, and his body was lean from the intense energy that drove him relentlessly. Immediately I knew he was a predator,and I felt a deep sense of danger. I was too tired to go on full alert, but I knew I should have. The only thing for me to do was to act calm and go along to get along, and maybe I would come out of this okay.

He kept asking me what I thought of his car. He wanted to know what I thought of it's power and speed. All this time he was dodging in and out of traffic at 75-85 mph. He seemed to be trying to scare me and ask him to slow down. I wasn't about to confront him. I went into a good ol' boy mode and told him how impressed I was. I wasn't exactly lying. I do appreciate how some people like to rebuild old cars, but it ain't something I find myself attracted to.

He told me that he was going about fifty miles down the road, but that he had to stop and cash a check so he would have some cash money where he was going, but if I would be patient he would get me to a good place to hitch. I had already decided to just go along with him until he decided to let me go. There was no sense in trying to get away from him. I was a stranger here, and there was nowhere to run.

He stopped at a number of banks trying to cash a check. I knew the checks weren't any good. He had a perculiar way of going into these banks. He would park outside, leave the motor running, go inside the bank, take a pretty long time in there, and then come back out, stick his head inside the driver's window and gawk at me. Then, he would get back inside and tear off to the next bank.


He began to tell me about his being in prison and how rough it was in there, and about how he had learned to survive. I believed every word. His talk about prison was the only thing he talked about that I did believe. I knew that if I ever did end up in prison, this was the type of guy I would dread to deal with the most. Extremely explosive in his actions, but putting on a calm face to deal with the world. He smiled and even laughed a lot, but his eyes never changed.

Finally, he went into this one bank and they cashed his check. I sensed that it wasn't a problem of finding the right bank, but of finding the right teller. Poor woman, and yet, that's the way the world is. This time when he came out of the bank with the money he said something that cleared up some of his previous actions. He looked at me with this incredulous, baffled look on his face and told he couldn't believe I hadn't stolen the car while he was inside the bank. He had left the motor running, why didn't I just slide over under the wheel and take off. That's when I realized that's what he had done.

He whipped out of the parking lot and got back on the Interstate. He started driving real fast and moving in and out of traffic in a very reckless way. At times, he would be going over 120 mph, and was weaving in and out of some pretty heavy traffic, he alternated from cutting people off and making them slam on brakes to getting cut off and having to slam on brakes himself. I realized he was trying to scare me, and if I showed any fear, then he would try to make me his bitch and I would have to fight him to the death. I was certainly tempted to give it up, but I knew if I did it might be the end of me.

When he finally convinced himself I wasn't going to give it up, he pulled off the Interstate and let me off. As I got out of the car, still keeping my composure, he asked me what the hell a guy like me was doing out bumming around. We both knew what he was talking about, but I knew there was no way in hell I was going to tell him anything. He would be back in his cage before long. It was the only way he knew how to live.

Although there was a coupla hours before sunset, I knew I had to get some sleep. the intersection was a good one for that. There were trees all around it. I picked out the most obvious place I could between the on-ramp and the Interstate, and crashed for a good 10 hours. It had been quite a day.

It was sprinkling rain in Meridian, Mississippi when the old man and I got there. I walked out of the station and looked toward town. I had lived there for a little while. Less than a year. Although I had kin all around the place we were not close. We hardly knew each other at all.

Now, on that cloudy afternoon there was no one to go see. Besides, I was pretty filthy and had no money to pay my own way. This wasn't an unusual situation. I had passed through Meridian a hundred times over the years and never stopped to visit. I had cousins there, but they never knew my parents because we had gone too. My aunts and uncles were all dead.

Truth is, not many people have ever known me at all. I never stayed anywhere long enough to give them the chance. Many people who thought they knew me didn't even know my legal name. I made names up as I moved around. None of the people I made acquaintance with knew each other. I lived a compartmentalized life. Each group knew a completely different person. I kept imitating people I admired for one reason or the other. Since nobody on the road knew my family history there was no way for them to know if the person they thought I was got based on any reality they understood. They had no choice but to deal with the particular person they met me as.

I guess I was trying to decide which of the combination of personality careactoristics suited me best so that one day I could be that person. It never really happened until I created felix. I like him pretty good. By then, it didn't matter to me whether anybody else liked him or not. By then I had already figured out that people only see themselves in others anyway. If they liked themselves they would like me, and if they didn't like themselves they wouldn't like me either. What difference did it matter how I acted if all they saw was themselves. This was the real freedom I had looked for. In my opinion this is what Gautama awoke to.

Kristofferson wrote that "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose...", and I really liked that description. When I proved to myself in my own way that people project their own opinion of themselves on to others without knowing it, I found myself free to be whatever I liked. The fact that people don't know they're projecting amazes me to this day. They really think you are what they would think of themselves if they acted like they think you do. They think you do what you do for their reasons, or at least the reasons they feel like they would have if they were like you. They couldn't be more wrong, because if I told them my reasons for doing and saying what I do and say, all they would perceive is what they would be saying if they were me. This is a crazy world.

The next ride I got didn't take me very far, but it turned out to be a pretty good ride. He was a young man in his late twenties or early thirties who had just gotten out of prison a coupla months before. He had been in prison for robbing people with a gun. He said he picked me up to give me a ride to a better hitching spot. I've heard this a lot during my time, most of the time it doesn't work out that way. I think he picked me up to tell me he envied my freedom. I get that a lot too.

He told me he was going to do me a favor. He reached in his pocket and picked out a twenty dollar bill. He held it in his hand as he explained to me who he was. I got the impression that he had robbed somebody to get it. He repeated his name several times to make sure I understood who he was. I suspected he wanted me to remember his name because he expected it to appear in the newspaper soon. He handed me the twenty dollar bill and told me to remember him, and let me out at an intersection about ten miles out of Meridian. I don't need to remember his name. I knew exactly what he wanted, and I'll probably do what he wanted down the line. I'll come and get him when it's time.

The intersection he let me out at had an eerie feeling about it. In one way it was good because the truck stop had a franchise hamburger joint inside of it, and I went inside and got a hamburger and a cup of coffee. It was starting to get dark outside and I knew I would probably spend the night here.

After I had eaten I walked back to the intersection to look under the overpass bridges to see if I could find a comfortable place to lay down. The way the bridge was built didn't exactly allow this, and besides it was pretty dirty under there and wet from the rain. I walked across the bridge to check out the other side. I did find a dry spot, but there was no level place to stretch out. I was too tired to keep looking and it was too dark to see anyway. The clouds covered whatever light from the Moon to find another place, so I made myself as comfortable as I could. It wasn't very comfortable because I had to lay at downward slope, and the big trucks flying by kept kicking up a constant moisture from the road. They were loud as they passed under the overpass. The best I could manage were a few naps, but everytime a truck came through it woke me up. I was dirty, wet, and miserable. I took refuge inside myself as much as I could.

By early morning when there was enough light to see where I was going I climbed out from under the bridge and walked back down to the truck stop and got something to eat with the money the boy had given me. I kept drinking coffee to try and wake up, but mostly to have an inside place to be outta that drizzle. After I stayed there as long as I could I went outside to get back on the highway. I was in bad shape. I was tripping on fatigue and hallucinating colored streaks flashing across in front of me.
I needed to get some real sleep.

On the other side of the road toward Meridian was a patch of woods. I walked around to where I was out of sight of the truck stop so no one there would see me go into the woods. What I found there was fairly interesting. There was a bunch of junk stuff, a couple of dog pens, and some kind of little shack.

I took my time approaching this place. I didn't know whether anybody stayed there or not. I went in a semi-circle around the edge of it. Ripped my only pair of pants on a barbed wire crossing it. There was a dirt road that led into it, but there wasn't any fresh tire tracks on it. I decided it was abandoned and walked around looking in the dog shed and the little shack. They were all filled with old boards and stuff that looked like somebody had used it for a storage place. It hadn't been used for a long time and everything was covered with dust. I could see I wasn't going to be able to stay inside of them, and I didn't really want to be inside if somebody drove up.

I dragged an old door behind some bushes to try to lay down and get some sleep. I knew that I was so tired that if I did go to sleep I might not wake up if they did. There was some old plastic I used to cover myself from the drizzling misty rain. The door itself was dry from being under the shelter. It wasn't very comfortable, but at least it was a flat place to lay down. It took me an hour or so to relax enough to be able to drift off to sleep, but when I did I was out like a light.

Hey, so... sometime I iz a lazy mofo. Sorry, but living life is sometime more interesting than writing about it. My meditation has gotten real strange.

I rode with an old friend to Wilmington. He was taking his son down to some music convention. The boy plays in a coupla bands. He's been playing a long time. I have been attempting to get both of them to meditate for a long time. It's like talking to a fence post. They don't seem to understand how important it is to do something for themselves that nobody else can do for them.

Jack Kornfield, who teaches meditation and writes books and produces audio tapes on the subject called meditation the "art of arts." It makes sense to me, because what a meditation practice does is to create an overview. What I used as an example yesterday in my futile attempt to communicate what meditation accomplishes, was about how to get to that overview. The overview is important because it allows one to have the mental acuity to perceive opportunity when it arises. There exists certain moments in life where one can do miraculous things if the timing is right. A moment too soon or too late and the opportunity vanishes. I don't gnow why things work this way. I don't care. These moments don't appear to exist as a creative effort, but are doors that open where creativity does the most good. They don't appear to exist as something that one has control over, but definitely something one can be-co-me with, and go along for the ride.

I know both of these guys are going to read this, so this entry is somewhat redundant for what I talked about yesterday, and intentionally redundant.

When I sit down to practice my meditation I start by thinking about my perineum. Every time I sit, I have to find it all over again. I find where it is by feeling for it. I use my imagination to place my conscious mind at that location. I attempt to feel where the base of my penis ends and my rectum begins. I feel for it. I seek to place my consciousness as exactly as I can on that particular spot, and then decide to direct my breathing from there. The next thing I do is to make sure when I exhale that there is no more tension in my lower belly. At the beginning there always is. Optimally, I let my belly flop as much as possible. When I have let my abdomen relax as much as possible I find that I can inhale from as deep in my belly as is possible.

I'm particular aware when I'm doing it right. I can feel that when my belly is as relaxed as possible, then I am going to be able to draw the next breath from the deepest part of my being, and simultaneously realize that when I do that, the air I draw into my lungs is automagically going to stimulate the right sensitive areas at the top of my nostrils where the air turns down toward my lungs. When I begin to feel this happening then I begin to actually feel the perineum area where that holy spot exists. That holy spot has a direct connection with the crown chakra, and activates it without having to pay any attention to it at all. Helen Palmer, from whose audio tapes on Enneagrams I learned this method, states that energy follows the attention. Pay attention to that holy spot at the perineum and it empowers it. It begins to buzz. Then, what happens when it begins to buzz will lead you to the next thing to do. Nobody can tell you that.

One of the things that happens that is easy to describe is that my breathing goes on autopilot when the holy spot begins to buzz. I no longer have to pay attention to the holy spot or my breathing. The crown chakra starts acting up, I feel it buzzing, and my attention goes there. That's how the overview comes into being. It's almost like my body has an autonomous reaction to the buzz. It goes into a sort of catatonia. This catatonia happens at the alpha-theta transition when the sleep state approaches. It takes some getting use to because it exist as a state of paralysis that prevents the body from reacting to the dream sequences that follow. It prevents your body from responding like it does when you're awake in the normal beta state. For example, if you dream of being chased by monsters, this catatonia/paralysis of your body keeps your arms and legs from responding to the dream activity, and your body stays in your bed during the sleep state. Sleep walking is a an exception to the rule.

This paralysis is sometime associated with a phyical vibration, and also exist as an indicator of when you can leave your body to do astral travel. When you are trying to get out of your body to astral travel, this paralysis is what tells you when to perform the ritual used to get out. I do that constantly during the beta state, so that isn't all that interesting to me. What is interesting to me is the next step in my meditation.

The paralysis indicates to me that I'm shifting into warp drive. Sometime there is a loud pop similar to a crack of electricity discharging across my brain. I'm free of concern with my body, and it's fixing to get numb and disappear from interfering with my released conscious awareness. Once that happens, I do seem intellectually aware my body exists, but for all practically purposes, I can no long feel it. I attain to a somewhat disembodied state that allows me to "see" these cyclic opportunities where I can allow myself to get pulled into situations that would not ordinarily be there for me in a "normal" state of consciousness that is attached to identifying with my persona and physical being. This exists as a state of "is-ness". The normal state of consciousness only works in an ex-is state of being, where consciousness is shuttle-cocked back and forth between polarities in such a way that one gets caught up in either the future or the past. No opportunities there. Opportunity happens cyclically, and it ain't no good to you as an afterthought. What you shoulda done and second guessing only brings suffering.

David, Eric, I done my best by you. Have a good life. Your exquisitely crafted personalities may not show up on my radar much longer. I'll only see in you what you ignore, and my speaking to that will only convince you were right about me from the gitgo. No blame.

The red Peterbilt pulled up the on ramp to I-10 at Wilcox, Arizona. I halfheartedly stuck out my thumb not expecting to catch a ride with an eighteen wheeler. Most of the drivers are not allowed to pick up hitch-hikers for insurance reasons or company policies. I looked up at the driver to wave at him as he drove by. It was an older man. Instead of passing me by he stopped the big rig right beside me. I opened the door and he told me to get in. I grabbed my pack and jumped in the truck, and he continued up the ramp and into the traffic of the Interstate.

We rolled along without talking for a coupla minutes, and then he turned to me and told me that God had told him to pick me up. I kinda knew what that meant, I was going to get saved again. I waited for the sermon to begin.

Instead he began to tell me about how hard it was to get a load outta California when he went out there, but that he was lucky and got a load of frozen fish to haul back to Mobile, Alabama, which was his home. He told me that the contractors in California drive a hard bargain when bartering with the truckers because they know how expensive it is to go back toward the east coast empty and pay for their own fuel. There isn't much manufacturing going on in the plains states and there isn't much of a chance to pick up a load on the way until they get near the Mid West. I could feel him checking me out as he talked.

As I listened to him, I realized he was older than I was, so I asked him how long he had been driving trucks. He told me he was 74 years old and had been driving trucks since he was 18. He told me a little bit about how he had gotten into it and what kind of trucks he had driven in the early days before diesels had become dominant. He still had fond memories of the huge gas engines that had been a lot more powerful as far as torque is concerned, and how he used to be able to pass slow traffic a lot quicker than with the diesel engines. But now, the diesels were a lot better than in the old days.

He was proud of how he had started his own trucking business. At one time he had over a 100 trucks on the road and was making a lot of money. He told me that his daughter run the company now, and that they only had about 40 trucks, but that he wasn't involved in managing the company now. When they had gotten into tax trouble a while back, it proved to be too much for him, and he bought himself this truck and was running independent. Just doing what he wanted to now, and only used the company to arrange for his loads.

We rolled through New Mexico pretty quickly. This old man had a lead foot. He must have averaged about 75mph hour. As we approached El Paso and the long stretch of west Texas he said he was going to stop and fuel up at a truck stop soon, and asked me how long it had been since I had eaten. I just told him it had been a while cause I thought that was what he wanted to hear, and it turned out it was. He told me they had a good buffet line at the truck stop and that he was going to buy my dinner. At that he picked up his cell phone, told me he was going to tell his wife he had picked up a hitch-hiker, and he called home.

I only heard his end of the conversation, but it sounded like his wife was worried about him picking me up. He kept telling her that he knew she had warned him about picking up hitch-hikers, but God had told him to pick me up, and that he was going to be the Good Samaritan and feed me. He seemed to take a lotta pride in this. Just after he finished his call, we came to an intersection that had several truck stops and we pulled in to one of them and went inside.

I followed him around in the truck stop to let him lead me into whatever it was that we were going to do about food. As I walked behind him, I noticed that he had this bent over way of walking that didn't seem much different than the way he sat in the truck. I guessed that he had been driving a truck so long it had shaped his body to fit the seat. He walked with his shoulder hunched forward, his knees bent, and the only real difference in his posture was that his head was held straight up. From the side he was shaped like an "S".

The food didn't look that good. It had been sitting on the steam line for a long time under those heat lamps. There was a separate salad bar that looked a little better, and I decided to each mostly from it. When I finished what I could he encouraged me to eat all I wanted. He reminded me I could go back as many times as I wanted. I ended up eating more than I wanted to show my appreciation, but the food was really lousy.

Soon, we were back on the road and through El Paso and headed through Texas. We didn't talk much. I did ask him if he was going to stop anywhere to sleep. I vaguely knew that truckers can only drive so long before they have to take a rest break. He said he didn't pay any attention to that, because he knew how to keep his logs in such a way that the cops couldn't prove he hadn't stopped. He intended to drive straight through.

I knew he must have felt some of the same fatigue I was feeling, but he didn't act like it. Maybe that fatigue is what got him to talking about his family. I can't remember all the details, but it was a strange tale. He had been married several times. His first wife was from Baltimore. She proved to be a no good bitch, and he had left her after their first child. He had gotten married again to a good woman by whom he had a couple of boys. They were pretty good boys, but he didn't trust them to take over the company. Somehow he was contacted by his daughter from the first marriage. He had not seen her for years. She wanted to come to see him and get to know her father, and he paid for her to come down to Alabama to visit. His wife had died, he and his sons didn't get along, and he was lonely. When she came down to Alabama to visit he hadn't told his children about her, and they thought she was a young girlfriend. Turned out he fell in love with her at first sight. He wanted her to have everything, so he married his own daughter. This was the woman he had talked to on the phone.

I didn't realize that this old man didn't know he had told me what he had told me. I don't know whether he thought I wasn't listening or that he hadn't realized what he was telling me. I was listening, and so as we cruised through Louisiana I begin to ask him so questions about why he had married his own daughter. I was extremely curious. For some reason I didn't really care, it wasn't any of my business, I just found the whole situation very odd, and even weirder that he had actually admitted this to a total stranger. My questions seem to startle him out of his fugue, and when he realized what he had told me, he got very hostile and angry at me, and denied vehemenently that he had said what he said. He told me he was a good Christian now, and that he and his wife went to church regularly, and that he had said no such thing. It didn't surprise me at all. People tell their most personal stuff to strangers they think will never come into contact with anyone they know. After all, who would listen to a bum? No blame.

The rest of the trip to Meridian, Mississippi was driven in silence for the most part. It seemed like the closer we got to where he was going to let me out, the madder he got with me. I knew he was just angry at himself for blabbering out stuff that he knew could be turned against him, but he didn't know how I am, and that people had been safely telling me their secrets most of my life. He was just scared because he seemed to have betrayed his own confidence. No blame.

I was born about 20 miles from Meridian. We moved to North Carolina when I was two years old, but we had come back to visit my parent's families who lived in this area all my early years. I had moved back there for almost a year once before, and I knew this place pretty good. The problem for this old man was that where he lived in Mobile was less than ninety miles away, and I had family there too.

When the old man got to Meridian and pulled into the place where he would fuel up, I got my stuff, and then followed him inside to buy a candy bar and a coke. He hadn't spoken to me since he realized what he told me, and he didn't speak to me again. I had followed him inside just to see what his response would be if I acted friendly with the people inside the store. He literally turned pale and could barely sign the credit slip for his fuel. I deliberately left the store before he did so he could see me walking away. I guess I will never know why God had told him to pick me up.

The next morning I got up and started hitch-hiking again. Practically all the traffic came from the Reservation Casino. It was interesting looking at the faces of the people leaving there. I tried to decide whether they had won or lost. That proved impossible. Some seemed to express some sort of tension, others didn't. Many of the cars had more than one person in the car. I knew from experience that there wasn't much chance of me getting a ride with them. Most of my rides came with single men.

I don't know what the real percentages are, but I suspect about half of the rides I got over the years was from men wanting to counsel with me about religion. It seemed as if it made them feel good to save a soul for Christ. I didn't argue with them, but rather accepted what they had to say. Many prayed for me in my hour of need. Sometime I would get saved 3-4 times a day. Many others were drinking. Some seemed so drunk I just wouldn't ride with them, but not often. Other time homosexuals would pick me up hoping for a little action. Most of them were married with children. I don't know how many times I got picked up during my sojourns by men who had left their wives and families and were just riding around the country. They were usually pretty sad and just wanted someone to talk to. Others were looking to party, but after having lived the domestic life for a while, they didn't know how. At least a coupla times this has happened and I would suggest we go to Mexico, and off we'd go. Well, they had been told what to do all their lives by somebody including their wives, most people have been, so they were happy to see me.

It seems difficult for regular people to realize how many people live in the United States, and that kinda stuff is going on all around them. It's not just their neighbors. The roads are full of lost people. They have been led to think that life is a certain way, and that if they do what they have been told, then things will work out. For most people it does. If things come up that don't fit the plan they deal with it somehow, but some never really get their act together. Maybe I'm one of those people. I don't really believe that, but I have to accept it as a probability. I wanted to live a life of adventure from the time I was very young.

I don't really remember much about the next ride I got, but I do remember he took me to an intersection about 25 mile west of Phoenix, Arizona, gave me some money to get something to eat, and I went inside the truckstop that had been a stagecoach station at one time. They had a restaurant and a big souvenir shop. It was a fairly interesting place with lots of antiques from the ranches around the area. I sat down in a booth designed for 6-8 people and ordered some food. Not long after I sat down an older man approached and asked if he could sit across the table. He soon told me that he had been a horse wrangler most of his life, and that he still rode in rodeos. He was 84 years old. He had on one of those shiny-looking jackets that had horses embroidered on it and the name of some rodeo he where he had won the senior title. He said he had bought a small ranch to break horses for the local ranchers that he came to in the winter time, but when it warmed back up in Wyoming, he went up there to work. He had spent his life going back and forth wrangling horses.


The next ride I got was with a trucker. He was driving a flat bed that had four huge tires on the back. They were so big they stuck out over the side of the trailer. They were used on some huge mining machine. Pretty amazing sight.

This guy drove out of California, and told me all about how he had just built a new home up north of San Francisco somewhere. He was a gun nut and liked hunting. He told me all about his guns and how pissed off he was that somebody has stolen his four-wheeled all-terrain vehicle in broad daylight. When we got to the weight station leaving California they told him he couldn't drive at night with a wide-load, and so he pulled into a small independent truck stop just up the road.

We went inside, and he asked me if he could pay for me getting a shower. I hadn't had a bath for a week or so, and my clothes hadn't been washed since Texas. I guess I was smelling kinda ripe. He bought a coupla six-packs and said he'd wait for me at the truck. So, I took a shower. When I went back out to the truck he offered me a beer. He told me he would give me a ride the next day if I wanted to spend the night there, but there was no room for me in the truck. I asked him if I could sleep up on the trailer between those huge tires. Too many rattlesnakes in Arizona to sleep on the ground. He said that would be fine, so I crawled up on the trailer and was soon out like a light.

The next morning bright and early, for some reason this guy didn't like me. Maybe he had a little hangover. I didn't drink but one of the beers. I was a little worried, him being a gun nut and all, that he would pull a gun out and rid the world of one more bum, but he didn't. He did start lecturing me on the Christian work ethic. He told me his boss had a fuel contract with a station that was a coupla blocks off I-10 and when we got there I had to get out. Fine with me.

He pulled into this fuel depot that looked like it was a regular service station for cars. It was a tight squeeze for him to get into. When he stopped I got out of the truck, walked around to thank him for the ride and be on my way. As I approached him, he told me I oughta think about getting a job. Right then, one of the tires blew out on his trailer. Pow!He glared at me and got out his phone to call his boss. I started walking away, and another tire blew out. Pow! He started yelling at me because I was laughing. I walked off looking for an entrance ramp.

I asked a Mexican fellow where the next ramp was. He told me it was about a mile futher east. I had to zigzag around the streets of downtown Phoenix to find it. When I did get near I found that the best way to get to the entrance ramp was to walk down the exit ramp leading to it. It led down to a city street and the entrance ramp was on the other side of the street.

As I walked down the ramp I saw a bum with a sign at the bottom of the exit ramp. He was bearded and wore fatigues, I figured he was a 'Nam vet down on his luck. I watched him work the traffic as I got closer to him. He hit up a coupla cars with a big grin and both of them gave him some money. He seemed to be doing alright. I crossed over the ramp to show him I wasn't invading his territory, and threw up my hand and waved at him. He gave me a big smile, and called out, "Hey bo, going to Carolina... eh?" I nodded and then made my way across the street to the entrance ramp. Just as I got on the shoulder of the ramp I thought about what he said. I looked at my gear to see if there was a sign or something that would tell him I was headed for Carolina. There was nothing. I turned to look at him and he was staring at me. He waved again and turned back to the off ramp traffic. There's a lotta strange people on the road.

The guy who picked me up next was a drunk. He had a cooler on the floorboard of the back seat where he could reach it. He asked me if I wanted a beer and I took one. I hadn't had any coffee and I was in the desert. It tasted pretty good although I don't really like beer.

This guy was all over the road. He wasn't speeding, but he did wander off on the shoulder of the road occasionally. He told me he was going home outside Wilcox, Arizona. It was the hometown of Rex Allen, a cowboy who became a movie actor. He lived outside of town on a ranch he and his wife owned. Said she was gonna kill him for being drunk again. I didn't say much. I just wanted to get to the next town to see if I could get in a little better place to get a ride.

All of a sudden this guy decided that he really liked me. He said he was going to "adopt" me and take me to his home where I could clean up and spend the night. I had been through this before. What he really wanted was somebody to be with him when he came face to face with his wife, and then maybe she would act a little different with a stranger in the house. I wasn't about to let this happen. When he stopped to get another six-pack I got out of the car and disappeared. He actually drove around a while looking for me, and eventually left.

An old trucker gave me my next ride. He was going all the way to Meridian, Mississippi, only twenty miles from where I was born.

One of the most unbelievable events of my life happened when I took a hike in Yosemite National Park one summer morning in July. I climbed up an asphalt trail to the top of one of the lesser peaks there to have a look from what was described as a wonderful vista of the beauty of the park. I got to the top without too much effort. The top of the mountain had a fairly flat area and one could walk around it with ease and see the entire surrounding area just by going to different viewing points scattered around the top of the mountain.

After an hour or so it started drizzling rain and most of the tourists left. When the drizzle changed to snow, all of them left. I felt great about being on top of the mountain all by myself.

What I didn't think about was that the snow would cover the trail up and I might not be able to find it to get off the mountain. I thought it would stop snowing at any moment, and didn't worry about it. After all, it was July. It was summer. This freak storm could not stand.

I should have left right then, because it started snowing harder, it got deeper, the trail head was made indistinguishable from all the other snow covered objects of the area, and I soon found myself marooned there wearing only shorts, a t-shirt, and a pair of canvas deck shoes with no socks.

I desperately searched for a way to get off the mountain, but the sides of the mountain were sheer drop offs and the trail the park service had cut was the only safe way down.

It continued to snow and by dark it was up to a foot deep. I got frightfully cold, and my extremities were turning blue from that cold. I knew that if I did not get off the mountain before dark I would die.

With the additional snow my chance of finding the trail was negated, and when it got close to dark I concluded that I was going to die for my foolish decisions.

Just as the Sun was disappearing over the horizon I saw one last-hope area at the edge of the mountain that might have been the trail head. It was fairly clear of trees and brush and had a little slope down to the edge of the precipice. But the deep snow had blanketed any sure indication that the trail was beneath it.

I sat down on my butt and scooted my way down toward the edge to see if the trail went down and beyond my view in that direction. But as I came to the edge I could see nothing that resembled a trail, and just over the edge was a sheer drop down the face of a cliff for what I estimated to be around 700-800 feet.

I sat there weeping for a while, as my hope of surviving left me in despair. For some reason, I kept visualizing the Park Rangers coming up on the mountain the next day and finding my dead body. I imagined them speculating among themselves what kind of idiot would let himself be entangled in such a stupid situation.

Suddenly, I started scooting back up to flatter ground as fast as I could, and then when I could stand up easily I started running back toward the center of the recreational area in a big loop and then ran as hard as I could toward the edge of the cliff... and leaped out and over it as far as I could. I could not bear the thought of them finding me dead on top of that mountain.

As I took that final leap over the edge of the cliff I lost consciousness. When awareness returned I found myself walking toward a light, I assumed it was the light at the end of the tunnel I had read so much about and I seemed quite happy to be dead.

The light I saw in front of me was not that ethereal tunnel light, but a very earthly one. As I approached it and drew nearer, the light turned out to be a camping area light next to the bathhouse of an unused tent camping area. The door to the bathhouse was open, the inside was heated and the showers had hot water.

I was not dead... yet.

When I looked at my perfectly cobalt-blue body in the mirrors along the wall above the hand sinks, there was not a scratch on me, and my clothes were no more torn than when I jumped.

As I left the park on a bus down to Bakersfield and the warm desert, I suddenly realized I was about to forget the entire incident. I had to struggle to recall the event, and as I thought about what had happened I began to realize the implications of what had transpired. But, if I had not made a extreme effort to remember.. it would have faded away into the oblivion of the unconscious as if waking from a dream.

The next morning I set out to go to Los Angeles and the Pacific Ocean. I thought to just go there and stick my toes in it. That was not to be.

I looked on my map to chart a course to there from Ontario, California. There was a big throughway nearby that would take me straight downtown. I walked to the entrance ramp and put my thumb out. I was there for a while before I got a ride with a truck driver going home in his car. He took me all the way through L.A. to a place just south of downtown. He told me what a favor he was doing to get me through the central area. I believed him. Just as we passed by the center part of town where all the tall buildings were we passed a little grove of trees at one of the intersections. A middle-aged man sat on the ground waving carelessly to the passerbys. He seemed pretty doped up. For a moment I saw myself in him, and I didn't want to be there. That feeling stayed with me the entire time I was in the area.

I saw the LA County jail in the distance. I spent some time there when I was stationed at San Diego in the Navy. Thirty-seven days! I had gotten mixed up with the wrong kind of people. I wasn't innocent of what they put me there for, but it wasn't something I would have done on my own. This kid from L.A. saw me coming, and inadvertantly got me involved in attempting to prove I wasn't a yokel. My trying to prove to him I wasn't only proved I was. Hard times. I saw my first murder in that jail. In fact, I saw two of them, and I was supposed to be next. I didn't even have enough sense or experience to be afraid.

Things got mixed up around L.A., and I kept getting short rides that didn't get me anywhere. I finally figured out that I didn't have a place I really wanted to go except to the ocean, and that wasn't happening easily. I decided to turn back and return to North Carolina. I finally got a ride west back toward I-10. One of the places I found myself was in Southeastern L.A. in the same area where the Watts Riots took place. This was not a place I wanted to be. I felt very nervous there. I found myself at an intersection in what seemed to be a very desperate part of town with a lot of desperate people giving me the eye. I wasn't sure why, but I had the distinct feeling their intent wasn't congruent with my well being. I started walking east to another intersection that might be a little safer place to be. I must have walked about 10 miles until I reached an entrance ramp in a little better neighborhood. There, it didn't take me long to catch a ride.

The guy who picked me up was on his way out to an Indian Reservation that owned the closest full casino to Los Angeles. He was a member of that tribe, but had married a white woman and lived off the Reservation. He told me that he was in charge of the maintenance of the Reservation, but he didn't have anything to do with the Casino part of it. As we rode along, he told me a little bit of the history of the tribe. What he told me was pretty interesting. In general the land granted to the Indians was the most undesirable land around, but fortunately for this tribe, the land had a large canyon that was covered with peat moss. This allowed water to collect there and survive the desert conditions during the hot months. During WWII, however, the government came and removed the peat moss claiming they needed it for the war effort, and this left the tribe destitute. Only when they built the Casino did their fortunes improve.

This Indian guy told me that he had been an athlete in his younger days. He had almost made the Olympic team in one of the track events. That's when he became a Christian. As soon as he asked me if I had been saved I understood why he had given me a ride. This was not an unusual situation at any time during my hitch-hiking days. I began to wonder what I could bargain for to let him save me. I was hungry, so I started working a food mojo. It didn't take much. I asked him if they had restaurants at the Casino, and if they were expensive. He asked me if I was hungry. I told him I was, and he said he would buy me a good breakfast. When we got to the Reservation he drove me around a little bit so I could see how much better the Indians lived now by comparing some of the old huts that were still around with the more modern houses and double-wide trailers. Then we went to this upscale franchise restaurant to eat. He recommended the potato pancakes, and they were delicious. As good as I've ever eaten. I don't know whether they were really that good or I was just so hungry it seemed that way.

After we left the restaurant he drove me back to the intersection of I-10. But when we got there he pulled over to the side of the road and asked me if he could pray for me. I knew the best thing to do was just to go along with him. He grasped my left hand in his and began a long prayer for my soul. At the end of his prayer he asked me if I would accept Jesus as my savior. I said I would. I didn't tell him this same thing had happened four or five times in the last week. It seem to make him so happy he reached into his pocket and gave me a wad of bills. He counted it out first so I would know just how generous he was being with me. It amounted to $17. I took the money and acted like I was putting it in my right hand pants pocket. He talked to a little more about how happy I would be about my decision for Christ, and then he let me go. His eyes followed me as I crossed the road to the entrance ramp, and then he looked down and saw that I had left his money in the car seat. He screamed at me to come and get the money. I refused as nicely as I could . He got out of the car with the money in his hand, waving it at me like it was a victory cup. I still refused his money and walked a little further up the ramp. Finally, he drove off. I don't know if he ever figured out that my soul wasn't for sell or not. I sure haven't. I may have already sold it. Who knows?

This intersection was an interesting place. There was a railroad running parallel to the Interstate. A coupla long trains passed by while I was standing there, so I kinda figured it was one of the main tracks coming out of L.A. toward the east. Across the tracks and down in a little valley was a concrete mixing plant. Beyond the buildings that made that plant up was some low hills that had a little vegetation popping up here and there. This was part of the Mojave Desert and it seemed a little unique in the way the colors, mostly various shades of brown, fit together to form a pattern. It must have been the background for a lot of the western movies filmed around Hollywood. There were a couple of good sized trees on the corners of the intersection. After I had stood waiting for a ride for a while in the hot sun watching the faces of the people leaving the casino I decided to take a break in the shade of those trees. The tension I had experienced by being in the city for the last coupla days caught up with me, and I decided to spend the night there. I found a little niche in some bushes just behind the trees and laid me down to sleep.

A person asked me directly if I was the living personification of the I Ching. I don't gnow his intent in asking me this question, but I do gnow how it affected me. My answer to him was that I don't use the book I studied through using it for over thirty years.

I do think the voice that told me not to use the book as an oracle anymore came directly from the I Ching entity I installed in myself. My use and study of it did install it in my psyche in such a way that it acts in my psyche of it's own volitions, and my querent's question appeared to be about whether or not I was it's stooge or not. The answer is yes, I am strongly influenced by the wisdom I found in myself as a result of subjecting myself to it's influence. I am influenced to an even greater degree by other systems of thinking.

Mainly, I am influenced in thought and action by the King James Version of the Bible. I was raised to adulthood where it was the chief resource of the people around me in my family and community, and still is. It was everywhere. In every media I was exposed to both at home and in the public venue. To even question it's veracity was to invite social disaster upon my person. And yet, as I matriculated into puberty, I did just that. Quietly, with some subterfuge at first, then all out rebellion. I defied the God of the Bible in the most direct fashion I could muster. But, by the time I did that, it was too late, it was already a part of me, and simply became the standard by which I sought other influences. I was at war with myself. At war with an invisible enemy that was not really an enemy at all, but which existed as my conscience that made me consider my words and actions with a particular bias that led to predictable results. It stratified the way I ideated my point of view.

My real war was about wanting options to this predictability. I hated being predictable. As I got away from my natal family and the communities I was associated with due to my family, it became even more apparent that others were aware of my predictable nature. They could easily manipulate the way I responded to them because they knew that people who had been taught to think of themselves in this particular mode would respond to the stimuli they provided in ways they could take advantage of. And not only that, but in ways totally unbeknownst to me. I absolutely hated thinking that I had taken some unique path to another way of seeing the world, only to find them waiting for me on the front porch of my destination, sitting there patiently waiting with a smug smile on their face. What seemed even worse, they seduced me into doing and saying things that contradicted everything that I valued and held sacrasanct whether I was consciously aware of such values or not, and left me praying for relief from a God I had arduously denied as a possible savior.

I needed systems of thinking about things that was at least unpredictable to people working run-of-the-mill mojos. I began to look at the very systems people of this ilk found objectionable.
I wanted to box outside the Queensbury's Rules. I wanted to learn to be street smart in a way that allowed me to cut the crap, and if not win the good fight, to at least find strategies of retreat that would allow me to fight again another day. Total capitulation to my childish vulnerabilities of predictability would not satify. I needed... the occult! Or, so I thought, and so I did.

Over the years, I found that rejection of the system I had been raised to rely on was not enough. Even my great war with myself was not enough to declaw my detractors, because even this rejection was predictable, and led to the same end.

I met a guy during my various sojourns into the world outside the familiar who read Tarot cards. I followed him around like a puppy for about a year to learn how to do this system. This lead me to a person who indoctrinated me into the 'mother of all the occult systems', astrology. Then, about the same time I was given a copy of the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the Book of Changes in a very odd manner, and I became aware of the subtleties of reading palms. I became deeply involved with learning these devices, and over the next thirty years they became the weapons with which I fought the mediocrity of my early years. I certainly became more unpredictable, and I was certainly left alone to stew in my own juices while following this path. It did lead me into communion with others who were at war with themselves, but it did not satisfy a deep and abiding need to be at one with the other.It did lead me to understand that the other was not "out there" beyond all the noble rhetoric I had become a professor of. It lead me to my own person, and to the acknowledgement of what I needed to do to be at home with myself.

Ontario, California is somewhat of a Mecca for truckers plying their trade around Los Angeles. It has two big truck stops just off I-10 that many of them use when doing business in that area. The truck stops used to belong to competitors, but the big chain bought the other one up and now it's just one megatruckstop on different sides of the same road. Hundreds if not thousands of trucks moving through there every day. All day, all night, they never stop coming and going. Most of the trucks, although they do park there for a while leave their big diesel engines idling, and so there is a giant dull thud of a noise that permeates everything in the surrounding area.

The place is well lit at night. There is a modicum of security, but most of it serves the interests of the truck stop rather than the truckers. Those lights and the exhaust from all those diesels belching smoke and rising in the desert air looks eerie from a distance. The ground trembles with the constant vibration of the idling trucks. I had been riding in one of these rumbling, grumbling big trucks for two days. I wanted to get away from the noise.

I didn't really know where I was, but since I wasn't going anywhere in particular, it didn't really matter where I went. I started walking. I began thinking about how, when I was a young person before I had joined the Navy, there was no television sets around much. The most viewing I had ever done was seeing the glare of the round, greenish-looking pictures through a neighbor's window. The only outside entertainment up to then was the family radio. We listened. If there was some program on the radio we wanted to hear we would sit close to the radio that we could hear well enough to pounce on every word, every strain of music. There weren't that many diesels around in those days. I walked a little faster.

As I walked the noise made me think of the big Naval destroyers I had lived on. There was always noise there. I could practically hear the thump of the big propellers turning and feel the vibration under my feet. I thought of the shrimp boats I had worked on the the Gulf of Mexico. The diesels never stopping from the time we left the dock until we returned, day and night, night and day. Noise and vibration without surcease, and my heartbeat entraining to their rhythms. The interpreter becomes the interpreted.

Off to my left I saw the familiar shapes and textures of a plowed field. Even that field was lit by street lights. I thought it might be the gateway to some quiet space among some bushes that I might stretch my body out full length without have to curl it among seats and gear shift sticks and listen to the silence. Maybe even hears some crickets or frogs. Anything not man-made would do. I walked along the road along the edge of the field until the big diesels were just a hum in the distance. It was better, but I still couldn't hear myself think.

It felt good to walk after being cooped up with a nelly driver for two days. I was alone again. Sure, I was somewhere in the outskirts of one of the biggest cities in the world, but it was getting quieter. I could smell the fresh plowed dirt. It was like an old friend that was comforting me as I sought refuge in the dark. I became almost desperate to become unhooked and unconnected from the implements of civilization. Enough! No mas! I just had to find a place I could hide away, sit and wait with great expectations. I gnew it was waiting for me. I walked a little faster.

Suddenly, I remembered I was walking; left, right, left, right... I changed my breathing so that I was inhaling on the left step and exhaling with the right step with two steps in between. I pressed my tongue up against the top of my mouth so the earthy aroma in the air would go straight to the bottom of my lungs. There was no traffic at all on the road, and as I walked and paid attention to my breathing and letting my legs stretch out into a more natural pace I began to relax a little and felt the smoothness enter my gait. I wondered from one side of the road to the other as I ambled along feeling myself. I was alone again.

Up ahead, in the ever present dimness of the never dark road I saw a bridge ahead. As I came to it I could see it was an irrigation ditch. The ditch was paved with concrete. Not unusual in California. It was empty. I stopped at the edge of the bridge and listened for the trucks. I could barely hear them. Probably as good as it was going to get.

Carefully, I edged my way around the guard rails to explore the underside of the bridge. The slope down to the ditch was concrete slabbed too. It was darker under the bridge. I tried to see if there were any people there. I stopped and listened to see if I heard any talking. Nothing. I creeped along the slope away from the buttresses where the big steel beams lay anchored on their pads to see if anybody was there from one side of the bridge to the other. I saw no one, and then went up to the buttresses to see if there was a flat spot I could lay down. There was, and there was enough space between the beams to lay down full length. Without hesitation I put my bag down and sat down to be alone with myself since it seemed like it had been... forever.

I uttered my road chant over and over again, waiting for the time to come when the chance was gone. The paralysis came slowly. I questioned whether it was really there a coupla times and it went away. I started again, and again, and the third time it came over me completely, and I was home.

Recently, I read an article on the BBC site that said that Einstein and Newton both had a form of autism called Asperger's Syndrome. I read the article out of curiosity. By the time I finished it I was convinced that I did too. I have thought I have epilepsy too. Something is just a little off the beaten path about me.

Sometime, I just don't get it. Like a lot of people I have been given a series of IQ tests by people who were professionals and ought to know the proper way of administering these tests. I have always made some pretty good scores, and have been assured that a lack of intelligence is not a problem with me. I don't believe it is either. Admittedly, my intelligence quotient is sort of specilized in a way. I only seem to have it when I'm really interested in the stuff I like to study about. Otherwise I can be pretty much of a dummy. As I wrote in an earlier entry, I suspect that what is really going on in this arena is that, when I'm interested in a particular subject, I appear to have the ability to explore things related to that subject with an intensity of purpose that goes beyond where many others lose interest. I have an unusual type of memory system that allowed me, in the past, to retain things critical to the integration of stuff I learned a long time ago with my current interests. Again, this only applies to the stuff I'm really intrigued by.

My ability to concentrate on a given subject has it's drawbacks though. I seem to be able to get more deeply involved in my interests at the expense of ordinary events that are going on around me during these times. Many times I have been told that I don't have common sense. My response to statements of this kind is that I have no real need of common sense because I am not common. I'm special, just like everybody else.

I seem to go into some sort of trance when I'm concentrating on my interests. Being in this trance allows me to ignore events that can be distracting. The root word of ignorance is "to ignore". So, as far as concentration is concerned, ignorance is my best friend. It also exists as my worst enemy as far as social affairs are concerned. When I ignore stuff my significant others feel is important, it always gets me in the doghouse. It seems like in relationship with the other, I find myself constantly apologizing for not paying attention to their interests, as if I don't, they can't maintain that interest.

Even worse, it seems, ignoring stuff that gets in the way of what I am concentrating on allows me the discovery that if I can ignore those things that distract me, then the stuff I ignore seems not so useful to me. If I can live my life without cluttering my mind with what the other considers important, and find a way not to insult them in the process, then bully for me.I find it easy to be around people who don't depend on me to keep their own interest alive and kicking. I can pretend I'm interested in stuff that is not important to me for only so long, and usually they find out that my pretense is a sham, and then I have to apologize even more to get back into the good graces of the other. Many times, much more often than suits me, I come to the place that not only are the personal interests of the other not important to me, and according to how much they require of me to live their own life, I can lose interest in the other along with their need for enabling. That may have a lot to do with my staying by myself most of the time. This seems to be just fine with me, I've lived alone for much of my life. I seem to have problems in relationship, very similar to what I read in the article on Asperger's Syndrome. When people start yelling at me for not paying attention to them when I'm caught up in my interests, it's time for a change in my habitat.

Another area of relationship I have encountered in the past few years has to do with love and jealousy. Many people seem to like to say that if you don't love yourself, then it might appear impossible to love others. With the question being, if we can only see ourselves in others, and we love ourselves, how can we not love others as we do ourselves. Some people don't find this to fit with their agenda. They seem to expect exclusivity in regard to love, and loving anyone but them upsets their apple cart. I do seem prepared to offer exclusivity, but only in regard to fidelity. I'm ready to promise not to sleep around, but I am not ready to promise not to love others. The process of aging and satisfying my curiousity has finally prepared me to pledge fidelity, and yet I intentionally remain alone. This may change, because I feel I have finally come to the point where I trust myself in this regard.

I seem particularly attracted to studying systems of thought. The systems of thought that interest me are generally not considered by many people as worth the effort it takes to learn them. Most of them have been developed to facilitate an intuitive response rather that proofs that such and such are so and so. I don't seem to require proof of things that my more scientific friends find valuable. Most things obtained by the scientific method have been proven wrong eventually, and only have temporary value. So do intuitive results, but intuitive results are not considered by many people to be written in stone anyway, so why go to all the trouble to prove them. The only thing I have ever encountered that has remained the same during my brief sojourn on earth in this particular body is that I have always been me. Me doing this, me doing that, me saying such and such, and so and so. These things have value for the moment they are useful, and easily discarded if they lose their value. I attempt to live in the flow of the specious present as often as I can, and hanging on to things that will eventually be proven wrong seems to interfere with my focusing on the flow.

The next morning we got up and used the facilities of the truck stop to straighten up a little, got some coffee, and continued on our way to Los Angeles. I have always been partial to Flagstaff, Arizona. I have approached this city from all sides at various times in my life, approaching it from the east produces a very odd sensation in me. I was raised in the coastal plains of North Carolina where the geophysical nature of the area consists of really flat ridges between swamps.

There are not many high places there. What we call hills are really just places in the road where one dips into the swamps and then climb back out of the swamp when the road returns to the flat land. The only place where you can see for any distance at all is where the forest has been cleared for farming, or you climb up to the top of the city water tanks and fire towers. Otherwise, even to see the sky you have to look up.

The odd sensation I felt as we approached Flagstaff is that when we went up a hill, we never went down again on the other side. There is no other side. It is a continual climb. Some special places I could look ahead and see the road in front of us going up and up until it disappear into the horizon.

There are not many trees, as such, until you get within about fifty miles of Flagstaff, but as the mountains Flagstaff is located on comes into view, the Ponderosa pines start appearing, and there is something to look at besides the flat plateus that appear as steps leading up to Flagstaff.

As we closed in on the city, the driver started pointing things out to me he thought interesting. He was a veritable tour guide. His constant chatter about his family life now changed into a conversation about his interests about the land. He had already told me to be on the lookout for various animals. Deer, antelopes, bears, jackrabbits loved the high country and the trees that seem to come outta nowhere just like the humans who lived there.

He pointed out some pretty high hills on the outskirts of town and asked me if I knew what they were. They appeared to have a cone-like shape, and I wondered outloud if they were extinct volcanoes. He told me they were the same material, but actually were the slag and refuse from coal mines. People used the stuff to pave their driveways and farm roads. The color of the stuff seemed familiar to me, so I asked him if that was the same stuff Texas used to pave their highways before asphalt come along. He said it was. When he realized my interest in volcanoes, which didn't exist near my home, he started pointing out little ridges of lava that had popped up in jagged lines all the rest of the trip. Even though I had seen these ridges in various locations out west, I hadn't realized they were real lava before.

The Ponderosas around Flagstaff were interesting to me because as we climbed in elevation they were grouped closer together and there was more underbrush amongst them. The driver pointed out that the higher one got, the more snow there was to feed them. When they first appeared they seemed spaced pretty far apart compared to the forests east of the Mississippi River, and I could see pretty deep into the woods through them, but as we climbed in altitude they were closer together and it became more difficult to see very far into the woods. After we got past the actual city of Flagstaff there were lots of other kinds of trees and wildlife there, and it seemed like a lot more water and streams about. The drop out of the high country and mountains around the city was much more abrupt than on the eastern side and sooner than wanted we were in the salt flats and the everpresent brown of the basin and range country.

The driver started talking about his intention to visit his brother in San Diego when he delivered his load to Los Angeles. He told me told me a lot more about his family and his relationship with them as we breezed through Nevada and eastern California. I had seen this country a hundred times before, so I listened and nodded in and out of a series of naps as we drove along. The little dog had appeared to adjust to my presence and sat in my lap much of the time now. The driver told me that he was going to spend the night at a big truckstop about fifty miles east of LA, and that's where he would let me out. We got there about dark, and he gave me five bucks to get something to eat. I got out of the big Red Ranger, waved goodbye, and wandered off to get some food and find a safe place to sleep for the night.

I tripped the light fantastic into town and found the busiest intersection of the Interstate. There was a big truck stop located just across the street from the on-ramp. I had just enough money to buy a cup of coffee, so I went inside, found a safe looking place to place my stuff, just across from the restaurant cash register, and found myself a seat at the counter.

I gnow waitresses. They have been my only friends in many desperate situations. I gnew just by looking at the one who waited on me was a single mom. She also gnew me. We didn't talk much, she was busy, but she kept my coffee cup filled until I had no excuse to sit there any longer and my poor belly could not stomach any more acid. I left her my widow's mite for a tip, paid for my coffee, and went near the driver's lounge where I found a stool at the noisy video machines near the door the drivers used to come inside and return to their big trucks.

As I sat there, all the fatigue from the previous night and the trip crept up on me. I kept nodding off, nearly falling off the stool several times. Occasionally, I got up and went to the restroom to relieve myself from all that coffee I drank. Eventually, a grizzled trucker came up to me and told me that I should go inside the TV room and sit in there or the management people would run me off for loitering. I hadn't realized I would be allowed in that room or I would have gone in there first. My fatigue plagued me even worse there because the seats were fairly comfortable like those in a movie theater. I kept falling asleep. After an hour or so, I decided to get back on the road.

The on-ramp to the Interstate sloped downhill. It wasn't very long, and there was a semi parked on the shoulder of the ramp so that it would have difficult or even impossible for someone who might stop for me to pull over. But, the traffic there was pretty good. A couple of cop cars passed me without stopping or hassling me, so I knew I would eventually get a ride if I just stood there long enough. I didn't stand there very long at all. A big red Road Ranger stopped right in front of me without pulling over. A dark-haired driver in his mid-thirties motioned for me to hurry up and jump in, and I grabbed my pack and got in the truck. He took off and entered the Interstate traffic before he turned to me and said, " I didn't know if you would still be there. I watched you inside the truck stop for a while, and figured you was alright, and hoped I could pick you up to have somebody to talk to." I thanked him.

After that, for a good long way I didn't even have the chance to talk much. He did the talking. That was fine with me. He told me he was going to Los Angeles, and that if I behaved myself I could ride with him as far as he was going. I wasn't exactly sure what he meant by behaving myself, but not to worry, I soon found out that all I had to do was sit there, and everything that had ever crossed his mind would eventually be revealed. This boy needed somebody to talk to in the worst way. Since he was going to give me a thousand mile ride, I was glad to oblige.

He told me he was a Mormon. He had been raised in Utah and followed his father to Arkansa after he had moved there for a job. He was married and had two kids. He had worked as a diesel mechanic before he bought his own truck and started driving. His wife stayed in Fort Smith, Arkansa and kept the books and arranged all his loads through the internet. He used to have a satellite hookup in the truck, but since he had cosigned for his father to buy his own truck he didn't have the money to keep it up. He was worried about his father, who was a year older than me. Him and his wife had bought a coupla acres of land just outside Fort Smith about ten years ago, and built a house that wasn't finished yet. He had two big dogs around the house that protected his family, but they eat a lot of food.

He went on to explain exactly why he had bought the Road Ranger instead of a Freightliner. He had wanted the 'Cadillac of all trucks', one of them big ol' Peterbilts with everything on it, but with a family, he just couldn't afford it. But, one of these days when he got the kids through school, it was a done deal. Course, he didn't aim to drive trucks all his life. Up until two years ago he had two trucks, but the ol' boy he had driving the other one went to sleep at the wheel one night and tore the damn thing up. He had told him not to take them damn pills and drive day in and day out, but noooo, did I think he had listened? Damn rednecks, you can't tell 'em nothing. Since then, he decided to wait awhile, and since his Daddy come hitting on him for some help to buy a truck for himself, things had been kinda tight. He couldn't really afford to help his Daddy buy that truck, but then again, he was his Daddy, and he couldn't just let him sit there after he broke his arm and got layed off. The damned thing hadn't healed right. He told him not to go to that quack, but he went anyway. If he had just listened to him he wouldn't have had all that trouble.

We rolled on down the road. We got through El Paso a few hours later without much hassle. As we turned north up toward New Mexico I noticed how much El Paso had grown in that direction since the last time I had passed through. Surprisingly, it was the area on the eastern side of the Interstate that had grown the most. The Rio Grande pretty much controlled what happened on the other side of the road. The dairy farms with the thousands of Holsteins seemed to have gotten bigger, but it was hard to tell. Seeing a dairy in the middle of a desert had always been a strange sight, but after seeing all those irrigated fields of alfalfa it made sense. The smell hadn't changed a bit. It always made me remember those before-daylight forays I made to milk our family cows when I was a kid. I had to tote warm water to the cowbarn to wash the manure off the cow's udders. They liked to lay down in their own droppings in cold weather because it was warm. I knew the smell of cow manure from a long time back. so did the kids I went to school with. I only had one pair of shoes back then.

I find it interesting that no matter how many times I pass through an area there is always something it seems like I missed seeing in the previous trips. This time it was noticing the huge pecan and walnut orchards along the Rio Grande. They obviously had to irrigate them. I don't think I have ever been through there when it was raining. The old familiar pecan trees, so prevalent in the South where I grew up, seemed to conjure a wave of nostalgia from me. For the life of me I couldn't figure out why I had not seen those orchards before. The trees were not that young. But, neither was I. I had passed this way at least a hundred times or more and never noticed them.

Meanwhile, ol' Motormouth was telling me why he didn't go to church anymore. Didn't see any sense in it. Sure, the Mormons would help you, but they extracted a price for all that neighborliness. They wanted you to do this, they wanted you to do that, ya just didn't have any privacy. That's why he liked moving to Arkansa. A man could get away from all that, buy a little place of his own, and mind his own business. Did I like Mexican food?

I told him I did, generally, it depended on the cook. He told me that he had a favorite Mexican restaurant. It was located on a shortcut that connected I-10/20 to I-40. He hadn't been there for a good while, but was thinking about shifting north up to I-40 to go to Ontario, California instead of the way he had intended on I-20, just so he could get hisself some of that Mexican food. Would I mind if he went that way?

That's when I began to wonder what he meant when he had told me earlier that I had a ride as long as I behaved myself. Still remembering that it was late March, and I didn't have any warm clothes with me, and I-40 was just far enough north that I had to consider what weather conditions might arise, I decided to ask him what he meant by "behaving myself"?

He started talking about homosexuals, he said, "You ain't gone start none of that stuff are you? I mean, we gone have to stop and sleep somewhere, and the restaurant is at a truck stop, and I'm sleeping on my bunk in the back, and you ain't gone try none of that stuff are you? Because, if you are, then you gone have to get the hell out of my truck. You ain't... are you?" I assured him I wasn't. "Well, there ain't enough room in the back for two of us. Do you mind sleeping up here on the floorboard? It's got a rug on it, and you'll have to sort of curl around the seats, but it's better than being outside." Again, I assured him that would be perfectly okay, much better than where I tried to sleep last night. "Well, the dog pees there sometime. I try to stop him, but it don't always work. Sometime I just can't get off the road in time for him."

I forgot to mention the dog. He traveled with a small dog. Made sense to me. Kept him company, he just couldn't talk. The dog was jealous of me being in his seat, but after a while he got used to me being in the truck and got up into my lap. When he did that, it seemed like the ol' boy was jealous of the dog accepting me. Most of the trip, however, the dog stayed on the bunk in back.

The emphasis he placed on me not starting "none of that stuff" made me wonder if he knew why he really picked me up, but as long as my not being put out in cold weather depended on my actions, I figured I'd be okay heading north, and since the Mexican food would be my first chance to eat in a coupla days, I'd worry about what he did at the truck stop later.

We headed up through New Mexico on the shortcut to I-40. I hadn't been on this road before, so it was new territory for me. We passed through little towns I had never seen before, so I liked that. The small towns were about like any of the other small towns out west. Motels, filling stations, farm implement dealers, cotton gins, bars, and restaurants. The every present churches and county courthouses here and there. After a while we got to the town where the truck stop/restaurant was, and he found a spot to park the truck.

The Mexican food was okay, not much different than much of the Mexican food I had eaten all over the Southwest, but since it was the first food I'd had to eat for a while I was happy to get it.

When we'd finished eating, and he had told the waitresses all the jokes he'd heard since his last visit, we went back out to the truck to sleep. He warned me again about "starting some of that stuff", and when he finally shut up, I tried to find a comfortable way of arranging my body on the floor to try to sleep with the smell of dog piss wafting up to my nose. But after not getting much sleep for two days I crashed fast and hard. He...didn't "start none of that stuff" either, or if he did, I was so far gone I wouldn't have noticed.