Maiden Voyage

It was just before the 4^th of July.  I had got back in touch with an old friend and we decided to catch up over drinks before I spent the next day with family.  Going back to Orange County is always conflicting for me.  I remember very well the absolute revile I used to feel about the place when I lived there.  The sterility, the pointlessness, the frivolity in place of what I would consider ‘real experience’.  I had my Holden Caufield moments here, my Gatsby ones as well.  I drank and wrestled my soul like Hemingway, although my heroes were always more manly – like Ayn Rand.  I didn’t need to sneak out of any palace to know of sickness, old age, or death – yet I sought to escape, like Siddartha, or maybe Joyce, and find my own truth in this world.  I was driving north up the 5.  My spidey senses start to tingle, I hear smashing metal over the cowboy guitar on my stereo and a plume of dust rises just 100 meters ahead of me in the southbound lanes.  The dramatic conclusion to a high speed chase.  I momentarily flash back to Baghdad, route Irish, an IED has just exploded – then two Mexicans spring out of the car and hop over the median.  One crumples immediately, succumbing to injuries suffered when a police cruiser slammed their car into the divider.  The other runs about 20 feet before two other trucks and myself corral him in so that the officers on foot can take him down.  And they do.  Hard.  I am stopped there for a few minutes while things get wrapped up, next to me a father and son are locked in argument, not knowing the real cause for the accident or delay.

Father, “Look, I just don’t want you to see a dead body on the side of the road.”

Son, “Screw you dad!”

Traffic was completely stopped in the opposite direction.  I drove past a bumper to bumper parking lot of cars for the next 15 miles.  Thousands of people held up, unknowing the basis, able neither to move forward nor divert.  Two illegal Mexicans caused all this.  I become painfully aware of how lonely a person I truly am when moments like these mean phone calls and not immediate discussions.  I make it up to Dana Point.  The place has changed and yet remains the same in some startling way.  Like an old friend who had facial work done, reassuringly familiar yet completely alien. I met my old friend, she was frustrated that I was enjoying more the conversation with her parents than with her.  We hit a few bars in Laguna Beach.  I met a girl who enjoyed the pleasure of ten abortions.  This girl was now a single mother of two children, working for a bail bondsman.  “UFC is awesome, I love it when they are all covered in blood.” She quipped.  This might have been music to my ears had I not been trampled so thoroughly by women like her in the past.  Sometimes I feel as though I have had enough love and loss for one lifetime.  I got fairly drunk, passed out back at my friend’s house, ate bacon for breakfast, heard patriotic music in the distance.  The world here is so clean, it is truly surreal.  Too perfect to be real.  Even hangovers feel good, have a romantic quality, are something to look forward to.  No wonder my perceptions of the world are so warped, look where I grew up.  Surrounded by mannequins.  Puppets and animatronics in a meticulously crafted store front display, a dream world created to appear as what everyone wants but can never have.  Unattainable even to those who live within it, especially to them.

I do not feel guilty or ashamed.  My life has been no embarrassment of riches.  People in this country are embarrassed of their inheritance though, and yet their lives are defined by it inextricably.  The president himself has apologized for a history that he is neither responsible for nor am I ashamed of.  I’m not a wanton sinner or heathen, corrupting myself simply to despoil the world, cast out from god’s love.  I’m not really even a modern man in a condo typing on his laptop, more a prophet in a cave.  A drunk in a motel room.  An incontinent in a hospital bed.  Gasping unwanted wisdom into the dust.  Life is not like a black and white photograph of a coal engine, smokey, beautiful, complex, romantic.  Life is smelly and dirty, noisy, churning and vile.  My eyes, hungry for destruction, gorging on the feast of ruins.  Having come from this strange television world its no wonder why.

I have a trip coming up.  All conversations seem to flow back into it, like the heart of a strange city not of roads but canals.  I am to travel backwards around the world.  San Diego – Alaska – Siberia – Mongolia – Bhutan – Moscow – Stockholm and wherever else fate points its skeletal finger.  One would expect that I am excited, yet I feel all the triumph of throwing a ball of crushed paper into the wastebasket from across the room.  I am working as security on this trip but I have the feeling I will not be working at all.  I am the guest of people whose goal in travel, all around the world, is the search for meaning.  They seek experience.  Seek meaningful experience, a meaningful existence.   They believe that I’ve found it.  This city of gold.  This fountain of youth.  They think I can lead them to it because they know I have answers to questions they don’t even know how to ask.

Like vampires they wish to feed on me.  Glean from me that secret they believe I hold.  I am the experienced tracker in the search for meaning, and they are on safari.  They don’t know about this web page or my life and experiences, and they don’t care.  “Shut up and just give me the answer.” is their attitude.  The answer.  The answer is that there is no answer.  There is no enlightenment.  The quest is the destination, but they are too blinded to ever understand that.  Too impatient to allow me to explain.  I don’t really want to explain, that cheapens it all somehow.  Some things are better expressed in poetry than prose.

In comparison to these people, yes, I have the “answer”.  I know the secret.  I hold the key.  I can’t help but find it, yet have no use for it.  All their jets and expensive cars and designer shoes… worthless to them, meaningless to me.  All their knowledge of art, architecture, and design – mere trivia… trivial treasures of the mind.  Game show answers.  To be hoarded greedily.  Bragged about snobbishly.  Dangled in front of the coveting cultural proletariat, friends and family, anyone with one less life-widget than themselves.  Arbitrary capital really, a dollar with no gold standard, no wonder they continually drink yet remain thirsty.  Not insatiable, but frustrated and unsatisfied.  Socialism of the soul, they are printing more money to buy themselves out of debt.  They live in Tartyrus, amassing worthlessness in the name of fortune.  Myself, like a dog, just as happy with an old wool flea ridden blanket as with starched white sheets.  Knowing the difference, yet indifferent to it.  Must be the soldier in me.

So what is to come?  Will this trip either unfold like origami or unravel like an old sweater?  I honestly don’t know. What I know is that I will be tested.  On trial.  When in the employ of people with no values, yours will be truly challenged.  I feel like something is coming that will change everything, but I don’t know what it is.  As time draws near to departure I’m edgy, nervous, sporadic.  I open beers only to rediscover them later, flat and warm.  I drink them anyway.  My apartment is cold, skin tingles.  I wrap up in warm clothes, claw at them, pull them off.  And I still can’t sleep.  My bandwidth is starting to max out.  Time moves like a drunken dancer.  My mind jumps through space, clutching random images before being snatched away.  I fight to understand the metaphor.  The dark conversations of whores in the night.  A throne of swords.  A lizard eating its own skin.  An army of shadows in retreat.  A sky racing, clouds fighting towards the horizon, escaping.  Rats crawling through a sewer pipe.  Flies sucking on dead eyes – staring into eternity.  Worms swimming through sour flesh.  A lonely cigarette, lit and left to burn out unsmoked, wedged into the crease of an overflowing ashtray.  Smoke rising like a serpent in a trance, I reach out to touch it.  I’m attuning myself to the subtle influences in the universe, the vagaries of human nature.  I stand before a transition, pennies on my eyes, lost between two worlds.  I’m ready.

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