COLONY ZERO
Taos, New Mexico
we had a good stay, reunited with a buddy from new york who I hadn’t seen in almost five years. He was an early supporter of my poetry, some of his compatriots had emigrated to los angeles a while back and that’s how we were connected, some 8 years ago or so I left my comfortable life in the midwest to become a postmodern beatnik hobo poet, doing spoken word and selling chapbook poetry zines out of a motivational tape salesman’s suitcase that I found at a garage sale in minneapolis.
We landed in Taos to see an old friend, now tending to a cafe, representing for Bohemia in this strange desert land, the motif a hyperspace of platonic south-western molds, little art galleries and tourist traps around the squares, hollowed out by winter, waiting for warmer days to be flooded with the people visiting and the locals emergent from their hibernation. you couple up in cold times, make arrangements for body heat.
I imagine a dynamic of an overturning population of young and old, families that came out to make earth ships, rich people looking for a new age sanctuary, the flight of the young people for larger seas.
it’s one of those counter-cultural vortexes, a nexus of currents flowing in from other such places that share a reciprocity with each other, the psychic geography of the terrain and climate- the identity of a place and how the people who inhabit it identify with and represent and reproduce that identity in their philosophies and practices. so here has lodged itself a desert punk aesthetic - the burnt out husk of a utopian communal dream haunting us from the vector of the past; land pirates forming the temporary autonomous cafes in worn out shacks under open sky- the future too a ghost that looms gloomy in its apocalyptic pronouncements.
ethic of adaptation: to presuppose the fall of civilization, to anticipate the chaos. not to will it so into being, but to acknowledge a reality that exists in the fissures of institutions and the inability to account for our collective actions, oppositional logic widened by its own limitations. I am colonized by the teleology of western civilization (which I can find no trace of) - barbarously imposing my totalitarian all-encompassing worldview perspective on any abstraction I can find. submit to my domination and I will give you the tools to liberate yourself, I will Shepard you thru the maze of gurus, poet philosopher sovereign truth blender cryptologist over-codifier. all this jargon for the file, on display in a ridiculous circus of discourse. criticizing the utility of utilitarianism and other such fundamentals so as not to drown in the useful fiction.
somewhere between magical thinking and scientific method;
the third way, democratic shamanism, a radical singularity of symbolism in the sensory apparatus subsumed into immediate attention. shedding layers of meaning in the joy of experience. we are sensual creatures.
for an alienated service economy, community is hedonism.
ROADTRIPS
we planned to head out west, my friend returning his rental car to the airport in Albuquerque, and we’d worked out a rideshare with a guy passing thru town on his way to the west coast by looking on craigslist for rides in cities further east, when no searches and ads turned up any leads in our desired time frame locally. a day of driving. our host had been on the road all night, so we helped him drive, shared gas, conversed. we discovered we were all predisposed to travel and taking people as they come, open, friendly. driven this route back and forth now a few times. the desire to see the world while you still have the energy. a self-selecting crowd that picks up hitchhikers.
TUCSON
helped drive different legs of the trip, stopped to take pictures by the Very Large Array and had a nice drive through the state roads through Gila forrest. trading daring stories of mobile living. arrived on university campus bar strip parking lot turf and waited for our ride to meet up with his friend inside a sports bar to watch the end of the game, while we guarded the minivan with all our bags inside. we’d bonded over the day’s drive and we were all delirious from respectively being up all night, catching naps in shifts- I did the last couple hours of the drive after we discovered a sparkplug had blown out, and we drove on with one less cylinder firing while gas fumes permeated the car. have to fix it tomorrow in tucson, he says. we all sat with scarves over our faces and the windows down while I sputtered up the hills and coasted where I could.
in advance I’d looked up an online contact on recommendation from a mutual friend, who picked us up and gave us shelter for a few hours before our phoenix contact could come get lost trying to find us on the outskirts of tucson. we set up the transmitter beacon and relayed our coordinates while he drove around aimlessly cursing his GPS device’s soothing synthesized female voice.
while we waited, we sat and absorbed the charm of our hosts and their space. a lovely couple on the outskirts of Tucson. the indigenous people lived for ten thousand years subsisting on the desert plants, everything that grows here is edible, they tell us. a nice home, the happy husband working on cutting tile to lay in to the porch, a menagerie of creatures kept, snakes, fish in tanks, cats and dogs, turkeys and other fowl in the backyard. I had never met these folks but we had mutual friends we were both very close to, and traded stories from around the time that we had all been running in the same circles but never crossed paths. now we were pleased to have finally gotten to come together, and by the time our buddy from Phoenix made it there to pick us up we were telling each other how great it would be to be able to get together again and wouldn’t it be nice to run into each other in LA some time and I wish we could stay longer and all those sorts of heartfelt things.
a long time spent since I had slept much more than a short nap in a car. we’d logged plenty of miles from Taos to Albuquerque to southern new mexico to arizona to Tucson to Phoenix and finally landing in some suburbs to get to take a bath for the first time in some days and relax at the happy home of our buddy, secure in his gated community, a homeowner able to offer us each our own room for the night. I retired, digesting all the successful habits that lead to this moment and gnawed on my own arm leaving little bruises, considering submission and domination of the self and being the observer internalizing surveillance society and the headtrip of the modern politicized identity.
PHOENIX
Super Bowl Sunday, we went out to the mountains and did target practice against a foreground of stone, in the desert, firing high velocity projectiles at old shotgun shell cases. It was the first time for me since being a lad in south dakota when I had been too timid to handle a .22 rifle with my older cousins. a few hours in the hot sun feeling the great leveling power of the guns in my hand. afterwards we barbecued and watched the football game. the halftime show was a brilliant illuminati mind control initiation black mass spectacle befitting of the cultural moment, exactly the kind of bread and circuses the America we made required. everything seemed correct, appropriate. even pushing into the dark after the European dinner party. even losing track of time and waking up the next day unsure of which house you stayed at, which day it was on the roadtrip itinerary - this insecurity and not knowing has become normalized.
NOMADOLOGY
a great stroke of fortune that we found this benevolent soul who was driving from Oklahoma City headed thru New Mexico and relaying us to Arizona— before we parted ways he’d told me he was continuing on to Los Angeles after he got his van fixed, and just so happened I was staying a little outside the city off of the interstate out west —- so that next day I awaited him coming out to pick me up. a spot of coffee while he came in to chat for a while before our departure, and I said goodbye to my friend and travel companion from New York, who was bound on a plane back to the big city in the next couple days. and that was the end of our adventure together for the time being, and I made some intentions to head out east again some day, having not been back out there in so long, talk of the coming spring and summer days and loose plans. that chapter was finished, and my story then began to head to Los Angeles to reconnect with my tribe out there, where I have been most active in recent times.
I make a lot of vague plans about which direction I will head in the coming weeks and months, and notions of where I’d like to be, but I’ve learned that you can’t really make fixed plans as you move with the current streams you navigate. You stop in eddies for a while to whirl around here and there, perhaps swimming upstream some times, but generally having to move where opportunities present themselves. a degree of flexibility is required for this, so you plan to keep things open and leave schedules tentative at the horizon of the event. when approaching it you start collapsing possibility clouds down to the vapor of praxis as you find yourself shuttling, arriving, leaving, constantly in flux. shifting perspectives that remain undefined until the moment you reach across the galaxies between yourself and an other- and open up ground for new terrains, new geographies, new mappings to locate ourselves in again, on new playing fields that can dissolve the self-contradicting internalized conflicting forces that play a role in making identity and contribute to shaping us.
some place to stand in an age where theory evaporates any hope of a meaningful way of knowing anything. nomad tribes form affinities and redefine space through recombining together continuously in dynamic tension. we create a place to inhabit that offers us possibilities. the only way to subvert domination is to create our own alternatives to it’s necessity.
GENERAL LIFE UPDATE #8345624
Dear universe, when we last spoke a month or so, i was hoboing around Oregon with a travel-size hobo-companion ladyfriend. we exemplified communal living, helped some friends move from eugene to portland on our last weekend in the state, had some friends drive us a half-hour south of the center portland metroplex and waited at an onramp for someone to read our “grants pass” sign, and successfully hopped down some lame towns along the I-5 in a few different rides, culminating in a trucker who told us the ins and outs about different big trucking companies and their insurance policies and no unauthorized riders rules and stuff, he took us down the rest of our trip to grants pass to make it to some buddies of mine, sweet dream-punky electro dance music party enthusiasts and post-apocalyptic tinkers that i think i have big crushes on, a sweet young couple from kansas that i wish would move to a cooler city when i come back to visit again.
they put us up real nice for a night and gave us a ride out of town on some little state road out toward the 101 and dropped us off in a little place called cave junction, full of old hippies, little road stop town. my partner makes us a sign outside of a grocery store out of an old beer box i found next to a recycling cash redemption value kiosk. a bicyclist going in to shop lent her some sharpies, red and purple and black. an older bummy hobo guy bought us a sandwich on his foodstamps, unprompted. we traveled broke, confident that in the pacific northwest, and in northern california, people would be sympathetic to our journeying. and so we hiked down the road to the end of town and held out our sign ahead of another guy further down sitting on his pack, hoping he’d make it out of town as well.. we were doing our thing which had become routine, dress nice be yourself look friendly and enthused, and figured we’d get out before he would.
a nice big white van with three girls in it passed us, and then later must have turned around and pulled up again next to us asking us if we needed a ride. they took us all the way to arcata and we napped on some foam pads and blankets in the back of the van. from there we caught a few more rides and terminated with another trucker in a state park another few half-hours down the road in humboldt county and left us at a gas station down the road from a state park where we knew a guy who worked for the forest service and lived in a sweet little shack in the red woods… he was headed back for the town that we had originally left from and were ultimately bound for in sonoma county, and after he gave us a little tour of some giant trees and fallen trees and old stumps and ancient trees and told us of the ecology of the place and the current local controversy around the california transit authority wanting to widen the windy roads through the woods so the longer interstate trucks could pass through, the same controversy that the girls in the van and the last trucker who came down also gave us their own perspectives on, after all that talk and the dusk light tour we hopped into his pickup and the dog got into the truckbed and we headed down the rest of the way to sonoma county by night, the girl outstretched between us while the radio tuned in and out of different stations as he told us of his memories with our mutual friends from years ago, making crazy night time runs up to far off towns we passed through on our way back down. we arrived to surprised friends we’d notified days earlier who expected us later, we made it a couple days earlier than we’d scheduled by fortune of necessity. the problem with showing up unexpected is that you don’t give them time to prepare, you see, but that is incidental…
and so we stayed around the bay area, mostly in the north bay, for a couple of weeks or so. made a short few day trip down to the city to visit an important friend of mine and having to try to patch things up a bit over soured relations over various strained and stressful situations. so you ask for all these friends to love and went out into the world looking for all these high-level weirdo characters such as yourself as you endeavored to become, and you got it buddy. so many people to know and stay in touch with, and as you try to grow closer to them you realize that there is always an amount of work involved in every relationship and you have to make the effort to show people that you care for them and how important they are to you. and i am blessed with some good friends that wouldn’t let me stupidly walk away from them, or let me throw away the value of something that i shared with someone else over something petty and selfish. so that was good, time well spent, learning that the family you get to choose- the friends you seek out - are no less important than family, and i’m grateful for these cosmic siblings of mine that i relate to so strongly i must feel like we are two shards split from the same geode. a short stay in the city, a fun party with some crowd a few years older than me, and meeting nice artsy professional types in cool oakland waterfront commune scenes, talking all kinds of esoteric lunacy and open relationships and technological civilization on the brink of radical transformation and all this kind of jive. hippies and new agers love my schtick even though i can’t stand half of the things that the really far out people believe.
a bit of san francisco vibe and then we alternated between our old house scene with our boys in my old place i used to live at up in the north bay, and then the girl’s mom put us up a bit too and i interacted with her siblings and got roped into playing with this cute three year old and talk about middle school with the 12 year old and stuff, the mother was very kind to me and thanked me for taking care of her daughter while we were on the road, lucky i had all these friends to stay with who helped feed us and keep us warm. all this work to get back to sonoma county but we had designs to move on to other places, the girl wished to return to her old scene in tahoe and visit with her people out there that are important to her, myself i am bound to return to new mexico to renew my driver’s license identification card so i can be free to more easily travel where necessary. and so she called her people in tahoe and made arrangements to leave town and i called down to friends in los angeles and made my own arrangements to take the time to visit people that were important to me. we hadn’t been separated much at all for months, spent practically every hour of every day for pretty much most of the summer save for once when she went up to tahoe for a week and a half earlier in the summer, or some times we’d have brief periods of hours apart for various reasons, but basically complete velcro buddies and now we were planning on parting ways again for a while, with hopes to reunite in new mexico after spending time with other people that we cared for who we wished to give our time to respectively. anticipating some major separation anxiety but excited to be off to see other great loves in our lives, we made these arrangements and as it worked out i was set to leave a few days ahead of her.
one of my super mega best friends in the whole world came to pick me up after driving up from LA, we left the bay that day and went down to big sur looking for somewhere to camp for the weekend but found mostly tourists taking up all the spots so we went a little further south down the coast and found a nice spot, did a little hiking, took pictures and talked about launching spaceships to other galaxies and the fate of mankind and the coming revolutions to economy and political structure with automation and networking and i revealed myself as an amateur futurist, or at least enthusiast of the future, ever since i was a little boy, and we shared a nice time out in a natural setting for a while before entering the sprawling metropolitan area that is los angeles. when we got into town i found favor with a sweet venice couple i’ve known for about 7 or 8 years who recently had a child almost a year ago now and get to hang out with the baby and sleep on a couch still in this nice little place that i’ve been coming to every time i come to LA. thru all these friends i am able to hang out until i have to go to new mexico, thru these friends i have different places to stay, and a whole sort of scene to plug into that i’ve been on the periphery of for years now over the course of all these visits, and my friends pick me up and take me to open mics at venues that other friends of ours operate, and i perform my spoken word poetry for groups of people that are full of long time supporters of my work who make requests for certain pieces and compliment me that i’ve grown into a stronger performer over the years and seem genuinely impressed with me, and for my part i have always returned to this place because of the supportive people that i have developed these alliances and attachments with and to.
and so i’m still in LA, been here for about half a week, and the girl just took a bus to tahoe today and we’re going to try to make some kind of plan to get back together again at some point, although we’re far away from each other now, and the money is tight, but i figure we can ask for some help from our families and friends that are like family, and maybe i’ll do another facebook post soliciting donations to my paypal account (which is lance@robotson.com by the way :P) so i can try to figure out a way to help her get back on the road with me. because i’m a traveling poetry salesman and it is helpful to have the beautiful assistant, and she has snake oil in her blood and makes a good partner in crime. charisma is the currency i trade in, and seek it out in others where it enhances each other mutually beneficially synergistically…
and in the horizon i must depart for albuquerque somehow, in the near term. still unbeknownst how i will make that leg of the trip but i’m working on options with some friends, maybe i can do some menial tasks for some buddies for cash or call some relatives - and further ahead still, in november, i must go off to minnesota to see my family and friends out there, and perform some important tasks for my father and give attention to my younger brothers, all worthwhile things, and sometime between albuquerque and minnesota i was hoping to get back together with my partner in crime and go visit some people in austin texas that we met when we hitchhiked up to oregon from sonoma county, about two months ago now. i’m sure they would be surprised pleasantly that we actually would come visit them like we said we might want to - and i know some other friends of friends there probably because i know a lot of people in albuquerque and it isn’t that far off, people move there frequently. but i’ve never been, and i’ve always wanted to go, so that’s kind of where my head’s at now, trying to make that happen and get back with the girl to get her out there with me so we can adventure around in some new place which is exciting and romantic - and i hope dearly that everything works out even as i live with uncertainty as i so often claim to thrive on and draw energy from, even as it is causing me a certain amount of stress and anxiety. we talk on the phone and tell each other that we’ll figure something out.
in the mean time i am enjoying myself in los angeles and i’m considering staying for another week longer than i had planned, and hopefully have the time to invest in those people who have been most loyal to me in the past, as i grapple with crazy feelings that arise from the condition of having too many awesome friends in your life and not being able to keep in touch with all of them well enough to nurture the relationships enough to sustain them, all the while trying to promote myself as an artist and find new people to connect with who potentially would respond to what i do well enough to wish to patronize the artifacts that i manufacture to support myself. a road life, a lot of old crushes, the constant running life dramas of balancing many relationships, tugged by feelings from many directions, living almost entirely with other people all the time, and wishing to contribute something meaningful to the lives of others in an unselfish way, but constrained by time and space, always time and distance and money trickling in the background putting restrictions on how able i am to invest my energy into everyone i’d wish to. so here we go again at ground zero and i’m sort of just pleasure cruising through town not even trying to push any cd’s on anyone and all out of copies of the book i published last year… luckily for me i have enough people that care about me too much to let me starve to death or freeze on the streets, while i tug my suitcase around and pretend to be an artist on the run making it look like i’m successful. this is someone’s idea of the dream, even if it isn’t your own sometimes. i live a charmed existence.
(photo by chiam bertman)
all’s well that ends swell.
so far we’ve had good luck finding people to stay with to fill in the gaps between the times that we had planned to come visit and stay with friends. when we hit Eugene we got dropped off by this sweet caravan of couples out of Austin Texas who told us to come visit, I’d gotten ahold of my buddy in town and told him we’d be landing that night. we made it a good time of a few nights in Eugene before he gave us a ride to Portland.
We were going up to visit this girlfriend of ours, from the town in Sonoma county that we’d just come up from, she went to Portland to go to school. she’d promised us a weekend of treats and eats, keeping us up in the style we’re accustomed to, and true to her word, she made good on taking care of us even though we showed up totally broke at her doorstep. a few days in Eugene had cleaned out our wallets.
so we got to hang out with our girlfriend and commiserate over a few evenings of her days off, and sort out all our odd stresses of being on the road for a week or so. we went out to a few of the hip Portland neighborhoods, had food cart food, had burritos at cheap joints the locals know about. they gave us comfy digs, and everyone was nice to us, some burning man folk there to talk to, some polyamourous open relationship couple who tell me they know no jealousy, interesting. some nice musicians and a nice back yard and comfy spots to relax and the only thing was there was no smoking on the property cause one of the guys gets migraines from cigarette smoke so we were always hanging off the sidewalk at the edge of the home and lighting everything with strike anywhere kitchen matches that were supplied to us from our hosts because we’d long since lost all our lighters and ended up with no money for new ones.
well at least we had spent our last two bucks in eugene at the smoke shop, picked up an ounce of this rolling tobacco that they sell as pipe tobacco to get around the federal taxes… our hosts in Portland kept us happy over the weekend, caring for us and feeding us, except nobody smoked so we were on our own with that. but we made it work. showed up with tobacco and no money and at least if you have smokes you don’t get cranky around your hosts. we didn’t even cook or clean or anything, it was a pleasure cruise vacation time.
but like all good things, our lady friend’s hospitality could only extend for a few nights, that was what we agreed upon before we came up, and thus we were calling around looking for places to stay. putting out the word on the social networks, writing messages to old friends, the girl was txting her old buddies who had moved up to Oregon from California. we had faith that something would work out, over the next 5 or so nights we’d have to stay alive to wait for my buddy from Eugene to come back up and pick us up again. round out a weeklong stay in Portland, some how. no money, no place to stay, the last night we have a place to crash approaching. we kept our faith and our faith was rewarded.
“we could always just hitch a ride back to Eugene if nothing works out,” the girl would say to me. what ended up happening instead was we finally got in touch with some of her friends, hung out with them in a park on our last evening to crash at the place we were at, and negotiated it with this guy that the girl knew, who was around in some scene she used to be a part of, and he took us into his little studio for a couple nights, which gave us more time to try to get a hold of some other folks to help round out our week in the city of roses. never did see those rose gardens.
the other issue was money, which we had completely ran out of, and we addressed this issue in a number of ways. the first thing I did was to get online and ask people to paypal me donations to my email address of lance@robotson.com on the social networks, which I didn’t think would really do much of anything, but to my surprise, some people actually came out of the woodwork and made donations to me (and my pleas to help keep our hitchhiking trip going). a relative I haven’t seen for a long time, a guy in LA I was hanging out with earlier in the year, and a friend of a friend in illinois who I’ve never met but who apparently is supportive of the lifestyle I’m leading. so they sent monies to me and I just had to wait for the money to clear into my bank account after a couple days.
the other thing we did is, the girl asked her mom to western union us some money, which had to be sent to me because the girl lost her ID somewhere along the way. and so, after sleeping at this guys place who she knew, we went on the epic hike to a western union check cashing place so we could have money, for the first time in days, so we can eat a real meal where we’re not just sharing a sandwich or a burrito together. and so, on that day, we both got to eat our own hamburgers, and it was good. and the money went quick.
“when you get your money we’ll spend it more carefully,” she says, back to splitting and sharing everything. the guy who put us up for a couple nights, who was a sweet illustrator, took us to a tobacco shop and we got a pack of these new york cheap cigarettes called ‘smoking joes’. they were a fine, cheap smoke. and he had good taste in music and cartoons and movies and he and the girl got along talking of those things while we all smoked in his apartment. so after a night, and the day of the epic hike to western union, and another night spent, we had finally gotten ahold of another friend to stay with, who was a nice 5 mile hike away, so we packed up our things and began to walk it. this after the rigmarole with my bank situation.
it goes like this: I was trying to get my paypal money out of my bank account, but my checking account had long since been screwed up by me over-drafting it by a dollar at a redbox last fall, (on some movie I probably didn’t even like, in Oregon, incidentally) and so my debit card linked to my account no longer worked. now, this is some credit union thing, so I figure I do like I always used to do and just go to some credit union branch place that will let me get into my savings account and get my money, thru these kinds of weird member branch credit union networks they have. but what had happened was, my old credit union had recently been eaten by a larger credit union, and they no longer participated in this shared branch banking, and so when I went to a credit union where I thought it would work, they told me that my bank no longer did that and that I’d have to call them up to figure it out. and call them up I did!
what they told me was, there were no branch offices in Oregon. closest ones were in Seattle and San Francisco. “well, is there anything that you can do for me today?” so I got them ordering me a new bank card, which will be sent to my old place in Santa Rosa (gotta tell my old roommates to keep an eye out for it in the mail), and then they are gonna transfer me to the card member services department head. so she makes me an offer. after I explain that I’m broke, on the road, why can’t I get my money, etc, she tells me, if there is an address I will be at, then they can FedEx overnight me my money. woo! so I say, let me get a hold of my friend who I will be staying with and I’ll get back to you.
so I call up my buddy and tell him the story of my weird bank scenario, and he gives me his address, and I call back my bank, and they say I’ll have forty bucks in cash the next day. I ask her to drop a little lollipop or something in the envelope.
armed with the knowledge that money was on its way, and the address to my friend’s place, we set off on our five mile walk with all our bags to his place. wishing we had a buck to our name, I spent my last fifty cents at a lemonade stand in some residential hood so we could get some refreshment. and we took breaks every 25 blocks or so. finally, in the mid afternoon, we arrived to our destination and were greeted warmly and offered cold drinks and a nice place to rest. my friend’s roommate was moving out, so we helped her move her stuff and she got us all burritos. I helped my friend work on his truck by pumping the clutch and getting out all the air bubbles as he’s running new fluid thru the hoses. we stayed up commiserating thru the night, and the girl took some bedding and made some nice nesting space for us to crash out in.
well my buddy said that we could probably stay a night or two, and the next day, the FedEx man brought me my cash. so we were set again to get some groceries and do some cooking. she cooks and I clean, is generally how we swing things. and we made a nice breakfast. and we went to check out some cool food carts downtown for lunch. and we listened to good music and I thought about contacting other people to stay with. but as it turned out, my buddy ends up saying we can stay all week till my Eugene friend picks us up later, so that takes a lot of pressure off.
after we establish that we are going to be in one place for a while, and don’t have to be hauling around our stuff every other day, I unpack my things and let all my oodles of stuff explode out and take up all the surface area that it can, and start looking around for things to do in town that I like doing, as long as we’re going to be around. and so, I find out about an open mic within walking distance, one I’d been to the year before when I was last in town, and I get ready to go out performing by spending an afternoon cutting and folding and gluing together cases for my demo CDs, which cleverly come in these ancient 5.25 inch floppy disks that I’ve cut open and gutted to use as packages for my cd. I manage to burn a few discs and finish packaging them in time to make it to this open mic and sign up to go on 6th.
the girl has no ID but the show space is separated from the bar and they don’t hassle us getting in. I’m excited to perform for my two friends in the crowd, the girl and our host. the girl has never seen me read on stage before. so we sit through a few singer songwriter types, I order some french fries for us. some of the performers are sad and others are up beat. some sing about love and others rant about politics. one particularly interesting duo of elderly gentleman, one on harmonica and one on guitar, do an awesome set, harmonizing with each other in beautiful baritone voices like a barbershop half-quartet. when it’s my turn to go on, I got a pretty good idea of my set, a few bits I do in under ten minutes, and enough time to pitch the crowd, and a rough idea of what I’m gonna say.
“so I’m a traveling poet and I hitchhiked up here with a friend of mine and this is what I do—
…now I’m going to do a song, I’ve been trying to get into writing little rap tunes, check it out, i’ve also got these demo CDs I made on my laptop that come in a cool custom recycled five and a quarter inch floppy disk that i’d like to try to sell for five to ten dollars or whatever you could afford, if I might shamelessly promote myself at this time…”
and yeah, I gave a good set, and the girl got to see me do my thing, she’d never been out to an open mic with me before so she’d known I do this stuff but I was pleased to get to show her my routine on stage. and I was well received, miraculously cool baritone guy is holding up a ten dollar bill at me, and then a woman comes over asking for a cd and she gave me ten dollars as well, and then I smoked a cigarette outside and another dude gave me seven bucks, and at that point I was sold out of all the copies I’d put together that night. on the way out the old baritone singing guys had been talking to the girl- “YOU are his traveling buddy?” - and then one of them tipped us out another five bucks- “here’s something for the road.” and the guy told me he liked my poem and to keep it up with the writing and the songs. good night.
on the last day in town before we got picked up to go back to Eugene I scored some 1850 songs from my cool friend that we were staying with and spent all day backing things up and moving all my music library over to this sweet external 500 gig drive I got for Christmas from my step mother, i’ve always been so pressed for storage space that I have made no serious effort to collect much so it’s been cool getting back into it. plus the girl hates the dubstep that my friend from Eugene plays in his car and she was adamant that I get some more music she likes so she could listen to it on my iPod for the duration of the trip back down. but i wanted some new music as well so it worked out swell. all’s well that ends swell.
we made it to Eugene. we stayed with a buddy of mine for a few days before going up to Portland. he gave us a ride, we offered a token gas money donation early on, before we were broke, which we knew was an eventuality. “listen,” I sez, “by the time we go up there we aren’t gonna have any money, so if we give you fifteen bucks now, you can spend it on whatever kind of fun you want to have today, as long as you’ll still take us to Portland, even though we’ll be poor and have been staying with you for days and have eaten your food and all.”
he already had another guy staying on his couch when we arrived. and the place is way small, but we made it work. the girl has good nesting instincts, there’s floorspace. we sit outside and smoke and talk with the neighbors who are all really chill, telling us about how the music scene in Eugene is really happening, how the bands always stop thru on their way to portland, stop to do a show and make gasoline monies. we fry our brains on all night surreal cartoon extravaganzas and melt off the walls hilarity side splitting, hikes up to Hendrix park looking like Jurassic park all up in the hills and fancy houses wondering if front yards are parklands or private drives or trails… saw a few local buddies and got to scheme on coming back thru town after a short stint in PDX.
the constant feelings of reunions and hero’s welcomes, the excitement of reconnecting, and introducing old friends and new friends from different concurrent parts of life, my friends generally get along with each other, and our hosts generally find my travel partner and myself to be an engaging duo, entertaining enough at least, do a song and dance for your meal is my usual routine, but having around a girl helps too, she doesn’t even have to pretend to try to be entertaining, and can get by on a sort of Tao-of-doing-nothing-ness. I admire that about her, even if she claims to have zero life ambitions. what’s worse than a shiftless layabout? I’ll tell ya. someone who just tries too hard.
Robotson.com is about to expire. can anyone paypal me 10 bucks to keep my site up? send to lance@robotson.com !!
hitchin’ part 2
hanging round the square in arcata, waiting for my friend to get home and give us a place to crash. sitting in the grass with all these street kids, arcata is a hobo paradise. they sit around planning where to camp tonight, a dance party at a place called never neverland, gather firewood and bring food they say. a shirtless redhead with long hair strolls up casually, ginger Jesus they call him. they’re discussing their various situations, the newly homeless and the seasoned ones living in cars, camping, making crafts, painting their guitar cases, embroidering clothing, strumming tunes, sharing smoke with each other even though smoking is outlawed in the square and virtually all over the town around business and so forth. for us, we got a warm place to sleep tonight, a shower to use, and probably have some good company and enjoy some comforts and have a fun time. i feel bad for some of these kids who are having a hard time, stuck in arcata for months, whereas we’re freshly on the road and everything is lining up easy so far. but at the same time I am a bit envious of what strange campfire street kid hobo parties must be like, and the weird delusional rainbow kid world they must inhabit.
after some sushi and cigarettes and a couple hours hanging round the plaza with the homeless kids, we get picked up, go out for supplies, food stuffs and tobacco, and head to the house to settle in. I’ve been here a few years ago, and it’s nice to reconnect with these northern california sorts. we do the little things we do anywhere, eat tuna melts and play jazz streaming off the internet into a stereo. all this and a nice mattress pad laid down with pillows and comforters. charge up your devices. the girl turns in earlier than I and I get a chance to stay up a bit later and commiserate with my friend, hear her crazy stories and all that’s happened since I’ve been gone. some people’s life stories are way more interesting than my own, as I really don’t do a lot but move around and talk to people, but I won’t print those stories here for you because they are too personal and too awesome to carelessly toss away to the public. keep the best ones for yourself.
we have tentative plans to meet up with the dude who drove us to arcata, and get coffee with him in the morning when we get up, however I sleep in greatly and the girl is packing her things and getting antsy to take off, while we’re still unsure about whether we should stay another day or head out for Oregon. it’s so nice to have a comfy mattress and a big comforter, I can’t tear myself away to get out of bed. instead of leaving we fret away the afternoon, the coffee guy never calls us back, I take another nap into the early evening. our host tells us it’s okay for us to spend another night, which is good because it’s sort of too late now to try to catch a ride for this evening. instead we’ll get a move on in the next morning.
after the second night, we’re actually trying to get up early enough to make a decent effort to press on to Oregon, but the vortex of trying to leave takes us over, waiting for our host to get home so we can say goodbye, waiting to figure out where we’ll get dropped off, should we get food, do we need to stop to get cigarettes, etc. - by the time we make it out to this onramp that we’re told should be the best ride out of town, it’s late in the day and it doesn’t seem too likely that we’re gonna make it anywhere good by the end of the night. trying to get to grants pass Oregon to stay with this nice couple I met when I was living in Eugene last year, and if I can’t get within striking distance today I’m not wanting to have to sleep outside or deal with any sketchy situations. but we give it a shot anyway.
so our routine is, we have our little sign, we look presentable, we smile and put out good energy, we present ourselves as just being ourselves, and hopefully people will respond to that. we do a little dance and shake around our arms saying, “hey, hey, going my way? take us to Oregon!” and people smile and laugh at us. some are holding up their arms doing little hand jive motion gestures at us, pinching their fingers to indicate that they are only going a little ways, or holding up one or two fingers to say their just going up to the next exit or so. our first actual day of trying to get out of arcata and we got such a late start it seems unlikely we’ll get anywhere good tonight. a guy from Oregon who moved in to town offers to take us to another on ramp he says will be better odds for us, but when we get there, there is already another hitchhiker trying to make his way out of town. territorial. a crust punk dude with a dog, and ourselves with our bags, makes it extremely unlikely any of us will get anywhere. so we hike back away from the onramp and try our luck there. I’m calling on the phone trying to get ahold of my friend in town to see if she can pick us up so we can spend another night and try again the next day. eventually a truck pulls over for us because the man driving recognized us from earlier in the day, and he takes us back to the pad we were staying at, fortunately.
we watch cartoons and set alarms to get up early, I fry some potatoes and we pick around in the fridge, eat garlic naan broiled in the oven, food and drink and music and a nice place to sleep. we reassess our plan for making it to Oregon, thinking of trying a sign for crescent city California first, about an hour and a half north, then you get off the 101 and cut up to grants pass thru the state border and some little town called cave junction, and I’m thinking maybe it’ll be tough to find someone doing that drive unless they’re coming from further south and going further north. we make another sign and I route the directions to walk to the onramp by the university in the morning.
we were hoping to get a ride but our host is sleeping in, and we slept in too, but it’s still early enough to get a move on, so after we’re all packed up, after being in town for three nights, we’re ready to go. so we hike for 20 minutes back to our onramp and seeing another hitcher there we roll up to the other side of the exchange and find another spot. we wait there an hour doing our hitching routine before we decide the spot isn’t so great, and that we should check back and see if the guy who was there is gone. he is, so we set down our stuff once more by the side of the road.
after a brief distraction of going over to smoke with these guys hanging off a hotel balcony who were hollering at us (they must have seen the girl first) we set up back again once more. the girl looks nice and I’m wearing my suspenders and a tie. “you’re dressed for success,” says a guy on a bike waiting for us to get out of there so he can hitch off the same spot we’re occupying. “More enthusiasm!” says an older couple walking by us to a pedestrian bridge. “We got enthusiasm! we’re the only hobos who dance! I would have made a great sign twirler!”
I have this whole notion about hitchhiking that I picked up from the first time I tried to get from Portland to southern california, took me four days. but at any given instance that I went out, I never had to wait more than one hour to get picked up, and generally that’s held true for this current trip as well. if your spot is good, you shouldn’t have to wait more than an hour.
finally a hippie vanagon at the stop sign gives us some acknowledgement (about 20 minutes after we post up), and beckons us to jump into the ride with him. after we get out of town a little he explains that he’s not going very far but he can take us thirty minutes up the road to Trinidad, and leave us at a good spot for getting rides. we were so excited just to get moving we didn’t think about how far we should try to make it, and I don’t know the route that well. when he drops us off, the situation looks grim. little town, not well trafficked, the onramp is short with not much room to stop, and there’s traffic coming from both directions to try to mug to. we’re a little worried, but I reset my metaphorical one hour countdown and we hope for the best.
fifteen minutes later a couple of cars stop and we run up to investigate. two young couples, caravanning in two cars, the one in the first car has a dog, they tell us they are heading pretty much the whole way we are going, except that they are going to stop at a little state park beach along the coast off the 101 on the way, and we’re welcome to either try to keep hitching from their or hang out with them and ride the whole way. we cram our things on top of ourselves and pack into the back seat with their dog.
trade stories, where are you from, talk about music, what would you like to listen to, etc. these kids are from Austin, theater kids traveling around on vacation after going to a drama workshop conference thing. they tell us we can repack our stuff when we get to this beach, not too far up. we get to spend about 40 minutes running around a beautiful foggy coastal beach day. it took me a while to piece it together that they were actually going along the whole route I wanted to take, and were going on even further to Eugene, which I was also planning on going to after spending a night in grants pass. but since these guys are going all the way up we figure we might as well just take the whole ride with them. I call up my buddy in Eugene, leave a message saying we can be in town by tonight and would he put us up? I figure it’d be cool to just show up and break into his house whenever, like a good beatnik friend would, but it’s always better to ask. so after running around the beach for a while with these nature enthusiasts, we get back in the car, and throw some of our things into the other car to be more comfy (we’re all sticking together, don’t worry, they tell me), and next thing we know we’re getting a ride all the way to Eugene.
hitchin’ / part 1.
we started out with a friend over a morning coffee, all packed up with our lives in just a few bags, stop off alongside the 101 in sonoma county, Steele lane onramp by the in-n-out burger. making some signs that read “north,” and “oregon.” we wait about 20 minutes before a young guy with drums and camping gear pulls over, tells us he’s headed all the way to arcata. pretty ideal. he shifts around his stuff in his car to accommodate us and we’re quickly on our way. I’m txting friends along the route, old friends in arcata, grants pass, eugene, and Portland. letting them know we’re on our way. hope to end up in a nice warm place to sleep but I’ve got a sleeping bag and some long johns just in case. carrying around everything I own in one small briefcase and one large backpacker’s pack, on loan from a friend who’d lived out of it for a couple months in europe, good traveling karma. it feels good to be back on the road.
listening to world music and one of the sons of fela kuti on the stereo. hurdling up the pretty California landscape, the 101 is such a nicer drive than the 5. we’re doing good time, should land in town after 3 pm some time, should have time to get ahold of people and try to see about staying a night or if we should just try to push it further on to Oregon. it’s good to be moving again after staying in Santa Rosa for nearly a few months, with only brief trips into the city to break it up. the bay area has been good to me, and full of good people who took care of me and supported me emotionally. good times, yet still there comes a point when you have to decide that you really are just visiting and you’re ready to move on.
so now I have a traveling partner, a young woman who is content with not knowing where we will end up next, someone excited about the open possibilities inherent in a life lived free of major responsibilities. if we weren’t really doing much in the place we were at, there’s little holding us there and we might as well be anywhere. so we teamed up to pool our collective friendships and have people we can visit, so we’re going to go on this test run and see how it rolls. nothing too strenuous, a good trial at the road life and seeing if you work well together in different contexts. potential for stress, and strange awkward situations that may arise, but it’s your attitude that will take you far. and so far we’ve been getting along famously, everyone of my weirdo friends I have introduced her to have been quite charmed by her. I’m excited to have a partner in crime again, or maybe for the first time, two wily hobos, personable house-guests, commensurate travel buddies.
sitting in the back of this silver honda, driven by a nice young guy from New York who landed in San Francisco, on his way to Arcata to camp on vacation and see some world musicians on the campus there for performances and Afro Cuban rhythms and melodies. honkytonky pianos sorta. driving thru redwoods with sand dollars on the dash. he tells us to remember to pee on some roses when we get to portland. “sometimes you gotta stop and piss on the roses,” I say. leave little memorable turns of phrase to associate with a time and place in conversational contexts, something to bind the group mind together and mark the occasion, milestone markers along the passage of time and place in the narrative of life. in-jokes for in-crowds, drawing circles of inclusion so new friends can relate like familiars. tell me a story, where are you from, what are some life goals you might have, the usual run of intense talk you jump into in the instant camaraderie of adventurous living on the frayed edges of common human experience. some company for a drive, bit of gas money, more comfortable than a bus and cheaper and still way more exciting to boot, because of the element of the unknown. excitement abounds.
the one thing I’m bummed about is that I left town without my hat. a couple days before our big trip I left my hat in a friend of a friend’s car and it was too inconvenient for her to deliver it to me or meet up with her before we had to leave, so I am off to Oregon without a head-covering. the hat was such an iconic part of my character. oh well. another abject lesson in non-attachment, again: the symbol is less important than what it signifies. it’s just like how i used to have these wings pinned to the hat, very festive and a bit flamboyant, i rocked them for about a year before i lost them randomly one day, and I figured that was long enough. a nice wool stingy brim fedora with upturned edges, classic but distinct from every other cheesy fedora you can find at a walmart - I wore it for about a year and a half and it became a part of me and people came to recognize me by it and don’t even notice me without it now. but in that time i’d like to think I’ve internalized the confidence and personae that the hat conferred to me, and I don’t really necessarily need it anymore. besides, my hair has grown out considerably over that year and a half and I think I might as well not cover it up anymore. I still want the hat back though. maybe she can mail it to me.
he said he didn’t even see our signs, that we were lucky he needed to stop to put some air in his tires. you can’t help but feel like you’re on the right path when it’s presented for you so readily, the path of least resistance, the ideal coincidence. friends start writing me back, excited to be in touch at the thought we’d see each other soon. we’ll get into arcata early enough to decide if we should get ahold of people there or press on to grants pass, we could still make it by tonight. in any case, lunch is in order and if I can get on the wifi somewhere I can look up a couple more phone numbers that I might need. I am like a modern day beatnik with a typewriter that fits in my pocket, and a publishing house available to me at any Internet cafe along the road. it may seem to run against the spirit of the road life, these attachments to technology, especially when my companions are more of the rustic sort. but I have always believed that the new media technologies would enable new lifestyles never before possible, and with the rise of social networking and crowdsourcing and distributed anonymous collectives, I’m doing my best to live up to my ideals and prove that point. so far so good.
all these hopes pinned on the eventuality of movement - motion for motion’s sake. it’s a habit by now, a lifestyle. years of wandering and cutting ties whenever appropriate leaves one with an attitude of constant nervousness, always ready to move on to the next scene. if things aren’t working out you can always pick up and pedal these aspects of your personality to a new round of strangers.
I’ve dissected and pop-psychologized myself so much now, I think I have a good handle on my issues. I can see the factors that have shaped me, the preemptive tendency to abandon another before being abandoned, built into every relationship and the very structure of my life. my mother gave me to her mother, my grandmother left this earth in a quick moment swerving on a dirt road to avoid hitting a deer, I was 13 years old and discovering new feelings. crushed. I shut off emotionally and went thru an appropriate lesson on mortality and loss at a developmental time. angsty teenage years led me to leave my home, take refuge with my father’s family, discover that side of my history. later, tearful arguments after the box of paraphenillia was discovered under my bed - I screamed you were never around, I was told he visited every christmas but I don’t remember. strange how we piece our own life’s narratives out of fragmented childhood images and implanted memories from stories we were told about ourselves.
my regression into infinite childhood. spoiled suckling of evil empire, feasting on abandoned wasteful remains of abundant industrial civilization. give me good old fashioned genocide, our ancestors raped and pillaged each other so we could sit here and have dinner parties yet again, giving thanks for ridiculous romantic unscrupulous diabolical cannonball diving into the choppy waves of unpredictable essential life experience; too many times to count down to destruction. broken syntax and no discernible sentences, just this chain of running on stream of consciousness word salad. from this deluded experience I am supposed to be your reliable narrator? I am willfully obfuscating my life in generalities and vague terminology, because I don’t want you to know everything about me and I’m still trying to live some kind of life as a crazy adventure story motif -
and the manic time before departure, before take off, before you hit the road with a thumb out pointing toward your destination. arrivals are full of mania as well, because once you get there you think you’re gonna be all worn out and tired, but actually you’ll be so excited to be able to decompress and expand, you’ll want to go out and do something fun, see everyone you can, stay up and congregate. nothing beats good road trips, and arrivals and departures with good people you haven’t seen in a while.
all of this on the horizon. the most interesting thing that could happen is unbeknownst to me, it could startle or surprise me- I hope it does, as that is the mode I’m trying to cultivate being in in this time of my life. it’s helpful to have assistance from another, who is similarly interested in cultivating that kind of relationship with being open to unknown opportunities, it’s helpful because you can support the mentality as well as have more eyes on it, scouring the trails for anything of medicinal value, getting ready for the big flight, the big migration, when the white blood cell gets to the heart and asks for oxygen the heart doesn’t say no, the heart oxygenates the blood cell and goes on pumping and the lungs go on inhaling and the flock is taking off in formation. stripping data threadbare barely aware of the scariest implications of the instructions.
let’s make a sign that says Oregon and stand by the on ramp next to the in-n-out, looking like nomadic bohemia and selling some story of freedom to carelessly drift town to town, catalyzing the cleansing flames clearing the old dead brush, allowing new growth to foster. the natural justification for destructive impulsivity and no less out there outside of the realms of human morality quantified and justified generally across the average intelligence of a bunch of brainwashed morons.
my convoluted misanthropy. my golden ticket. my willingness to conspire in the open and breathe high altitude progression blockade walk in arcade caution spark plague. joking around about burning the place down, hammer down protocol to eradicate any threat of transmission. electromagnetic wireless connection interrupted but I still dumped a couple good downloads from my consciousness to satisfy the condition that I am a writer, that I am alive, and that I have my own domain name that I can talk about stuff on, let me tell you all these things.
new t-shirt line (Taken with instagram)
“the apathetic elephant” staring at me from across the room (Taken with instagram)