My childhood nemesis, my older sister Billie, has often attempted to control my memory of certain childhood memories. When the family would get together and look at photographs, we would argue about what was going on when the photograph was taken. Usually, I didn't have any idea what was going on at that one moment all those years ago, but my sister takes the position that she was two and a quarter years older than me, and was more aware of what was going on. Then she clams up.

Since I don't have any real memory of such photographic events except for her dumb assessment. It's all based on some stupid snapshot from a bad camera and even worse film. It's just sickening to think I could have a little girl's memory of my childhood simply because she could beat me up if I didn't agree with her. But, she was even more underhanded when it came to blackmail.

Billie was a tattletale. A little power game she was good at. Inevitably, she would come to me first and tell me that she was going to tell our parents I had done something against the rules. I would call her a liar and that her shirt tail was on fire, and the screaming began. Then, she would stop yelling, draw herself up into her most self-righteous nine year old stance, and tell me that if I didn't pay her something to shut her up, she would tell on me, and not only that, but that she was obligated by family duty to expose me for the sinner I was.

Then, with a haughty practiced twirl, she would spin round on her heels, and head for the house yelling, "Momma" like the witch she only pretended to be. Mostly, I would find myself following her and yelling, "You better not tell! You better not tell!" Fat chance. Billie was a tattletale.

Usually, by the time she found out what I'd done, my parents already knew about whatever it was she was manipulating me about, and it didn't make any difference what transpired between Billie and I. Our family was a very closed loop system, being strangers with no kin about, and the outcome of my innocent mischievousness was painful and certain. Spare the rod, spoil the child.

Billie taught me the nursery rhyme about what little girls are made of, you gnow, sugar and spice and all that jazz. Billie liked the part about what little boys are made of, and when she got to that scene she would scrunch up like the Wicked Witch from the fairy tale about Hans and Gretel, and her eyes would be sizing me up for the oven while she screeched that part out as if it were truly painful.

Billie was fairly believable. You should hear her ghost stories.

"Sweet Mother of God! Run for your life!"

**************

A friend wrote to tell me he felt holes in my last entry about the trumpet. He didn't get a sense of closure because I didn't tell what my parent's response to my terrible anger at my father's present of a cornet instead of the silver trumpet. I realized I was closing the story fast, because I wrote it late at night and run outta steam. I just wanted to end it and go to bed.

I don't seem all that sure what my parent's attitude was about breaking a child's spirit. Maybe that attitude seemed similar to that of the prevailing community standards of that time, and yet they raised me and my brothers and sisters away from the place they themselves were raised, and the two societies were much different in set and setting. I think it made a difference they had both been to college (my father had already graduated by this time), and they were of an experimentive temperament as young couples sometime are. My father beat me, quite badly at times, especially if he was under a lot of pressure, but the beatings he administered were not as a stranger.

His beating seemed sometime like a ritual that included an unseenfamily group I did not know because we had moved around so much. My father would compare a beating he gave me with one he had recieved as a kid for doing exactly the same stunt he beat me for. He would compare a time he beat me with beatings his older brother and male cousins got for doing something he said I did. And we both deserved it.


Candidly, I don't know if I was ever convinced that what I was supposed to have done wrong was really all that bad, but that I was getting beaten for was because of family tradition. Blood is thicker than water. To become a member of my family seemed to require beatings of a certain kind for a very specific reason. My natal family might suggest I fell out of the highchair when I was a baby as an explanation of my uncouth ways, but I don't think they would ever deny that I earned my stripes as a family member.

Of course I got beaten for throwing a tantrum. It was standard fare. As usual, everything was calmly discussed before hand. I knew exactly why they thought I needed punishment. It made no difference if I plead innocence. The metaphor of how it was going to hurt them more than it hurt me got spoken like a a prayer for my wicked, lost soul, and the games began.

Some people finalize a deal with laughter, others with some unholy waking of the dead ancestors with ritual screaming and despair. I was punished severely, and heard the lecture about how much sacrifice the family was making to give me what I preyed for. I was bruskly informed that I was going to take that cornet to band practice, and I was going to learn to play it whether I liked it or not, because the family's honor was at stake. Why on earth should the generosity of my father be slandered by my childish selfishness? I would do right or suffer the consequences.

I did a little of both. My parents and I both seemed to somehow negotiate a deal over time about it. Later, all of us seemed more repentant about our anger than what the horn represented at the time. The last time I saw the cornet, my oldest daughter kept it as an icon representing her absent father. She says she feels my pain through it. She wants me to feel her pain too. Maybe I do. She says I cheated her out of family tradition by staying away from her. I hope so. Some pain is not all in your head.

We came to Clinton just after I turned twelve years old. I was truly awed by living in a town more than twice the size of the last town we had lived in. The last town we lived in was twice the size of the village I lived in previously. Clinton already had kid's little leagues in baseball and basketball, and I had never played much of either before we arrived here.A lotta bonding, both seen and unseen, had already taken place with many of the native kids. As a result I was one of those kids who was the last one chosen for the first coupla years after we moved here. I was a tough kid, but I was small and skinny. I had a big head and a small body.

The best thing that happened to make me feel pretty good about being in Clinton was finding myself intrigued by Sidney Carter's silver trumpet. Sidney was a kind of quiet, shy person. He was the grandson of the man who owned the house my family rented. He lived with his grandfather in the big house up the lane.

The house was a one-story house. It had a modular look to it as if it had grown from a fairly small cabin. It was told
that ol' man Carter built it himself, and had added more rooms to it as his fortune developed. It looked like one of the last additions to his house he made was a front porch. It had banisters around it. They were painted white and consisted of a rounded top rail, a rectangular bottom rail about six inches off the floor of the porch, and turned wood spokes spaced about four inches apart like the pickets of a fence.

But, for me it was hallowed ground. I would go visit Sidney at that house and the first thing I would do would be to ask him to show me his trumpet. He was proud to do it at first. He would bring that trumpet, case and all, out to that porch as though it was the holy grail on a velvet cushion, lay it down with great, exaggerated tenderness, and then open the case up. The suspension and awe I felt as it came into sight was one of the most beautiful sights I had ever seen. It was for sure the most precise machine I had ever seen, and it was shiny!

It was a marvel just laying there in the soft, royal blue, deep pile lining. Slowly, with proper reverence to the Gods of Music, he would uncradle it with his hands and hold it up to the sunlight, and it bedazzled me. My jaw would drop open when it sparkled in the light like some precious jewel. Then, he would play and shatter my illusions like so much fluff. I didn't want to hear him play that trumpet. I wanted to hold it it my own hands. I yearned for it with the deep prepubesent yearning of a twelve year old boy to hold that thing in my hands and just turn it over and over until I had memorized every detain to my heart's content. I abided with his torturous attempts to play just for the chance I could talk him into letting me hold it. There was some horrible angst overcoming me, because Sidney recognized how mightily I wanted to hold the trumpet, and began to tease me unmercifully, but he wasn't a mean person, Sidney wasn't, and we both knew the time would come.

When he did let me hold the trumpet I felt stupid. I had only seen pictures. I had never seen the real thing itself, and I felt belittled by it's very structure. It astounded me that somebody had taken the time to figure out how to make it. It made me wonder what I would have to know to create a trumpet. I couldn't even imagine making the shape of it in model clay. Much less figure out what had to happen when a human blew into the mouth piece to make those sounds come out so acutely on the right pitch. Something woke up in me that day out on the porch of the big house when I finally got to hold the trumpet in my pitifully small hands.

I wanted my own trumpet. Then, as now, I have no shame. Whatever it takes. For some reason it seems a little unpleasant to remember what I had to do to get that trumpet. I'm sure my mother had a lot to do with it. Earlier, she had me taking piano lessons hoping to lead me into a more cultured perspective. They didn't take. It wasn't my idea of something to do. But, the trumpet was my heart's desire.

One day I came in from playing just after my father had gotten home. He called me over with the rest of the family. Immediately I saw a strange box. My father was in a good mood. That was a good sign. When he felt relaxed and playful he was a lot of fun. He didn't get that way often because of his work. Today, however, he was in good form. His antics always made me smile, but today I wanted to know what was in that box. He saw me looking at it. He knew how powerful my curiosity can appear when I am totally dumbstruck. I knew what was in that box by the way he teased me. I knew it was my turn in the barrel.

He stretched the suspense out pretty good, but not enough to hurt me, and then handed me the box and sat waiting.

I didn't know what to do. If it was what I thought it was, then it didn't appear to be a long enough box to fit a silver trumpet in. Carefully I pried the flaps off the box and opened it up. The first thing I saw was the crowsack colored side of the case. I got it all the way out of the box and saw that it had mahogony brown leather reinforcing all around the edges of the case. The stitched leather handle had shiny brass rings on each end of it that attached to brass templates on the case itself.

Something was wrong. Hurriedly, I unsnapped the shiny latches and opened up the case, and there it was. It was not a trumpet, and it was not silver. It looked like a trumpet, in a rather squatty way, and it was not slim and slick, but bulky and utilitarian. It was a cornet. A lousy CORNET!

My response was not discreet nor diplomatically conceived. I screamed. I raged. I tried to throw it in the fireplace. My whole family dived for the cornet to save it from my wrath. They knew me well. I ran outside. I never went back to Sidney's house to see the trumpet again. I hated him and his damned trumpet.

I was a spiteful child, and I became a spiteful man. Wrestling that demon rage seemed to have become my life's work.

This rage, as such, seems neutral and unconcerned with the ethics of it's demands. Just that it moves the mountain. When it appears it comes like a thief in the night and overtakes me by surprise. It both protects me and wounds me like a double-edged sword that it mimicks. It took a long time to see it as cyclic, that it came in waves of passion that pulsed at the periphery of whatever understanding of things I might have in a particular moment. Always beyond the this and that of my day-by-day sniveling, I could not conjure it for my own use. Rather, it used me.

In this particular case the outcome of that particular rage did not fare me well. It was not a hard thing to do. I just refused to learn to read sheet music. I found that if I could learn the scales and practice them by rote, that I could play anything I wanted. I could stand next to somebody who could read the notes, and after I'd heard it once I could play it by memory. The band leader figured out my ploy, and in a big humiliating scene in front of the whole band, he told me to play a new piece of music to see what the trumpet part would sound like. Naturally, I was shocked and became a muttering fool. But, Ed Taylor was not through with his humiliation. It would last for three more years.

First, he made me switch instruments and play the French horn. He got the same results. Then he made me play a baritone and soon gave up on that. At the beginning of my 11th year of high school, he switched me to playing the tuba, and that was that. I could figure out what the bass line would be by memory, and as long as I played in key, it didn't really matter what I played, cause I got pretty good at improvising.

Mister Taylor was a stern disiplinarian. A taskmaster of unyielding morals. My very presence seemed painful to him. Occasionally, I would look up to see him grimacing at me as if in the throes of deep agony. He simply outlasted me. He was determined that I would learn to read musical notation. In my senior year he told me that I was going to be one of the soloists in the yearly Band Day Concert, and the musical piece was called Tubby the Tuba. I was required to learn to play that song by note or I would be the laughing stock of the whole school.

After consulting with my father, his fellow teacher, and telling him the plan to call my bluff, My father agreed to let Mr. Taylor keep me after school for two hours every day but Friday for private tutoring, with the tutor being himself.

I don't recall exactly how they blackmailed me into it, but by the date of the concert arrived, I was almost convinced myself that I could performed the piece just like it was written. They had patiently watched me made a joke out of playing music long enough or me to owe my father and Mr. Taylor a sincere effort to do right. The concert went over big, and my big solo got me three standing ovations.

I was hooked, but as it turned out, it was the roar of the crowd that really excited me. I really enjoyed getting people revved up enough they can't stop clapping was the biggest thrill of all. I just didn't know it yet.

I find it interesting how I sit around all day now. When I get up in the morning I have a ritual of disgust. First think I usually do is mash the start button on my computer so that it will boot up while I'm attending my toiletries, and when I return and turn on the monitor it is usually set for TV reception from watching the late shows a little before I go to sleep, so the first input I get is usually a morning show. Many times the first thing I see is the news portion of the morning show, and the whole idea of keeping up with this crap is what really disgusts me. I only receive the three network stations, and their version of the news is so sensationalized and censored for cuteness it drives me crazier.

Then, I switch the monitor over to my desktop and double click on my mail program to download the e-mail. I created mailboxes for each of the discussion groups I'm subbed to and all my friends I receive mail from have their own mailbox. What shows up in my Inbox is pure spam. This morning I had 18 spam posts in my felix Inbox and not one single post from the discussion groups or my friends. My rabblerouser tag had some posts from the discussion groups I'm subbed to in that name. No spam. felix was my first e-mail name, and I learned a lot about what not to do using that address.

Presently, I contemplate the notion of changing my felix address by using a 1 (one) instead of an l (ell) in the name to maintain the idea of it, and yet by changing one letter to a number I think it will stop a lot of the spam I get. These spammers appear to run a list of common names for each ISP and develop a list of addresses for each ISP based on commonality.

It seems odd when e-mail slows down to a crawl. The groups I sub to have members from many different countries and many different time zones, but it seems like when the volume of e-mail slows down, it slows down all over the world. I have read lots of comments about how the internet acts as a group mind. Participating in discussion groups seem to make it easy to find that very believable.

I hope to start writing of random adventures about places I have slept while hitch-hiking and traveling around North America soon. The series I wrote previously centered around my last trip taken several years ago, and my memory of those events are still pretty good and easy to put in sequence. The others happened some time ago and were not so sequential.

Many times I would just leave my residence and get on a local road and start hitch-hiking. When a driver picked me up and asked me where I was going I would make up a destination in the direction they were headed and tell them that. But then, a little later, I would ask them where they were going and if that place sounded like an interesting place or some place I had never been, I would tell them I was going there for a while. In other words, I didn't care where I was going. I was just looking for adventure and I didn't know where it would show up. That "not knowing" seem to exist as an attitude that allowed me to find excitement where I could find it, rather than going to a particular place in hope of finding it. In this way my sojourn seemed more digital than linear, because it resulted in me zigzagging all over the place as the opportunity arose.

Many drivers were local to the place they were going, and seemed delighted to show me the local sites of interest. As a hitch-hiker I was normally in the passenger's seat or in the back seat, and got shown many places as if I were on a tour with a tour guide who enjoyed telling me the stories associated with the site. I got a ride with one guy who had a fascination with petrified wood, and he was going to the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. While I wasn't totally consumed with the idea of petrified wood, I used my casual interest to ask him questions about one of his favorite subjects. This resulted in him spending a good half day showing me around the various exhibits of the park and explaining to me how he thought each exhibit came to exist in great detail, and then bought me lunch so he could tell me his general theory about the geographical history of the earth.

I have been thinking about how to write the final leg of my hitch-hiking trip I did at the age of 60 just before my 61 birthday three years ago. Maybe I just don't want to end it, but the truth is that I don't remember that much about the end of the trip because I had getting home on my mind more than what actually happened.

I woke up at about dawn in Florence, South Carolina. Immediately I started thinking about getting home. In a way, I already was home because in Florence I was already on the coastal plains of the Carolinas. I wasn't born in the Carolinas, but I was raised there from the time I was two years old. I had lived in many different parts of the U.S., but I always felt most comfortable here.

I could smell the swamps in the air and even on my clothes and skin as I lay there listening to the traffic of I-95 and all the cars and trucks using the intersection. There was a misty dew on the ground, and all over me. The mugginess was as familiar to me as the sound of my own voice. I stood up and gathered my stuff to get back on the road. I realized that I was very hungry, and decided to see if there was enough money left in the bank to use my debit card to eat breakfast. I was within a hundred miles from my house, and I wanted to celebrate having almost completed my sojourn.

I had slept about two hundred yards away from the intersection near the entrance and exit ramps that catered to the traffic headed north on I-95, and so I walked over to Highway 54 to the motels and restaurants there. I saw a sign on a Ryan's Steak House driveway that said they were serving an all you could eat buffet for $4.95. I figured I had at least that much in my debit account, and decided to go in and pig out for breakfast as my celebration.

I went inside and chose a booth near the entrance that didn't have any people near it. I was aware that the scent from my clothes and body was highly odiferous, and I didn't want to offend any more people than was necessary. A middle-aged waitress came with some silverware, and asked me if I was going to do the buffet, and if I wanted coffee. I said I was and I did. She flounced off to fetch my coffee, and I went to look at what food they had to offer. It looked real good, they had a big variety of various foods that looked like they took into consideration the different tastes that would come in from the Interstate. The scrambled eggs looked freshly cooked and the bacon and sausage was not to greasy looking, I saw they had plenty of grits that didn't look too lumpy, and so my homecoming breakfast was complete.

I loaded up a plate and went back to the booth where I found the waitress had brought a pot of coffee and a basket of fresh baked yeast rolls. I took my time settling my butt into the booth seat, because I knew I was gone be sitting there for a long time. My stomach had shrunken over the last three weeks because I hadn't eaten regular, and if I ate too fast I was gone bloat up... a sin in an eat all you want buffet... and not get my money's worth.

Not only was the food good, but the moment itself was delicious. I indulged myself mixing the scrambled eggs with the first grits I'd had in a month as though it were some exotic delicacy from an equally exotic location, because to me it was exactly that. Most non-Southern people don't really understand that grits exist as a fairly tasteless medium with which to carry the real flavor of the other breakfast foods like eggs and bacon. It's particularly good with salt-cured country ham. Country ham itself don't taste quite as good as grits with red-eye gravy.

A couple came in and sat at the next booth closest to the entrance. They looked to be in their late forties or early fifties. The woman sat with her back to me so she could look at the traffic coming and leaving from the entrance. This was significant to me because it kinda told me who the boss was in their relationship. Another thing about her that seemed to support this notion was the way she was dressed. She didn't look like she dressed to please her man, and yet the way the man was dressed looked somehow like she had chosen his clothes, as though she dressed him to please herself. He looked fairly well groomed with a full head of wavy hair, and as he glanced at me, I saw him take in my day pack sitting in the seat beside me, and then he looked at my face. The woman was sitting within 4-5 feet of me, well within range of the muskiness I felt sure emanated from my person, but didn't appear to pay any attention to me as they got up and got food.

As I was sitting there I decided to get out my spiral notebook I had done a little writing in during my trip, and started making notes about the trip, and then started writing a poem to commemorate the event. When I paused in my writing and looked up from the note book to take another bite of food or to reflect on my memory of the trip, I notice the man looking at me with a curious look on his face.

The waitress had kept tabs on me pretty good, and brought me some more yeast bread to replace what was left and had gotten cold. I got the impression that she empathized with something that had happened to her earlier, because she seemed like she was mothering me to some degree. I thanked her for her attention, and she asked me where I was going. Briefly I told her what I had done, and how excited I was to be so near to my house where I was anticipating a long hot shower and sleeping in my own bed. The man in the next booth was unabashedly listening.

Just after she left my table, the woman sitting in the booth in front of me got up and went to the bathroom. When she did, the man got up and stood in front of me, and told me he had heard what I had told the waitress. He had a big smile on his face and he seemed quite friendly, and so I asked him if he would like to sit with me for a moment. He sat down, and began to ask me a little about my trip and why I had done it. I told him that my trip was done for old time sake, that I had spent years on the road when I was in my twenties and thirties, and I just wanted to remember the old days and to see if anything had changed.

This man looked at me as I was talking with a sense of awe on his face. He looked toward the bathrooms to see if his wife was coming, and upon seeing that she was still in there told me that he had always wanted to do what I had done, but had given in to living the domestic life working and taking care of his family. I saw his wife emerging from the bathroom and he followed my gaze and understood she was coming back to the booth. He stood up and reached out to shake hands, and tell me how much he appreciated our little encounter. I felt something in his hand and took it, and when he returned to sit with his wife I looked in my hand and saw a twenty dollar bill. I looked up as they were leaving and we exchanged smiles, and they went to the cashier to pay up and leave. I put the twenty into my pocket feeling grateful that I wouldn't get home totally broke, as had happened so many times before.

Eventually, I had sat there so long and couldn't find any excuse to remain in this inside place to be, and got up to pay my bill. When I got to the cashier's booth she waved her hand and told me the man had also paid for my breakfast. This seemed like a good start to what I hoped would be an uneventful and speedy homecoming.

I walked back out to the entrance ramp to continue this last part of my three week journey. I had to wait about an hour to catch a ride with this young guy who was going to the South of the Border exit on the North Carolina-South Carolina border. When I walked up the entrance ramp to catch a ride, I was in North Carolina. I barely turned around when a car stopped to pick me up. The driver was a man in his fifties. He asked me where I was going and I told him the name of my home town. Then he asked me if I had played football in high school. When I told him that I did, he asked me who my coach was. I told him, and he began to tell me all about Coach Carr. It turned out that this guy had been a coach in the area for most of his life, and he told me all about this part of his life before he let me off at the intersection of I-95 and Highway 24 which would take me to Clinton.

I was less than thirty miles from my house, but I knew from the past that thirty miles might take all day. I don't have a good explanation for why things happen this way, but it has proved difficult to hitch-hike between Fayetteville and Clinton. This proved to be another one of those times.

The intersection of I-95 and State 24 got built as some sort of experiment the government did back when it was brought into existence. Route 24 had been four-laned for the last 10 miles in and out of Fayetteville because of the commuter traffic, and the Interstate getting built was celebrated as an excuse to try this experiment. There are lots of 'conveniences' at this intersection. The entrance and exit ramps are very long and they connect to a separate service road which makes it easy to build up speed before you actually enter the traffic of either highway. There was a lot of land used for this convenience, and there are no exits for a long way from the intersection. I've heard it said that if you have car problems it's the worst place to have them because it's so far to where you have to walk to get any help.

So when the coach let me out, I had a long walk ahead of me. Still I was really on the last lap when I got on 24, because my house was only a short distance off this very road. The few cars that past were going the speed limit, and my walk was a little complicated by the fact that the state had decided to repave the road in my absence. There were still some construction equipment around, and the new pavement was still sticky with newness.

I trudged along the road toward Clinton. I could hear the cars approaching me from behind me, so when I did hear a car I turned around and stuck out my thumb. I walked around three or four miles in this fashion, and when I finally did get a ride with this old man in a badly rusted, ancient pickup, he was only going a few miles down to the next road crossing. There was a stoplight there, and I got out hoping the stoplight would slow down the traffic enough that it would increase my chances of getting a ride.

The traffic did slow down, what there was of it, and some even had to stop when the light turned red. I was kind of embarrassed to be standing there on the side of the road looking and smelling like a direlect when some of the traffic was going to my hometown, and knew my natal family. I wasn't so embarrassed for myself, but for my family who had somehow gained a respectable reputation through the years. If a person from Clinton did pick me up I would have gladly accepted a ride, because it would mean that I would have a ride all the way home, and I would soon be clean as a whistle with fresh clothes on. It didn't happen though. It took me another hour or so to get a ride, and that ride only took me to the next little town of Stedman. Stedman is an even harder place to get a ride, because it isn't big enough for people to feel like they have to slow down to get through it, but since people do get speeding tickets there fairly often, they slow down in a token way, only to start speeding up just as soon as they get past the main crossroad. Another problem is that the shoulder of the road coming out of Stedman is very narrow, and not an easy place to pull over to stop.

The closer I got to clinton the more self-conscious I became. I could feel my family's disapproval of my wretched looking state even though I was twenty miles away. Another hour or so passed before I got another short ride to the next little town of Roseboro. Roseboro is only twelve miles away from Clinton, and the road I live down toward the airport is a coupla miles west of Clinton, so I was about ten miles from my house. Roseboro is also within Sampson County, of which Clinton is the county seat, and so more traffic was going to Clinton, and there was a higher possibility that the people there might recognize me as somebody they could gossip about seeing as a bum by the side of the road. I really, really wanted to get out of public view.

Sure enough, a guy who was a student of my father in high school came along and gave me a ride to Clinton. I guess in rememberance of his affection for my father he even went out of his way and took me directly to my house. I stopped him at the entrance to my driveway, and told him I wanted to walke the last hundred yards.

When he turned around and drove off, I took off my shoes and walked barefooted to my doorway, walked in the house tearing off my clothes, and jumped in the shower where I stayed until the hot water ran out. I was truly home.

The Yearn to Return

Now that my health has returned somewhat, I find myself still stuck in thinking about the difference between the will to live and the fear of death. My friend did respond to my query about the possible difference. She seemed to think both were a product of the ego.

I don't think this way. I have the opinion that the will to live pre-existed the ego, and not only that, preceded even having a body and a life on Earth.

This seems to exist as a time when I regret not studying science a little more carefully earlier. I never thought it would come to this, but I have to admit that science fiction would probably be the best genre for this fanciful flight of fancy, but since I don't possess the scientific lingo to bring it into play, I guess I'm reduced to writing my argument as a romantic dreamer forever lost in a world of my own making.

In 1971, while executing a rather simple plot devised to get some friends of a friend to get me high on their pot, I ended up in a house I had no familiarity with as the fifth wheel in a party I wasn't exactly welcome. Since I didn't have much shame in my presumptions then, and even less now, I distanced myself from the unwelcoming group by moving myself away from them to another room where I occupied myself with reading song lyrics of the Moody Blues on a poster in that other room. While staring at this poster I began noticing a completely different scenario manifesting itself on the periphery of my imagination, and upon the conscious perception of it, it rattled me to my core.

What I experienced in that peripheral fairy tale was the sight of myself as a speck of awareness sailing unhindered through the universe in a state of total exhuberation and ecstasy. It was as if there were no real plan or goal to this sojourn, zooming through the universe and experiencing this great self-exhaltation existed as the totality of my entire ex-is-tense.

Suddenly I saw what appeared as this magnificent blue and green jewel off to my right. It looked absolutely enticing, and immediately my attraction to it took me to it. This was the way I seem to move in this state of being, curiosity caused an immediate satiation of my desire.

Once I had entered this blue and green jewel's atmosphere I luxuriate in it's charm and appeal until my curiosity was sated, then, as usual, I looked beyond this place to allow myself to find curiosity in another part of the heavens to move out from this blue and green planet to zoom away. It didn't happen the usual way. Nothing happened. Again and again I performed this ritual of differentiation, and I stayed right where I was. It was like I was trapped. I couldn't get outta here. And, I'm still here.

At this point in my peripheral vision I saw what appeared to exist as the story of my lifelong visit upon this earth. This had a very powerful affect on me, because at the same time I was experiencing this fantastic vision, I was simultaneously reading the lyrics of the Moody Blues on that poster while isolating myself from the party people in the next room. Two entirely different dimensions at the same time.

The fairy tale ended it's saga of my existence as a victim of entrapment upon earth in the very spot I stood looking at that poster and was no more. I hurriedly burst into the next room frenetically screaming for someone to give me pen and paper. I had to write it all down before I forgot what I had "seen". The people in that room looked at me as if I had gone totally insane and irrational, and so I fled from the house seeking the same from any source. I ran to a restaurant near by, and a young waitress gave me a pen and told me I could use napkins to write on, and so I sat down and starting writing like a maniac. Suddenly, I realized there was no need, that there was no way I would ever forget what I had experienced in that vision, and I haven't. I have never experienced anything like it again. No need. My entire existence was shown to me as it had transpired over billions of earth years. It is not a pretty story.

You might be asking yourself what this has to do with the difference between the will to live and the fear of death. Probably nothing. It's just that this vision exists as the database of my experience for interpretation of sensory data that appears before me in my day to day life. Most people seem to have only this particular life's history to base the interpretation of their present life sensory experiences on, while I seem to have all the previous lives I have ever created myself as in my constant attempts to get the hell outta here. Through some unfortunate freak event I remember being free of this place, and that memory overrides any desire to live and let live that may have existed previous to this peripheral perversion.

If you are reading this and have come to the conclusion that this writer is obsessed beyond reason, let me assure you that I agree with you. I most certainly am obsessed with this fly-by-night fancy of the mind. It is not the only influence that causes me pause, but it does exist as the most powerful influence, because it allows me to integrate what otherwise would seem a very frustrating and futile journey on what one writer called "The Ship of Fools".

The nihilists I wrote of in a previous entry state that in order to see life on earth in it's primacy one must extinquish the will to live. They suggest that it is the will to live that entraps us here on earth. My vision certainly would encompass an "us", for it was the other entities like myself that I turned to upon realizing that I could not leave this place. They were all around me. They seem to be involved in the same activities that I would soon join them in, creating vehicles they thought might work to get back out into the universe to continue their sojourn as star trekkers. I began to imitate them, and as time went by we were joined by other specks of awareness who imitated us. We all seemed imbued with an almost unlimited ability to create, and create we did. We populated the earth with all life in this unceasing effort to the same end. That end was to get outta here. The yearn to return.

I view the yearn to return as the will to live. In my experience as an exerciser/creator of this yearn to return, I seem perfectly willing to accede that it doesn't work, and that it may indeed be the very reason we can't get outta here.

Due to the appearance of this vision I do seem aware of the problem and this awareness may serve as the inspiration to actually cease and desist from making such efforts to create a vehicle that allows escape velocity, but until this vision occurred, I only saw the will to live as my fear of death. This fear of death seems associated with the notion that all my previous attempts to create a more perfect vehicle of escape have failed, and that this present effort will fail also, just as the others have. I don't gnow how to extinguish the year to return, and as long as I remember how it was to fly free amongst the stars in total ecstasy, I somehow doubt I ever will.

I've had the flu or some other kind of bug for the last week or so, and I don't know whether the illness or the stuff I've been taking to alleviate the discomfort has screwed with my body the worst. I do know that I have not been able to write anything because much of the time I didn't care whether I lived or died, much less whether I was clickety clacking on my keyboard or not.

I just asked a friend of mine to offer me her opinion of the difference between the will to live and the fear of death. In our discussion group there are a group of nihilists that proselyse the notion that gaining the true vision of life requires one to relinquish the will to live. They say the will to live is responsible for all the ills of the earth and that it must get extinguished to go to heaven or something. So far, I haven't been able to interpret what they intend by their statements because I'm not sure what extinguishing the will to live actually amounts to in their theories.

I have supposed they meant a human's desire to survive any threat of death, and the extremes a person will go to not to die. Recently, an example of this showed up on TV with a hiker who got his hand caught under a huge boulder, and ended up cutting his hand off with a dull knife after three days being trapped alone in the wilderness. Did his actions spring from a will to live or a fear of death? I would love to get into a e-mail discussion with him so I could ask him directly, but it seems his typing ability has been seriously limited by the incident itself, and it might be a long time waiting for a reply. I wonder if dying of boredom might exist as an example of extinguishing the will to live.;-)

I've never heard of a person who died from boredom, I don't seem all that sure it's possible, and if they actually did die of boredom, what signs would the coroner look for as the cause of death? When I first came up with the saying "Bored people are boring.", I was very pleased with the cleverness of it. Whether I actually created that saying or not still lies begging in the back of my mind. I do know that since then when people have told me they were bored and I offered this quip in response, it sure seemed to change their attitude. This quip has not had the desired result with the nihilists though, equating extinguishing the will to live with boredom doesn't seem to have penetrated their will to bore others to death with their sorrowful wailings.

Fear of death appears not to live in the same camp as the will to live does. I haven't figured out if this seems true to me or not. The stories about heroic behavior many times cite a loss of the fear of death as the direct result of their acting in disregard for their own lives in favor of allowing others to live as a result of their behavior. Even more difficult for me to grasp is whether a person who does not survive their attempt to rescue the perishing is a hero, or a person who has extinguished the will to live and decided to take action in some vainglorious effort to commit suicide to gain their fifteen minutes of fame.

Perhaps my friend will answer my question about the difference between the will to live and the fear of death in a way that clarifies this dilemma for me. Hopefully, she will do it in an amusing way that dispels my boredom.

I just like waitresses. I always look for that quality of hardscabble tenderness that tells me I'm gone walk out on the other side one day. Some of them had faith in me when I was on the dark side of the moon. Many of them didn't even gnow they had ithat much compassion in them my my sorry state of affairs gave them the chance to reach out. It surprises me when I drag myself out of the gutters to walk inside some brightly lit diner and watch this harsh, seemingly mean-spirited harridan growl at the rest of the world, and then turn to me with her heart light shining. It helped me make it through the night.

My good friend Eddy and I went on the bum drifting from place to place just so he would have something to tell his grandchildren. He had heard my stories and wanted to go out with me to see if I was lying.

There was four of us who rode down to Brownsville, Texas to find a job on the shrimp boats. The weather was bad, the shrimp won't running, and nobody had a job for us. Luckily, we found out about a government program that paid a stipend for shrimper wannabees to go to a vocational school and learn how to work on shrimpboats. They had a domitory to sleep in, free food, and state-owned shrimp boats to learn the ropes on. We all signed on to do the school thing until the job market opened up.

I say there were four of us. The two other guys were were travel buddies we had met and had a good time with in New Orleans. They had been offshore sandblasting and painting oil rigs, wasn't gonna get paid until the next day, and needed a place to spend the night. Eddy and I agreed to let them sleep on the floor of our rented room. The next morning they got there checks and bought us all a big Italian meal that hit the spot. We decided to truck around together for a while to see what kinda jobs we could get on the waterfront around the Gulf coast.

Soon after we started the shrimping school our two friends found a job on a steel-hulled boat that worked the shoals off the Yucatan. The Mexican authorities didn't particular like this idea and chased them with gunboats, but the money was good if they didn't get killed. Oddly, without a clue, our friends turned out to be three steps beyond skin popping in a very serious way. It turned out that everybody on that steel-hull was of the same persuation. They would go out for a month to six weeks and catch as many shrimp as their holds would take, and then come back into Brownsville, sell the catch to get the money to cross the border to Matamoras, Mexico and hang out in shooting galleries, until it was time to go out in the steel-hull, then smuggle enough dope back across border to last them until they came back from the next trip out on the Gulf.

I never saw them again. During the next few years I heard that one of them committed suicide, and the other drowned when a crab boat he was working out of Key West got run over by an ocean liner out on the Gulf nearby. I was hanging around in Key West without realizing he was there until I read about it in the newspaper. They even had a picture of him. He had taken the money the ocean gave him to keep up his habit, and then it swallowed him. I figured he was a lucky man.

Eddy and I got split up after we finished the shrimping school. We couldn't find a job on the same boat. We didn't see each other for several weeks even though we were fishing outta the same harbor and all the boats came in during bad weather.

One day we ran into each other in a bar in Brownsville. We both seemed delighted to run into each other, and decided to celebrate, but neither of us had any money. I had an old Texaco Credit Card that the Holiday Inn honored. I warned him that it might be expired because I hadn't used it in a long time, and didn't remember when I had made my last payment. We decided to give it a shot and went into the Holiday Inn Restaurant to have a little blowout. I showed the cashier my credit card and asked her if they honored the Texaco card, and she said they did, but they needed to check it out. So, I handed her my old card, she made a phone call, and then smiled and told us to walk right in. This was looking pretty good. Life had not been too kind to either of us for at least a month. Now we found ourselves in a restaurant with a bar with a kind of carte blanc from the cashier.

I told Eddy to eat anything he wanted while we were there. I gnew this little fling was not going to help my credit rating, but I never kept much good credit anyway since I had decided to follow Doctor Leary's advice.

The waitress that came over was warm and cheerful. She had a pretty face and smiled a lot. I got lucky and guessed her astrology sign and then started working that mojo to see if I could catch her interest. She brought back drinks. Eddy was a Pisces, so he felt right at home here, and when the drinks come he brightened up considerably. Then, we were both flirting with the waitress and it appeared as though she was enjoying our attention. There wasn't many customers, so she stayed around the table a lot.

Eddy had a puppy dog quality about him that he worked with an easy style. He had a degree in Psychology and two trips to Nam to give him a little edge that emerged from him laughingly with an extremely dry turn to it. He liked my way of working my mojo and I liked the parts of it that he noticed. Not many could. Eddy had both couth and never mind. He was an expert at hiding it behind a big grin, big wide-open, bespectacled laughing eyes, and you could never keep up with him. Sometime, when he got drunk or drugged enough, he'd get brazen enough to start telling you what you were gonna say before you could
say it, and even imitate the way you were going to say so
that you thought you were talking to yourself. He thought
this was funny. I did too. We got along real good. He put up with my overbearing flair for the dramatic, and I tolerated his frenetic sense of insecurity. I guess we needed each other for a while

I had been around Eddy off and on for about three or four years. We lived in the same house together with about eight or nine other people several times. It was the only clique I ever belonged to, and being with these people was like fulfilling a lifelong dream.

Eddy knew I was attracted to the waitress, so he told her I was a palm reader, and that she oughta let me read her palm. She looked at him a little strangely, and walked off. In a few minutes she came back and asked me what Eddy had told her was a joke. I told her I could really read palms, and if she didn't believe I could when I was done I would buy her a drink. But, if when I finished telling her fortune she was pleased, then she had to buy Eddy and I a drink. She was hooked. Without saying a word she stuck out her hand.

I told her the story she already knew. I told her how many children she had and how many times she had been married, and why she was so desperately sad behind her smiling ways. Just like a woman she started welling up tears and crying. With a pompous sounding British accent I demanded she bring us our drinks, and then she was both laughing and crying as she walked away. She was a lot of fun.

During the time she was bringing us food and more drinks we chatted it up, and then she asked me to write down a poem I had told her. Instead, I thought it might impress her a little more in the right way if I were to write her a poem of her own instead of making her a copy about another subject all together.

In the next fifteen minutes or so I wrote her about the things I had read in her palm, and added a hidden enchantment for good luck at the end. I gave it to her, and she was gone for a good while. When she returned her eyes were full of love. She told me to wait for her until she could get off from work. It would only be an hour or so. I agreed.

Eddy told me he had to go back to his ship. They were leaving out early the next morning, and he had to leave. He had told me earlier, but I felt he was trying to get out of my way, and so we went to cashier to pay the bill.

There was a different cashier at the cash register. He took my card and filled out the credit slip. He told me that my bill was above fifty dollars and he would have to call it in. I was a little nervous, but I'd had a few drinks, and the night looked promising, so I wasn't all that concerned. That is until the clerk turned to me and told me that I had exceeded my limit on the card and that I would have to pay cash. The bill come out to sixty-six dollars, and between Eddy and I we had less than two dollars.

I told Eddy to go ahead and leave, that I would take care of it. He looked at me closely and asked me if I was sure. I told him to leave now. He spun on his heel and walked straight out the double-front doors.

I watched him look at me quizzically and wave as he left, I waved back, and sorrowfully turned back to the clerk, and told him I was completely broke. He insisted that I pay, but soon realized I was telling the truth and called the police.

There was no where to run, and so I didn't. I waited for the police to come and haul me off.

The word must have gotten around the restaurant that I had stiffed the check, and the waitress too, because I was going to add her tip to the credit card. My whole well-intended scheme was falling apart, and I had set myself up not only to go to jail, but hurt the waitress I really liked.

The police finally arrived. The clerk told them the situation. They did asked me if I wanted one more chance to pay the bill, and if I didn't they were going to cuff me and put me in jail for fraud and credit card abuse. This wasn't going well. Regretfully, I told them I had no money. They put my hands behind me and started to lead me outside to the patrol car.

Suddenly the waitress ran into the room and asked how much the bill was. She seemed hysterical, and appeared loud and pushy as she demanded the cops take the cuffs off me. She made such an entrance it startled everybody there. Her eyes were spitting fire, and she stared at the desk clerk with utter contempt. He shriveled from his clerkly arrogance to a surprising meekness and told her the price of the bill,

She turned to the cops and almost yelled at them that she would pay the bill, and to take the cuffs off me, that I was too good for that. The cop behind me took off the handcuffs. Then, she looked at me pleadingly and told me that sixty-six dollars was a lot of money for a single mother with five kids. She needed her money back when I could get it. I promised I would.

She wrote the desk clerk a personal check. She and the cops all nodded at each other, and the cops told me to get outta town. I agreed with them and left. I never saw her or Eddy again.

I laid on my bed thinking I would surely die last night. I have been ill with some sort of bug. It infected my sinuses and my lungs. I had a pretty high fever and ached all over. I had so much phlegm in my lungs and sinuses I could hardly breath. I thought of my father finally dying of pneumonia after losing control of all of his bodily functions. And now it was my turn. I said goodby in my mind to all the idiots who supposedly love me and would feel a loss no matter how much they hate me for what I represent to them. My breathing got faster and faster as my lungs filled with fluid. Mostly, though, I heard the wind howling.

I'm not fond of the wind. It always seems to howl in my most desperate moments. Even worse, I gnow it's not personal, but care-less. To be fair, I love the wind when I have been hot and sweaty and it cools me down. But, when I am not well or when I'm in danger it howls it's curses at me. Last night was one of those times.

I live in an area that is famous for it's attraction for hurricanes. Not many tornadoes like they get in the midwest come this way. Hurricanes do. The first hurricane I remember was called Hazel, and it ripped the roof off our family home and tore down the barn we were building. It destroyed my father's hen house and scattered ten thousand chickens across the landscape. I was a young teenager and the hurricane's coming was exciting. I had read all about it in the pirate's stories I loved to read.

My father was excited too, but so angry that he cried. He was just getting started on the first property he had ever owned and the financial loss was terrible for him. The sugar plums that had been dancing in his head were gone with the wind.

The eye of the hurricane passed right over our house. It was the first winds that did the real damage, and then the calm of the eye arrived and everything was real still and silent. My mother ran inside the house to see how much damage the rain had done to her precious furniture before my father realized what she was doing. He rose up from his tears to scream at her to get out of the house because the wind and rain would return. She didn't come out and so he went in after her, hysterical from his fear for her and with the immense pain and anger he felt from watching all he had worked for get blown away as he sat with us in the family car he had parked in the middle of the front lawn.

When they emerged from the roofless house again the wind and the rain struck from the opposite direction. My mother and father sat in the front seat of the car and held each and cried. I was astounded. I was a young boy. I had no idea why they were so crushed. I didn't know what it meant. I never have understood money.

As the winds rose and the rain was driven against the windows and metal of the car I just got more and more excited. My older sister and my younger brothers were crying too, more because of my parent's sorrow than the sense of loss. Not me. I watched the wind take the galvanized metal roof that came off in one piece get lifted from the ground where it lay crumpled near the fruit trees and get wrapped around the telephone pole out in the front field. I opened a crack in the back window of the car so I could smell it better. I could smell the salt air from the ocean fifty miles away. My father screamed at me to close the window.

It was hot and stuffy with six people in the car with the windows closed tight. My mother began praying. My small brothers huddled up against my sister. My father sat with his head lowered as tears ran down his cheeks. I knew I should at least act like I was sorry too, but I was so fascinated by all this uncontrolled power that even my father, who was the most powerful force I had ever known, couldn't stop from happening, that I stared out of the window in a state akin to pure ecstasy.

Later, when I joined the Navy to get away so I could find out who I was other than my parent's child, the power of the wind was always around. It controlled the seas, it controlled the oceans. It decided when and where our ship could come and go. Once, when we were escorting an aircraft carrier near the Phillipines, we got caught in a typhoon and couldn't get away from it. They battened down the ship and lashed everything down to rided it out. They called it a typhoon, but I knew it was a hurricane. The waves became so big that even the aircraft carrier disappeared from sight when it went into a trough between the big waves. Only five men out of a crew of 240 men were able to stand because of their sea sickness. There was only two of us on the bridge of the ship where there were normally 6-8 people.

The executive officer, who was renown as an old drunk on his way out of the Navy, commanded the ship while I fought the wheel to keep our bow into the wind. We would rise on the crest of one wave only to dive into the next one, and the entire ship except for the tip of the stacks would go under green water to emerge triumphant on the other side. There were only three men down below in the engine department to keep the boilers going and the ship going forward. The ship to ship radios were blaring away, but the exec ignored them and stood out on the bridge staring straight ahead, occasionally screaming course corrections at me and words of encouragement. I knew him in those moments as if we were of one mind.

When it was over and we had come through the storm, the deck of the aircraft carrier was curled back like an opened sardine can. Our sister ship's front gun mount was smashed back into it's bridge. Our ship had been stripped of one of it's anchors, and all the life lines and the Captain's boat was gone. After I finally got relieved of the helm where I had stood alone for half a day I went below to get some rest and green vomit from all the seasick sailors sloshed around in the aisles between the bunks, and the air was filled with puke and of moaning sick sailors. Not a good place to be.

In Key West, Florida where I got stationed in my second hitch to attend a nuclear school, there were two hurricanes down there. Later, when I got out of the Navy I returned time after time because of my affection for the place and went through two more hurricanes. Hurricanes were not as exciting to me as I got older.

It was the hurricanes that come here where I built my house on a 3 acre plot my father gave me that I began to understand my father's anger during Hazel. I built what there is of it myself board by board. I built it strong to survive hurricanes, and it has endured three direct hits and several that have come close enough for the winds to build to over a hundred miles an hour for a coupla days at the time. But, I wasn't here. When I saw the weather reports that they were coming I would get in my car and drive to some place out of harm's way. I could not bear to hear the winds howling for days at the time.

As I lay in my bed last night thinking my death was at hand I thought the howling winds had caught up with me, and were telling me this was my time, but not yet. I ain't dead yet. Damn.

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.