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)