The dream was about merchant marine ships. The problem was that the cargo that was on a slower ship needed to be transferred to a faster ship somewhere in what seemed like the South Pacific, and the interaction of characters had to do with the competitive nature of the crews on the two ships. The Captain and the mate of the faster ship had flown to an earlier port than the slower ship so that they could discuss the transfer of the cargo and arrange the logistics of the coming transfer before they got to the port where the faster ship waited.

A couple of incidents seemed so strange that they should have made me realize I was dreaming. The first one involved the speed of the slower ship. The "slower" ship got up to speeds of 60 miles an hour. To my knowledge only nuclear-powered ships could go that fast at all, much less a small cargo ship. The actual cargo was never discussed. But, there was an conversational exchange between the mates of the two ships as they approached the port of exchange that indicated the priviledges of the faster ship. The faster ship got the choice of all the top-rated movies for later viewing at sea even before the slower ship arrived in this port, and the mate of the slower ship was miffed at this priviledge.

The first incident happened at the earlier port where the captain and mate of the faster ship boarded the slower ship. The captain of the faster ship got aboard the launch of the slower ship okay, as his rank would be priviledged, but the mate "didn't quite make it" as the slower ship pulled out of the port. The mate jumped in the water to try to catch the launch boat, and when it looked like he was too slow, he literally started running on top of the water to catch it, and it was only the efforts of the one of the crew members of the launch who got down on the guard rails of the launch to catch his hand as he raced across the water that he was able to board the launch.

The speeds attained on the slower ship may have only seemed rather remarkable to me as the dreamer. In my own experience on destroyer-class vessels where trial speed runs between Oahu and Midway Islands only got up to 36 knots with the whole ship trembling like it would vibrate apart if we went any faster, so the speeds attained in the dream seemed incredible to me, even though more modern vessels especially built for speed might go faster. Maybe I saw the ports as being of the South Pacific because of these former speed tests.

The ships only stopped at these two ports to pick up the captain and mate and to make the exchange. They were not military oriented ports. There were neon lights shining across the water at the ports but we never went ashore. The slower ship got painted with phospherated stripes at the first port to help it be recognized at the port of exchange to speed up the logistics of tranferring the cargo. This would not ordinarily happen so the paint stripes should have appeared as unusual too.

As the dreamer I saw the ship leaving port and was aboard it too to hear the conversations. It was as though I was not perceived as being present to hear the conversations, but was there as a witness nevertheless. I seemed to be invisible. it seemed like I was in an out-of-body state and not a participant.

I have been present on what has seemed like space ships in other dreams, so maybe being on water-bourne ships would not have seemed all that unusual to me. The uniforms were of a nautical fashion, but too casual to have been military ships. The water was beautiful. It had that greenish tint that deep water always seems to have, and it was almost translucent.

In my experiences with certain research chemicals I have seen the characters on some of the space vehicles as various creatures that wouldn't ordinarily have the forms they did and also possess that level of intelligence. In ordinary dreams without special inducements I would have changed the various creatures into having more ordinary features like humans. To see them in the chemically-induced visions as large insects that commanded space ships was almost too spectacular to believe, and so this difference makes me think I automagically changed them into something more familiar in regular dreaming. Maybe even to the point of changing the scenario from space ships into nautical ships.

Sometime I get the impression that anthropologists "create" our former incarnations into "ape-men" with primitive features such as they show in scientific magazines with the same facility. The intellectual abilities are of the same order, but it's the experience in giving order to the elements involved in prehistoric times that is primitive. The actual intellectual primus is already in place and has been from the beginning and survives death.

Writing about dreams is so digital. I don't remember dreams sequentially, although they do seem to occur in linear order. It's just that my memory of them is so nebulous that it takes remembering one part of the dream before I remember other parts of it. Probably the most intriguing incident of this last dream was the mate trying so hard to catch the launch and not be left behind, so that he would have had to catch an airplane and be left out of the logistics meetings, inspired such fervor that he literally swam so fast that he was able to attain enough speed to emerge from, and run across the top of the water, was intrinsically fascinating and helped me to remember other parts of the dream.

I suspect that if I had waited an hour to write the dream down the memory of it would have faded altogether. The incidents that allow the digital-like recall seem to exist as the real trick to remembering any of it.

When I begin to write about those unbelieveable incidents is the key to the whole recall process. I suspect the fantastic nature of what is considered unbelievable is specific to the dreamer's beta state experience though. I have a couple of friends who teach chemistry who would have probably seen unbelievable molecular structures instead of nautical ports like I did, because that's their ordinary beta state activity, and they would have written about what seemed fantastic to them just as I write about what seemed fantastic to me. However, I think all of us would have been pretty impressed by a guy running across the top of the water. LOL

Maybe this equating what one experiences in ordinary beta state life in dreaming is the real secret to lucid dreaming. To recognize one is dreaming in real time, some specific incident in the dream has to appear unusual to the dreamer. And what appears as unusual to a person who makes a living as a lawyer, and what appears unusual to a person who makes a living as a chemist would seem completely different. What would appear fantastic and unbelievable to both a lawyer and a chemist might pass right by a dreamer who makes their living as an assembly line worker at the local Ford plant, who was dreaming about court systems and chemical labs.

There are other states we all seem to participate in besides the ordinary day-by-day "wakening" beta state and the alpha-theta dream state. The delta state is an example. The delta state happens at the very bottom of the dream cycle and doesn't seem to associate with the beta state in which we normally make a living. It may associate somewhat to a mixture of all the various states we encounter, and the average person might not make that connection in the delta state in such a way that some part of what happens in the delta state seems unusual enough that we realize we're dreaming, and be able to take control of dreaming in the delta state.

Maybe this is what happens with experienced meditators through their long experience in attaining the various states and recognizing the different associations possible in each state or combinations of states. Their familiarity with what might seem unusual in one state or the other allows them to realize what can be brought to lucidity, and thus control.

There is a voice I hear sometime just before I wake up or just before I go to sleep. If I hear it as I fall asleep I find it almost impossible to go to sleep, and if I hear it in the morning I can't go back to sleep. It doesn't happen often.

The last thing I heard was that I would die unexpectedly. That death would catch me off-guard. It was a pretty simple statement. And not anything more than that. It did not tell me how soon I would die unexpectedly, just that I would, so it could be anytime.

I came close to dying a couple of years ago. I was eating with my mother and niece in a restaurant and some sausage I was trying to swallow went down the wrong pipe and suddenly I couldn't breathe. I was totally unprepared for this. Nobody had the slightest idea what was wrong, only that I was acting funny. I was very calm about it at first.I tried to cough the sausage out, but that didn't work. Then, when I realized I was going to be able to get enough air in my lung to blow the sausage chunk out of my wind pipe I stood up and continued to try to get air in my lungs. Nothing I did was getting me air. Finally, a young man a couple of booths away approached me and asked me what was wrong. I could no more speak than I could breathe, but I used my arms and hands to indicate the Hiemlic manuever, he realized the meaning of my gestures, and got behind me and forced the sausage out. It took a few minutes to get to breathing correctly again. I sat back down realizing that I had come very close to death. Maybe, if I had passed out from a lack of oxygen and fell to the floor the sausage might have come out on it's own and I wouldn't have died, but from the reaction of the people around me I don't think so.

This event made me realize the fragility of life and how I am always just moments away from being a dead man. Something like this will probably kill me, I just don't know when, and somehow I don't really care. Better this than to lay suffering for months and perhaps even years withering away from some disease that slowly takes my life.

Perhaps a car accident will cause my death or somehow I will get caught up in some violent incident in which I get killed by gun fire. Maybe I'll drown during some unpredictable way. The way I imagine it, I'll be living my regular life one moment, and the next moment I will be struggling to live without even realizing that this is my final moments in this body.

Why would death be any different for me. I have lived in a very reckless manner much of my life. I have taken chances with my life on a fairly regular basis when I was younger. I have even went through the motions of taking my own life a couple of times and that obviously didn't work.

Probably the one time I thought death was certain was the time I jumped of the mountain in Yosemite National Park. I was in a situation where I thought death was inevitable, and so I acted in a way that at least indicated some choice on my part.

The one thing that worries me somewhat about dying unexpectedly is that I may not realize that I'm dead. When I do die, I want to realize that I am dead and move on with the choices available when death takes my body away from me.

My out-of-body experiences have convinced me that there is life after death. One experience when I was out on the road hitch-hiking was particularly convincing. I got put out at the intersection of two Interstates somewhere down south of here early in the morning hours about three o'clock, traffic was fast and there was very little of it at that time of day, there was no sign of any houses or stores around this intersection for me to disturb anyone by my singing, so I danced around and sang at the top of my lungs as a diversion from the extreme fatigue I was experiencing from being out on the road so long. Suddenly I found myself high in the air above my body and looking down at this fool singing and dancing in the middle of nowhere. My only thought was, "What has become of me." In that moment I realized I was not that fool down there singing and dancing, but rather, the "me" that was up in the air looking down at that fool.

This is what I think will happen when I die, unexpectedly or not. If at the time of my death I am attached to my body and don't realize that it is dead, I will hang around it trying to bring it back to life, maybe forever.

I don't know and probably can't know if there are choices about what to do next upon the event of the death of my body. I have read stuff that indicates that there will be choices, but if the spirit that is really me is unable to accept the death of the body and hangs around futily trying to get back in my body and reanimate it I may miss any choices that may exist at that time. The Tibetan Book of the Dead paints a scenario of this order that kind of makes sense to me.

But, without a living body, which I have always returned to when I lost my sensory contact with the world, it is hard to understand what really happens at the moment of death or what happens after that. When I have lost contact with the physical world previously, like when I have been in the hospital and lost that conscious contact through anesthesia, I don't remember anything. When I lost consciousness from eating trumpet flowers down in Key West, I don't remember anything after I passed out. When I smoked the Diviner's Sage and fell into a stupor however, I was consciously aware, but I was totally disassociated from any awareness of who or where I was, and that's how I think it will be when I die.

I had read everything I could to prepare me for smoking the Diviner's Sage. I spend a couple of days reading other people's accounts of what happened when they did it. Nothing I read prepared me for what happened though.

I had a sitter for this occasion. I had read that having a sitter was a good idea because some of the reports I'd read warned that people do strange things after they inhale the smoke, along with the warning that how a person reacts can be unpredictable. The ritual requires that one attempt to get as much of the smoke into their lungs before the ingredients of the sage takes over and does what it does. The biggest problem is that some people jump up and run and can hurt themselves by doing that. I was going to smoke the sage upstairs in my bedroom, and I wanted someone to be there to stop me from running and breaking my neck trying to get downstairs. Later, when I was sitting for a friend of mine while he smoked the sage, he did jump up and run, and it happened so fast I couldn't stop him. He did not get hurt.

I used a combination of some regular sage leaves in the bottom of the pipe, and packed some concentrated sage that was five times stronger on top of it. I wanted to have the full experience on my first effort, and I thought using the concentrated stuff would optimize those chances.

I was also warned to inhale the smoke while I was sitting down so that I would not fall and hurt myself when I took the smoke into my lungs. So, I sat down on the edge of my bed so that if I fell backward I would fall on the softness of my mattress. This turned out to be a good decision. I lit the pipe and took as much of the smoke into my lungs as was possible and held it down for as long as I could. My sitter was helping me light the pipe, and was urging me to hold it in as long as I could. When I couldn't hold the smoke any longer I blew it out, and immediately took another lungfull from the pipe. I held that as long as I could and took another.

Before I finished that toke I felt the effects of the sage. I experienced a bunch of colors with my eyes closed, and those colors had a shape that became my entire sensory awareness. The shape was like a the Nautilus seashell. Event the colors I saw conformed to and was arranged like the little growth ridges in the shell. It was out in front of me at first as though I was seeing a circle of light on a flat plane in front of me, and then that circle swooped over me similar to flipping a hoola hoop over my head. It became the only thing I was aware of. As the flat circle of pontilistic colors enveloped me into itself I heard a circus-like voice shouting, "Here we go!", and as it swooped over me and enveloped me I fell back on the bed. That was the last thing I was aware of as a human being.

At that point I was inside of the shell-like environment with the colors existing as my only awareness. I had no concept of being a human being. I had no idea that I had a body or lived on the earth. I had no memory of anything and just was. I was totally detached from anything that reminded me of my former self. I was just there. I lay there struggling for orientation. I didn't know where I was or who I was. There was nothing to attach this awareness to. There was just the colors. I somehow found myself searching for the origin of that voice I heard as the smoke overtook me. I had no concept of time in the least, just that I didn't know what was going on. I felt helpless. After existing in this formless, timeless place for what seemed like an eternity I became aware of some entity and I reached out to it. I realized that I was trying to get a grip on something... anything! I realized I was communicating to this entity, but I didn't know what I was saying or what it was saying back to me. I was lost in the immediacy of the moment, and could not store information about what was going on. It was going on, but I could not reflect on what was going on to make sense of it.

The first awareness I had of being a human and where I was happened when I asked the entity, "Have you got me?" It was at this moment that my sitter, thinking that I was talking to him, answered me by saying, "I am here."

When I heard my sitter's voice I began to orient myself to the situation I was in. I lay there for a few minutes realizing that what I had experienced had happened because I had inhaled the smoke of the Diviner's Sage into my body, and that I was alive and had a body, and that I was laying on my own bed in my bedroom. I wasn't dead.

This is what I think will happen when death comes. Total disorientation and helplessness. The brain will not function at all and no memories of what has happened when alive will be available to latch on to. There will be consciousness, but nothing to attach that awareness to. The memory of the sensory world will be gone and that conscious awareness will be alone with itself. Only the Other can help that conscious to orient itself to the situation it's in. If there be such. Only if there be such. I do not gnow.

Other than my reading about Semiotics lately, I have been stymied in my creative efforts recently by my decision to go on a diet and lose some of my rather immense girth. The diet I am following, more or less, is a low-carb diet basically along the lines of the Atkins diet. I have been avoiding sugar, rice, potatoes, and breads for about a month now. I didn't weigh before I started this regimen and I haven't weighed since I started the diet, but it has had a strong effect on me. I seem subject to grumpiness and a bit of depression during this time, and my enthusiasm for writing about my life has literally gone down the drain.

I suspect my physical life depends on the habitual use of sugar in one form or the other, and that what I am experiencing has to do with the withdrawal sympthoms of this addiction. While these withdrawal sympthoms evidence themselves more in my physical body, my mental life seems to have an equal toll taken upon it in the form of the depression I have been experiencing.

Depression is an old, old story with me. It doesn't sneak up on me as it did when I was a kid. I'm familiar with the signs of it to such a degree that I'm aware of the smallest parts of it as they appear. Depression is something I have a habit with. There was a lot of it going on in my early life during the time of my teen years and expecially during my twenties. I ended up committing myself to the state hospital when I was in my late twenties.

Prior to the time I committed myself to the state hospital I spent a considerable amount of time going to see psychologists and psychiatrists to attempt to understand why I felt so depressed. I think most of them tried to help me in the best way they could, but this is a very difficult area to deal with, because they are humans themselves. At one time I thought I wanted to enter this field as a professional, but in the years since I realize there is not much they can do without endangering themselves simply by their association with their patients.

I didn't follow through with my interest in becoming a psychologist. When I started taking courses in that subject I found it to be the most boring subject I encountered. My impression is that the people who do go into this field do so to help themselves. Instead I decided to study acting.

Formal education has not worked with me. I think I know why, but I can't say I'm certain about it. I think it has to do with my determination not to let myself be gulled the way I was when I was a young prepubescent kid. I believed everything anybody wanted me to.

In the times of past
when I was a boy
I listened to every word,
and the meaning of my prayers
was to wash away
the guilt and fear
of doing wrong.
I wasn't strong,
but I'd sing a song.

Just to settle down
I bought a wife
with the pictures
that she saw
of her mother's smiling eyes.
She did not understand
that I was a man
just for loving,
and Lord, I can't smile.

Then, my chances come
for me to run
from all the golden rules.
To be the biggest damn fool!
To buy my way into the dreams
to make things fit
into my schemes,
and Lord, how I screamed.

I could sing a song
about pretty girls,
and all the friends I know,
but the song I sing,
with a distance ring,
is about a man
without a plan
to own the future,
or kill the past.

fmp '69

Even as a kid I seemed prone to conversion, brainwashing, and the sympthoms of metanoia. One of the first times that I remember clearly was in a church by a preacher named Reverend Cox. I was nine years old. It shocked my parents to see my small body walking up to the pulpit to accept Jesus Christ as my savior. They didn't think I understood the implications of such a decision. They were right, of course, I didn't understand the implications, but I was in the full throes of conversion, and I wouldn't have it any other way. They had no choice but to go along with me on this. It was probably a mistake on their part to leave me alone with this guy for his "instruction", but doing the Christian thing in a small town in the Bible Belt was expected, and they probably had a difficult time finding arguments to restrain my enthusiasm. The next event of conversion happened when I was thirteen, and it given the direction of deciding I'd had enough of Christianity.

My decision not to take Psychology as my major in college probably had a lot to do with my susceptability to conversion. Somehow I realized that to get into the field I had to undergo a type of conversion to allow it to happen, and I had enough of that. In fact, I think that's why formal education did not take with me. Any and all of it requires such a conversion. My studies in dramatics seem to lead me much more effectively toward my unseen goal, that of learning to induce conversion myself.

I may have posted this entry previously, but I'm too lazy to look it up. I have spent some time editing it to make it more understandable to myself, and hopefully for any perspective reader. This is one of the more difficult concepts I play around with to put in words.

The persona is that which in reality one is not,
but which oneself as well as others think one is.
~ Carl Jung

It interests me a lot to read that Carl Jung came to the same conclusion that I have. Or rather, that we both came to the same conclusion some others may have also arrived at independently. The relevance of Jung's statement is something that needs to be understood before any real progress can be made in trancending the conceptual world we created for the survival of our identities as individual people.

This is not to say that I have gotten beyond it, but that I sense that I do understand the meaning associated with Jung's quote now. I have only arrived at that meaning recently.

This all started when I returned from an involuntary out of body experience that happened to me many years ago. Later, when I realized that I was back in my body again, I found myself saying one sentence over and over again. This sentence was the anchor that allowed me to remember I had the out of body experience. The sentence I repeated so repetitiously was, "Everything is nothing but the idea that it is something, and it could be anything at all."

It took a while before I understood what that statement implied, and even longer before I knew what it meant to me in regard to my own world view. Eventually, after repeating this sentence redundantly for a long time, I realized it meant that I was perceiving the sensory world I experienced daily in a conceptual sense, and my concepts and ideas of the sensory world was not the real material world at all.

After reading and studying Joseph Campbell's book, The Hero of a Thousand Faces, and began to understand his description of what he called "The Hero's Journey", I began to associate this sentence I brought back with me from the out of body experience, and this association led me to begin to understand the psychological concept of projection. The notion that we only see ourselves in other people. As I began to understand this better I could see examples of it's truth for me in my own relationship with the sensory perceived world and the possibility of it happening in other people's relationships with the hallucinations of projection too.

When I first began to get it, my nature of being led me to think of ways I could use this concept to get what I wanted from others. I soon realized that what people said about me or any other thing was a projection of what they thought about themselves, and possibly all of us betrayed our innermost secrets about who we think we are with every description we made of the other.

I soon found out that this betrayal of self is very difficult to remain consciously aware of in the moment of betrayal. I thought at first that by acquiring a critical database about how others thought about themselves, I could use that information to manipulate them for my own ends. The second thing I thought of was that the same method was possible for them to use... for better or worse... against me. After that, I didn't seem to have the time to mentally maintain a list of ideated personal attributes on anyone but myself.

Recently, in the past month, I read a book written by a Jungian analyst that, according to Jung's psychology, all of our projected personal attributes and careactoristics dwell in our psyches unconsciously, and this same unconscious material we project on others, is the very materials we desperately need to become conscious of in our own person.

This entire process of my understanding projection had a little twist in it, and it was this skewered twist that changed my entire gestalt. It took a while for me to realize that our own attributes and careactoristics we project on others is not necessarily the way we think we really are.

The judgements resulting from what we perceive in others is what we almost certainly visit upon ourselves. The qualities and characteristics we deem them to have, relates to the same opinion we have of ourselves. What we observe them doing and saying could be true about us too, but if, and only if, they did what they do for our reasons rather than their own reasons. Paradoxically, other people don't seem to do and say what they do and say for our reasons. Nor do we do and say what we do and say for their reasons.

This train of thought is how I arrived at the same conclusion as the Jung quote above. We seem to think that everyone else, at some level, are basically the same as ourselves, that all of us do and say what we do and say for our own reasons. That's true in an ordinary sense, but that is not how we are the same in my opinion. We are the same because each of us projects our opinion of ourselves upon the other, and we are not who we think we are.

We only hallucinate that we are our own individual person, and that we own or possess our identity as individuals. We are not those projections we place on others anymore than others are the projection of ourself we attempt to make them into. We create this conceptual illusion for the artificial purpose of reason, and then pretend that reason rules the sensory world. It does not. Something beyond reason and beyond our conceptual contructs prevails in spite of the games we play with ourselves and others.

I had an experience once at a party where there was a mixed gender crowd of about twenty people. I left my body during a very curious personal moment, not intending to go OOB, but when I looked over to the sofa and saw my body sitting there I kinda figured it out. ;-)

I found myself near two young college girls who were sitting on the floor in the middle of the living room of this house down by the Tar River. They were having a conversation about something that had happened during one of their classes. I started talking to one of the girls, and she responded to me without stopping her
conversation to the other girl. At this point she seemed to be talking to both of us at the same time. Her personality continued it's conversation with the other girl, and another aspect of herself simultaneously talked to me. At the same time I was talking to her, my body over on the sofa was having an animated conversation with an old friend of mine, while I was talking to the girl while out of body.

This incident got me to thinking that my personality can operate quite well without awareness of my anima, while my anima is aware of itself and the personality simultaneously.

Since that particular incident I have realized I am not aware of my anima most of the time, and I only assume that it is always out and about doing as it pleases, and communicating with other entities, some with bodies and others not, without the awareness of my personality.

This seems similar to entering the dream world and believing myself to participate in that dream world without awareness that at the same time I'm laying in my bed sleeping. Sometime, however, I am aware that I'm laying in my bed sleeping and also aware that I'm participating in my dream world at the same time.

It seems possible to have some sort of control with this. I don't seem to have it. I feel lucky if I am aware of both povs happening simultaneously and when it does happen it happens randomly and serendipitiously. I suspect having control is a matter of intent.

Maybe the control of intent is the secret the Sayings teaches. I'm halfway guessing here, but I seem sure intent comes from my anima, and I also suspect that my personality foolishly thinks it controls intent simply because it does seem to exert control over my identity or who I "think" I am.

There is a deep yearning to resolve this issue and this yearning is represented poignantly by Rodney King who said, "Why can't we all just get along." LOL

The conflict between my anima and my personality over identity and intent postures itself as the true mystery of life... for me. My personality wants to control intent and my anima wants to be recognized as my true identity.

I figure this dichotomy represents the father/son deal in the Gospel of Thomas, and is also addressed in the sayings about rendering and blasphemy.

I have had a drinking problem for most of my adult life. This drinking that I've done seemed to have a purpose, and it is connected with my relation with females. It was only recently that I became consciously aware of it's definitive connection with females during my last relationship with a woman a coupla years ago. I think it became conscious to me because previous to meeting this woman over the internet and deciding to move to her place to live I had reduced the variety of my drinking to red wine.

Previous to this I drank anything and everything as it become available at various events. I knew I didn't like beer the first time I drank it. A half can of beer made me sick and I puked for hours until I got the dry heaves. But, since most of the guys in the Navy drank beer and it was considered a manly thing to do, I eventually got used to the taste of beer.

I learned to drink hard liquor in the Navy. I had to try it all to satisfy myself that I was sophisticated about these things. Mostly I drank mixed drinks that were sweet and easy to get down. My first favorite mixed drink was sloe gin and coke. Incredibly sweet drink that tastes a little like my favorite soda pop. By the time I realized I had too much, I already had enough booze in my body to be over the top and quite ready to betray my natural reserve and make a complete fool of myself.

Between not liking the taste of beer and the devastating effects of drinking hard liquor I decided to buy nothing for myself but red wine, usually a very hearty burgundy. Burgundy is sort of so so with me. Usually the first coupla sips of it don't taste too good. It is certainly not sweet enough that I gulp it down like soda pop, and after the first glass it gets to taste a little better. When I'm by myself, which is most of the time now, I seldom drink more than three small glasses and most of the time I don't finish the second one.

I live like a miser and have for most of my adult life. I have issues with money, and if I have enough to live a little extravagantly it usually leads to pain and suffering that doesn't seem to come around when I remain poor. Presently, I live off a small Social Security check that is barely enough for me to pay only for the most essential domestic conveniences. I buy a gallon of wine every coupla of weeks that costs around ten dollars, and normally drink two glasses of wine per day, unless I have visitors, and then I may drink more for the sake of sociabilities sake. I don't have many visitors.

My point is that when I'm alone I don't drink very much. It's when I get involved with other people that the drinking becomes a problem. People usually seem attracted to the person I represent when I spend most of my time alone, and expect me to stay that person because that's what they were attracted to about me in the beginning.

I said that I became consciously aware of this during my last affair, and that's true. That's not to say that I have been unconscious of the fact that most of my relationships break up as the result of drinking. It would be hard not to notice that over the years even for me.

This woman began writing to me off-list while we were both subscribed to an e-mail discussion group. She admired the way I wrote and we started a personal relationship through e-mail. She was interesting to me also. Eventually she declared love for me sight unseen, and since I also felt like I was getting involved, I decided to drive up north to where she lived to get a good look at her. She was/is beautiful. I knew from the getgo that she was too young for me, she is sixteen years younger, but she insisted that didn't make any difference to her because she found it so difficult to find a man who fit her notion of what real intelligence amounts to. Besides, we both have had strong spiritual experiences that seemed to make us birds-of-a-feather.

I think I stayed with her at her place for about a week and come home. Our e-mail relationship continued with more intimacy and feelings, and so eventually we decided to try to live together. I would leave my home and move to her small studio apartment with her two cats.

We had other things in common besides the aforementioned spiritual and intellectual experiences. We both had been married twice, and had lived very active sexual lives of some dubious social worth. Drinking, drugs, and carousing had been a big part of our pasts. We were fairly open with each other about how we had lived, and also about how this seemed to be connected with the influence of other people.

So when I bought the first gallon of wine we both enjoyed it, got a little too inebriated at times, but since we were happy and in love, it just seemed more like a celebration than a going back to our old ways. That came into play when I bought an ounce of pot to carry up there, and we started smoking from time to time. This did seem to come to the fore more as an open issue because she was a college professor, and her reputation was very important to her. She really loves her job. She seems to enjoy being around young people. She has no children of her own and appears to enjoy mothering them.

Then, little things that hadn't seem to have been a big deal at first became more important. She had these two cats she had saved from certain death. She did not allow them out of the apartment for any reason. It was a very small two room apartment with a small bath, and the cats became an issue. I don't dislike cats, especially if they belong to someone else, but I didn't like having to live with them inside the house. At night they got naturally rambunctious, and chased each other all over the apartment including the bed we slept in. One night one of the cats pounced on me with all claws extended and woke me up wondering, "What tha' hell?", and when I threw it up against the wall for it's troubles, our troubles began. She told me I was a cruel, heartless person who had no respect for helpless animals. I told her she was even more heartless for locking them up in her apartment and never letting them act like cats.

I began to realize her intent was to treat me just like she did the cats. I was to fulfill a role she needed played out in her life, and that I would not be allowed to go outside the cage she built for me to act like a normal human. Her extreme jealousy became more and more apparent, and soon enough, openly so. Eventually, she told me directly that she was a control freak, and that it was her way or the highway. I left most of my stuff that I had carried up there to live with her and took the highway.

As I mourned lost love during the aftermath of this failed relationship, and looked back on other failed relationships, it was then I began to see the relationship between them all. The drinking seemed to be based in my childhood.

I didn't know my mother had been married twice when I was a kid, and that my oldest sister was only my half-sister. I found that out in a hayfield while working with my father. My father made the mistake of treating me like his confidant. When we were out working the farm together he liked to tell me about his adventures experienced when he was young. I guess he thought he was giving me advice about the mistakes of young blood. On this particular day, when I was about 15 years old, he was telling me of all the women he had been with before he met my mother. When he told me about this one woman he should have married instead of my mother, and how sorry he had not married her instead of my mother, I became angry, and told him I didn't want to hear all this stuff, that he was talking bad about my mother and I didn't want to hear it.

The work we were doing was pretty tough on both of us. He was raking up and pitching hay into a high-railed trailer, and I was in the trailer stomping it down to pack it tighter, so we could get as much hay in each load as possible. Hay is gathered on the hottest rain-free days of summer, and we were both dripping with sweat.

Suddenly, we were not having a picayune conversation about the lusty adventures of his youth anymore. When I yelled at him to stop saying bad things about my mother he got mad. His face turned red, and he started screaming about how little I understood about my mother and waving the pitchfork at me. That's when he told me about her first marriage. I was totally stunned. I couldn't believe him. I wouldn't believe him. Like most young boys I thought my mother was good and pure as the rain that fell from the sky no matter how mean she could be sometime.

I stood in the trailer holding on the the side rails and just stared at him as he raged about how my mother had gotten pregnant by a drunk, and then tricked him into marrying her so she could get away from the shame of it. Nothing that had happened in my young life wounded me so deeply. I jumped out of the trailer and ran for the woods to deal with this devastating news. He screamed at me to come back and get in the trailer because we hadn't finished the work. To this day I don't think he realized how strongly this hurt me. His pain has inured him to how it might affect others.

I don't remember exactly when I came home again. It was dark. I had cried myself into a great tiredness, and there was no where else to go. While I would out in the woods, I vowed to go find the drunk who had abandoned my mother and kill him. Within a couple of weeks I ran away from home to my grandparent's home in Mississippi to execute this plan.

I couldn't kill him. I got lucky and found him. It wasn't hard. He was the boy next door, and just happened to be visiting his parents while I was there. When I realized who he was and saw what was standing in front of me, a dried-up nothing of a man, I understood why he had left, and forgave him. This skinny little man was no match for my mother, and my father wasn't either. That's when I began to wonder if my father wasn't telling me the truth. They were both victims.

This thing makes me wonder is how much this affected my ideas toward women. Here were these two men who both married my mother. One drank to get away from her harridan ways, and one who stayed and suffered. I seem to get attracted to the suffering a hard woman can put on a man, and the ecstasy of escaping it once I get caught up in their grasp.

My friend Billy came over a coupla days ago. He was distraught. He had an envelope in his hand, and as he came in the door he looked down at the envelope, looked up at me, and said, "Damn people, I think I'm gone kill myself." and laughed.

He had gone to an auctioneering school and then failed the licensing text.

Two minutes later he was hypnotized, and walking around A National Park on the top of Lookout Mountain and looking down on the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee in a state of awe.

After he had refreshed himself there in that place and relaxed a little, I aked him to return to the examination room where he took the licensing test. He told me that he was okay with the way the test was going until he came to the fill-in-the-blank portion of the test, and he froze. Even though he knew the answers, he could not write the words down on the paper. I asked him to fully describe how he felt at the moment he realized he would fail the test because his fingers were paralysed.

He told me he felt totally helplessness. Defeat,shame, humiliation, and anxiety seemed to flood his emotions in that moment, and he felt a disgusting emptiness in the pit of our stomach.

I asked Billy to hold that moment in time, and to search back through his life for other times he had felt this feeling before the test. His eyes became active behind the closed lids and I knew he was seeing multiple events as he contemplated his life.

I asked him to find the first incident this feeling of helplessness happened in his life. He sat silently for a while, and then he said he could not tell me about the first time it happened because it had happened for as long as he could remember.

I asked him to go deeper into state and relax even more, and then to look again for the beginning of this feeling of dread, but to start out at 6 years old and search even more deeply. I told him that he would begin to search more deeply when I counted aloud from three back to one, and then clapped my hands. I repeated this to him several times, and then told him that each time I counted down from three to one and clapped my hands, he would continue his search for the original event he had felt helpless like this, but to search in the next younger year.

I counted down and clapped my hands and told him to look for the first time he felt that way when he was six years old. He just shook his head as he looked at all the times this feeling had wounded him when he was six years old. Billy had a very sad, tormented look on his face during this time. Sitting across the old tool chest I use for a coffee table, I could only feel what he was experiencing. I asked him if the same feeling happened earlier than six years old. He nodded his head.

For brevity, I'll just say that we regressed him back until the birth moment and the feeling still came around.

Since we had already approached his moment of birth, I figured he might want to experience what he might be aware of previous to his entry into the world as Billy. I asked him if he wanted to go back through the birth experience to before he was born. He straighted his shoulders and made his back a little stiffer, and sat erect on the front edge of the sofa. I've known Billy for 15-20 years, and I recognized this posture from a long time back. Billy comes from a Native American heritage, and this erect way of composing himself is his warrior pose.

I had him go through his entire body looking for pockets of tension or nervousness while I counted backward from one hundred, and that as I counted each number he would be able to let go of being Billy for a while. As I counted down on each of his exhales I saw him relaxing and letting go. When I had counted down to one I asked him if he was ready. With his lips in a straight line his eyes smiled out that he was. Immediately, I counted down from three to one, and then clapped my hands as loud as I could to startle him into jumping the broom.

Previous to my loud clapping his face was a composition in nobility and strength. A moment later his jaw dropped, his shoulders sagged, and there was a look of confusion I'd never seen before. I asked him who he was. He didn't know. I asked him if the feeling was still there. He said "Yes.". Even before he was born? "Yes."

I asked him to tell me what he could about the feeling that was part of him even before he was born. He said something was coming for him. He couldn't see what it was, but he knew it was so powerful that he could not put up a fight. He said that if it found him it would have total dominance over him and that there was nothing he could do about it. He said he would be totally at it's mercy and that all he could do was beg for his life. I asked him repeatedly what it was that was after him, and he could not tell me. All he understood was that he sensed that it was after him, and there was nothing he could do but try to escape, and that even to try to escape was impossible for long.

I asked him if that's why he decided to get a body and be a human. He said becoming human was just another place to hide, but not for long, that eventually it would get him. I asked him what would happen if his hiding place was found out. He said it was waiting, that eventually it would get him. I asked him what would happen then. His answer was that he would have to go back. I asked him where he would have to go back to. He wouldn't tell me. Whatever it was he was frightened more than his courage could help him with.

I took Billy back through the birth process as slowly as I could. He didn't say much. I didn't ask much. I told him to remember what happened, and set up a post hypnotice signal so we could get back to it, and eventually I brought him back to sitting on my sofa.

Funny thing, he had forgotten all about failing the auctioneering test. It must not have been all that important.

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.