I am not willing to debate some things about the nature of life. Some of the things I believe in run contradictory to reason and I am OK accepting that. I’m alright with life being a collage of contradictions in which you place huge wagers on ridiculous bets. As long as you know the game. And one of the things I’ve come to know about the game is that when a good wind blows you open your wings and fly because that is true freedom. One must trust the giver of winds sometimes with the whole of their life. Fine. Game on.
Well a good wind blew on a sunny day at the Sanctuary while I was suturing a large sheet of combat paper with broken mirror into a canvas with Eli. I breathed the air in to test its contents because I am a professional and my computers showed that the air was composed of pure artistic possibility. So I packed my bags with whiskey and weed, hunched my shoulders against my bony frame which I willed to be strong and I left the house for the first time in the last few weeks.
Gonna travel this land over…. again.
It was a hot day in New York when Mike and Jen dropped me off at the Greyhound station. I had my blue fake leather suitcase (which was full mostly of drugs) a backpack and a pillow in my instant professional suit coat and sunglasses which snap me into an alternative mode of being. When I feel that positively cool and in charge of things I am reminded of the personality I made to deal with the military. Funny, smart, mean. My three guns. And I kept them close.
I like that me.
On a five hour lay over to Buffalo I stopped in the bar to get a drink. The bartender turned out to be some form of witch. She read my palms and told me that I would some day get famous for using pastels violently. I laughed in her face. Had she seen the pastel paint on my pants? She told me to beware Kansas. Then she poured me a tall shot.
It was the first of many.
After the bar closed I went to sleep in the station until the bus came. I knew that I wasn’t going to want to make any buddies this trip. No part time friends. No new acquaintances. I didn’t want any more gaudy stories about the troublesome lives that make us what we are. Greyhound people. I no longer want to share that thing with them.
I am done being a Greyhound person. That’s what they all say as their bus leaves the station.
Greyhound does what it wants to do and this Greyhound wanted to break down to try to break me down and it damn near worked. There was a K-Mart there so I took a shit in a real bathroom and rolled a joint while we waited for a mechanic. I did the math. I had a few hours to spare… but this could easily take more than a few hours.
Well, good winds are lucky winds so I swallowed my anger and sure as shit the mechanic comes with not a fucking minute to spare and off we go.
I make my connection to the train in Chicago. I was waiting for the moment of relief when the train would pull forward when the fat attendant that had told me which seat to sit in walked up and fatly observed that I was not in that seat. I had chosen a more remote seat by the window in lieu of the painful seat he’d wanted me to sit in with everyone going all the way to San Francisco clumped in the front of the car. Just short of telling him to fuck himself I explained that I was a veteran with personality issues and that I’d just gotten off of a 24 hour Greyhound ride and I could use a few moments to myself. I continued to explain, pretty angrily, that I was a “full grown adult” and that I could work out my own seating arrangements and that there had been a precedent of seat selection that had drawn me to make this very lengthy decision in the first place.
Well he didn’t take kindly to my attitude so he said “You’re throwing a lot at me here. You’re a veteran… you’re an adult… so, are you going to have, like, problems? Being on the train?”
At this point I decided I didn’t want to talk to him anymore so I turned away from him to let him know that our conversation was done. I said “No, Sir. We will not have any problems. I promise I will move if a family needs a seat. Thank you. Goodbye.” He stared at me for a few minutes and then didn’t talk to me again for the next 55 hours.
Which is precisely how long the ride takes.
Amtrak tortures smokers in many ways. By forcing us into an environment which is naturally stress inducing, which naturally causes a man to sneak booze onto the train and drink it with his coffee, which naturally causes a man to have a powerful need for a cigarette. But you can only smoke in predetermined cities. The schedule is on the wall. For some stretches we weren’t allowed to smoke but once in an entire state. Can you believe that? How can I be expected to only smoke one cigarette in Nebraska? Even thinking of Nebraska now I am troubled with so much anxiety that I could smoke half a pack of cigarettes in one sitting.
Well I endured. Drunkenly. And when I could I smoked grass. But the chance of being left in some bum-fuck town where you might very well be forcibly fucked by bums loomed everywhere and I could feel in my soul a deep understanding of how terrible I would feel if I were to be left here because I had wandered off to get high and now I was in the middle of nowhere with no phone and little money in my fancy coat and sunglasses and stoned. No… too dangerous.
Smoking int he bathrooms also proved hazardous because they WILL kick you off of that train ANYWHERE. Yes. So I only smoked a few hits of hash in the bathroom independent of one another but wasted most of the high being trapped in the tiny bathroom with the faint smell of weed and a very intense paranoia. Whatever high did make it back up to the viewing car was usually so high strung that it didn’t help the general euphoria of what I was seeing at all.
I could go into a biblical sermon about those mountains which never end from Denver to the dead ship yards outside of Emeryville but I will not. In fact almost anything that I could say about the beauty of that stretch of land would be pointless. Language is too dumb and ugly a thing to describe them. I simply tell you this: Make it your personal duty as an American to see that stretch of land. It is the most majestic thing which time and patience and raw force had ever put together and one cannot help but contemplate the nature and the idealogies of God and how fantastically trivial we are in contrast to these rock formations which are pure and beautiful in a way that we will never be.
But I warn you, take plenty of whiskey.
This concludes the “To San Fran” portion of this three part adventure. Tune in next time I get stoned to hear the juicy details of a bleary eyed three day San Francisco blow out.
Otis, over and out.
The Paper Trail 