Sunday, October 30, 2011

I'm So Mad

I just got totally gypped by the girls over at the GI clinic. The legacy of this mad running around the country is a mild episode of colitis, what the doctor calls a flare. My Doctor. In whom I have  a total, mind numbing, knee-trembling irrational but delicious romantic school-girl crush. One-sided and inappropriate as it is.
He’s this mittle-europa hunk of nearly bald and unpronounceable Hungarian from Croatia who has been treating my nether regions for years ever since the days when he was new at the clinic and the guy you would get to see when the big name DR that was nominally in charge was booked months in advance which was usually. Fine by me.  All he had to do was roll those rrrs and say vat ve vant to do in dis case and I would hear bells and see pink emanations and do exactly what he said, which was to lie down on my back and pull up my sweater while he would palpate my abdomen. Pretty much as good as it gets.
I know I did it to myself, the nurse didn’t really, but when she said she would tell Dr S**** my symptoms and get me in to see him the very next day I took her at her word. SO much of my difficulty in this world comes from me hearing what I want to hear in stead of what is actually happening I am embarrassed to tell you.
Imagine my surprise when the exam room door opened, after I had set my alarm at 4:30 in order to be properly bathed and bedewed and ornamented with my prettiest underwear, just for confidence you understand, when instead of the dishwater bald pate of my beloved there was peeking around said exam-room door some unidentified and unnecessary full head of raven black hair I would just as soon seen in perdition. I was indignant.
“You’re not Lee” I exclaimed, and then spent the next half hour explaining without giving away my secret infatuation so as not to reveal what an old sap I really am. This was of course the associate MD who takes the acute stuff because my dear Dr S***** is now the fully booked part of the clinic and unless you book 6 weeks out you never see. I knew that. I just didn’t want to know that. So I did not. And I did try womanfully to listen to what I was told, and to do what I was told, but in order to make that work I had to re-tell myself and roll some rrr’s in the process and mix up w and v and the whole works.
I wuz robbed.

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Mileage

I'm on Google Earth adding shit up, and I got some totals roughly speaking. The first leg, from Portland to Hartford to Cashiers to Key Largo calculated with the little yardstick thingie and not getting too detailed about all the little twists and turns the highway takes was 4657 miles. Then to go from Key Largo back up to Orlando and then over to Pensacola and around the gulf shore to New Orleans, then Houston, El Paso, Phoenix and LA where I turned finally North with a side trip to San Freesco back home to Portland was another 3720 miles.
I have a lifelong tendency to run a good thing into the ground, which is an unnecessary trip to Prince Rupert via Prince George, BC, 1089 miles up and 1153 miles back because we went through Kamloops rather than down the Frazier Gorge, for a grand total of 10,619 miles.
Like I said before I am glad to be home. Portland makes perfect sense. Of all the places it is the most humane of cities. Setting, culture, costs, weather all that shit point right to our fair little stumptown city of bridges, and fuck a bunch of coffee companies co-opting a traditional and not always complementary nickname. I used to be a little ashamed of living here, like in the 60's when San Francisco was the flower power place to get your freak on, or Manhatten in the go-go 80's and the moneypower vibe, or LA for the outsider art and the art cars in the 90's but I feel different about it now. This here's home.
$549 per ticket divided by 10616 miles gives $0.051699783407100480271211978529052 per mile.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Just because you got home doesn't mean you are safe..........

I'm home. I got here Monday evening early. Tired, nervous, burnt out and sick of myself, the bus, my stupid ideas of fun, the world, everything, this blog not least.
I'm still aghast at they way I ran it into the ground. That trip up north was totally unnecessary. I dug it thugh, but I have to say I was a bit surprised at a couple of things, Canadian culture in general and the Canadian Greyhound system., which is now virtually indistinguishable from the American bullshit, wore out, down to just the basics, impersonal.
And it seems like our northern cousins are also wore out with being nice now they are a bit more arm's length and a bit more tendency to assholeness. I don't care. I did enjoy being there and seeing all that country but it was frustrating to just be passing through and I can't think of a way to do otherwise, without a lot more money than I will ever have. I would like to travel out to Longworth where I went that one time it seems like the folks there were interesting excellent people and I dug it and made a bond that I hate just to walk away from but I know damn good and well none of that is true I made no impression they aren't really there any more and if I went there it would just be a big "who the fuck are you " type deal and I would hate myself for even going and for imagining this bonding thing at all.
And while I am at it I feel that way about the trip altogether, that it was a waste of resources, that Jane actually does hate me now, she never answers my texts never writes to me, and its because I went there and got up in her shit and saw her scene and reminded her of all the reasons there are to dislike me.
I put over a grand into this stupid trip. That's a lot of money I don't have. I hope I am wrong about Jane Coffee, she's a quirky kid, busy in her own life, her own friends, I'm 40 years older, and these kids now are on a whole nother level, thinking in a way I don't, about things I don't know about, with their own conventions and culture and she makes/made a huge effort to be my friend and maybe it just can't be done.
I'm sick. I drove myself into a Colitis episode. Like when I went to Thailand only this time I am determined to stay away from writing about poop all the time like I did back then. It's not rel bad yet so I have hopes that I will get out of it sooner than later but you never know. I called Dr Somogyi whom I have a great respect for we will see what happens now he is supposed to call me back today. I don't feel bad but I am worried when I see the "end results" and that's as descriptive as I intend to get.
I made a pot roast out of a huge slab of chuck I got at freddie's which came out excellent there's food for a week  and plenty to put into the freezer after.
It's like I'm two people, one of us worried about money and being sick and the other ok with everything and just going on about her business. Depressing.

Out of Sequence


Here's something that I found this morning  poking around on my cptr it kind of stops abruptly but I wrote it on the bus in mid-flight so to speak, something distracted me and I never got back to it.

Kamloops is a big town. You come around the corner from the North and there it is all spread out like cherries in a bowl. The depot has a ceramic tile floor and guess where you have to sit to charge up your gimmick, right there on said floor. My butt will probably never forgive me. They have these hard-ass floors for the snowmelt all effing dark winter long.
My butt is already angry. I know because I took a bit of a poop back there a ways on the moving bus I don’t know really what it amounted to being they have that poisonous green liquid down there in the receiving end of the apparatus. I now have officially arrived.
Really I’ve run out of things to say. Nothing much happened on the way here except I watched a movie and tried to sleep a little and what’s up with the fucking road surface totally and violently pitted every random six feet and ka-thud KA-THUMP thump thump so much for any real sleep. I don’t give a shit, I will be home in bed by this time tomorrow, well, tonight.
They are doing that thing where they kick everybody off while they go clean up and gas up and get the new driver out of the bar and sober enough to steer.

Monday, October 24, 2011

I was wrong

I'm home more about that later. I just deleted the thing I wrote here yesterday all sleep deprived and nerves worn raw by overuse and Greyhound-saturation syndrome. I was wrong when it happened and wrong when I wrote it and particularly wrong when I posted it. If you read it and wonder where it went hoping to amuse yourself by rereading what a asshole Heidi Sue has become you are out of luck. I'm st ill a a-hole but I have better sense than to advertise it as something funny. Sorry.

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Campfires Part 2

Several times I have seen what I took to be campfires off in a field not far from the highway. I do not know what they actually were. Flames. In the back of my mind I just figured I was hallucinating or conflating something with a reflection from elsewhere, but I did see something. Open flames, red, free against the black bulk of darkened America. Campfires in the night.
Of course they are not actually campfires and I finally figured it out after another night charging through the coastal mountains of British Columbia. What I was seeing were those sodium yard lights the power company sold the farmers of North America to illuminate the farmyards so that meth addicts can see to steal the copper out of their milking parlors and the ammonia out of the tank parked back there behind the hay baler.
Rolling along in the greyhound after midnight, half crazy from sleep deprivation, at just the right angle, a little bit of berm alongside the roadbed raises the grass and weed growing there to flutter across the orange yellow fire-like glow of a distant sodium vapor giving it a lifelike, fire-like animation and fooling the eye that is longing for something anything, to alleviate the fever dreams of midnight America

Library

I’m camped out in the mezzanine lobby of the Prince George Public Library, plugged in at least, warm at least, unmolested or very nearly so, putting in the time waiting for the Vancouver Bus at 3:30 or 4 or 4:15. Or something. Every now and then a hapless Prince Georgeite climbs the circular stairs to rattle the library door and enquire about the hours, then inevitably reads the door and blushes a little before wandering off to the health fair in the conference center below. It’s a big building, modeled vaguely as all big civic buildings in BC seem to be these days, on the longhouse or some variation thereof. In the previous century but one the buildings were English Colonial, kind of a beaux-arts Whitehall replica in as much stone as they could drag together.
Taking another look, I have to say there's a bit of Michael Graves involved here  And some really good oil-field type welding, panoplies and canopies and towers and arches out of 3 inch pipe in roman curves supporting pagodas and crennelations for no good reason but excellent and playfully formal if there is such a thing, all to good effect.
I have opted to endure this level of boredom to avoid the greater evil of a nine-hour layover in Vancouver in the middle of the night. So I have an eight hour layover in PG in the day, and its not raining, cold as it is, so good to go. They kicked me out of the depot so it could close at 10, they will let me back in at 3. I went to the coffee joint the local Starbucks clone but the loudspeakers were braying some mindless repetitive Canadian Pop Bitch music at high volume and I couldn’t take it, even though the thermometer is hovering barely above 0 Celsius, which is way more dramatic than 32 F and still colder than is comfortable even with my new thrift store generic winter sweater, goose down jacket, gloves, scarf and cap.
They opened the Safeway by the depot finally at 8, we having arrived at 6:15, nice guy driver, Scots accent Sean Connery look/soundalike let me have the very front seat and conversated a bit in the midnight, there were approximately damn few passengers all the way, including the kid we dropped off at some mining camp, dozens of doublewides lined up for barracks way out between nowhere and somewhere worse, at 4 in the morning, poor bastard.
My butt is sore from the ceramic-tile-on-concrete floor but like I say, I’m plugged in, got food and chocolate milk, so good to go.

Pioneer Backpackers' Hostile

So I walked in the pitch dark pouring down rain from the bus to the Hostel where I had booked me some lodging in Prince Rupert. My trusty GPS for some unfathomable reason thought the address in my contacts list was in Guadalajara Mexico and kept trying to send me south, 2,568 miles south. I knew better. As it was I had a good sweat going by the time I got there and checked in.To a hotbed of passive-aggressive hostility.
Which started on the phone when I made my rezzies, no warmth from the hostess Christy, I dunno, she just wasn't into it.
Then the brouhaha with the closed road that reopened but not until I had another dose of the Christyfreeze, and yet a third when it reopened. However her boyfriend w at the desk when I got there, and checked me in, at first denying my debit card with a tone of voice that said he expected no less. I checked online and there was plenty of money in there and it went through and good comfy bed and hot shower and shave and shampoo and crash to be awakened immediately with total screaming muscle cramps it feet, legs calves, and unidentifiable leg parts that scared the bejesus out of me. The smooth flat wood floor helped, and staggering downstairs I stole a banana and heaped up a handful of table salt and took a advil and a pill and got 9 hours of sleep and was damn glad for it, waking up with gut cramps and the fear of god and of colitis in a panic in my heart.
The chick behind the counter was neither Christy nor Sebastian but a young Quebecoise who lost no time in shaming my poor attempts at French, then ignored e to keep up a conversation with some lithe unshaven 20something of a real Frenchman. That's unfair in a way to say that because I did succeed in making conversation later in the morning. She was nice enough, but I had the feeling she was holding a knife the whole time, or at least checking constantly for turds on the carpet.
The Prince Rupert Rowing and Yacht club had at one time elaborate security locks on the gates to the dockside ramps, but they are gone and replaced with a bungee cord, I dunno, hard times I guess. Aluminum and plenty of it, Charter boats and a big Ketch of raw metal, nicely setup and hell for stout. No marina is complete without two or three mossy neglected sailboats mouldering at chafe worn lines, even here.

This guy Lyle has a garage studio open to the sidewalk down to Cow Bay where I looked at boats, Lyle does amazing and thorough native style carvings and paintings. His little helper Duane, a chubby 19 year old Native American with ponytail and pack of Marlboro Reds complete, was in the middle of weaving a traditional no-shit Tlingit conical Rain Hat out of cedar bark stripe precisely cut and flexed and perfectly woven to exact symmetry. Nice stuff.
)EDITORIAL ADDENDUM( Actually not Tlingit. Haida...Just words to me, white girl that I am, but to those concerned it might be a matter of life and death. It amazes me how often I drop the ball. I was there, I'm interested in the weaving techniques of these guys, the Native Americans, but I didn't even talk to the kid that was weaving. He was on a break, too. I don't know why I do that and I would like to know, too.
BACK TO ORIGINAL TEXT::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
The Hostel nearly redeemed itself on my return in the late afternoon, there was a kid, Devon, I think, kind of a road warrior type, shared his delicious Spaghetti with meat sauce and little chopped nut garnish and fresh basil and good Parmesan and a chat and a real road connect. Good looking too. And a Sailor. He was in Prince Rupert by mistake, got on a coal freightcar running empty in Vancouver, thinking it would stop in Jasper which it did not so 6 more freezing ass hours to Prince Rupert. Not broke, not bumming, just wild and young and amazingly tough.
I had me a 4 hour nap and got up and got the fuck out of there. It wasn't bad vibes, just not good ones, no vibes at all.

Saturday, October 22, 2011

Too Late

It’s winter in Prince George, Full on Fall anyway. We were up to 4,000 feet coming over the ridge to get here and all the leaves on all the trees were totally gone. Instant depression.
Here in PG there are still some, bright yellow, kind of a glowing saturated yellow on the birch trees. And there was frost on the early daybreak fields not beat down by any snow so far. There was a grain combine parked in a wheat field in the rain later on, two or three circuits of the standing wheat completed, the rest doomed to rot in the autumn rain. Too late.
Some of the farmers have those giant round hay bales still in the hay fields where the baler left them already showing a coating of moss in the rain. Other farmers have their hay shrink-wrapped in those same giant cylindrical bales, wrapped like white sausages, all gathered in long rows of tubes in a single storage field, like a vast chenille bedspread for all the cold cows in the winter dark.
There was a momentary crisis in Prince George. Wednesday night a boulder came down on the highway near Terrace, not far from Prince Rupert and made everybody nervous so they closed the highway all night, and the busload of passengers turned around and drove all the way back to Vander Hoof. A sign on the depot door read Highway closed service to Hazelton only when we got off the bus from Vancouver. But as I was trying to decide what to do about it a call came through it was open again. I’ve flown over that coast range and those are real mountains and no joke.
Just past Fort Frazier we saw a big ol’ healthy-looking black bear bounding across the road hauling ass up into the treeline in that peculiar low-ass snout-high sprint they do,
I couldn’t find the camera in time.

Downs

There was a Downs Syndrome girl caught my attention in the Seattle bus depot the other night. Early twenties, perhaps, not much younger or older than that but its hard to tell . Anyway she was trying to get her some goodies from one of the snack machines that rip off the passengers in all bus depots from coast to coast. To avoid giving $2.50 to the machine for a bottle of water in Vancouver later that night, to digress only slightly, I wandered in to the little convenience store, where the lady gladly charged me $4.50 for the same thing, and smiled while she was doing it.
Anyway this downs girl was seriously trying to come to grips with the whole transaction and was not succeeding. She caught my eye and I went over to help. She had part of it figured out. To get the cookies you put in the money, and she had found the coin slot and had found her coins in her little pink purse. She knew you put the money in the slot, but she didn’t know about amounts, or denominations or the differences between coins. Or numbers, like on the trays in the machine. Or that she had given me, to put into the slot for her, a stupid Rutherford B Hayes one-dollar coin, and she did not know that the god damned machine then kept said one-dollar coin and would not disgorge it when I pushed the coin return plunger and got back a random assortment of everything else, pennies nickels dimes and two quarters.
I been ripped off plenty by the fucking machines in these dumps, and the Seattle bus depot is just that, a total dump, right up there with Oakland the oldest and dumpiest of them all. And I know better. I don't put nothing in there I want back.
She did know to ask for help, and she did understand I was just as frustrated as she was, and that the greyhound clerk she collared to replace me wasn’t about to help either. He told her to call the number on the little sticker on Monday morning during business hours. She really didn’t have many of those concepts down, nor the concept I got from his obfuscation, which was a polite way of saying you are shit out of luck lady, downs or no downs syndrome.
She was humble about it, and about her handicap. She understood, or seemed to understand, that there is a lot of shit in this world beyond her kenning, that she would never get.
Hours later as she was leaving the bus she noticed me sitting up toward the front, recognized me and gave me a shy smile.

Smoke Break

There were these two Canadians a couple of rows in front of me talking talking talking all the way from Vancouver and its now halfway to Bumfuck and even with my earplugs this low rumble of men’s voices six or eight hours worth I for one was tired of it. You know how I get.
So we pull in at Williams Lake and these two pile off stat for a smoke. This one chick from way back thinking they have de-bussed for good, immediately and forthrightly schleps all her shit forward and plops down evidently solving her own annoyances from the back forty. Then a true little old lady gets on, new passenger, and sits down beside her. Immediately entrenched.
OK, smoke break’s over, and two bewildered Canadians find themselves other arrangements. Oh well," one of them sighs as he heads to the back in search of a seat. Totally Canadian.

Campfires

Several times I have seen what I took to be campfires off in a field not far from the highway. I do not know what they actually were. Flames. In the back of my mind I just figured I was hallucinating or conflating something with a reflection from elsewhere,  but I did see something. Open flames, red, free against the black bulk of darkened America. Campfires in the night

Friday, October 21, 2011

Customs

Rolling again. That was Canadian Customs. This severe older guy, (probably ten years younger than me) behind the podium, asked what I meant when I indicated on the declaration form I had meat and dairy and seeds and nuts I told him jerky and salami and cheese. The other question was what did I do for a living morphing into what did I used to do before retirement and I couldn’t think and I was shaking and then I thought oh yeah medical office that’s right, computer records that’s what, electronic records and I would have blathered on and on until I had a blood sugar seizure. Luckily he changed the subject to what was I doing in Canada, hmmm? I told him about the bus pass and the pretty much pointless ride out to Prince Rupert which he chuckled and waved me through have a nice time in Canada Miss Dillenbach and whoa, good to go!!
So now we’re on the way to Vancouver where I will find out if this ticket thing is how I think it is.
There was a very nice India-type Indian in the line in front of me so when I was done with the customs I asked him if we were done and yes so I started to follow him out to the bus only he wasn’t going to the bus he was going into the mensroom oops.
Then there was the handsome teutonic queer in the seat behind me who somehow worked it into the conversation that he rarely rode the bus though he did travel a lot for business, terribly deep voice but had on short shorts and a black leather sportcoat, handsome as he was, it looked wrong.He left the impression that he was, and he may have actually been from Palm Springs, I was embarrassed for him. Why, you ask? I will tell you as I would have told him had he asked, honey you don’t wear the black leather jacket with the 70s shorty shorts. You just don’t.
If you do the black sportcoat thing especially if it has the extra stitching details, not biker zips but an extra row of stitching here and there for a tailored kind of sophisticated vaguely menacing in a butch-bar kind of way you should go to your designer jeans and tasseled loafers, brown and lacquered-looking.
If you go with the shorts, go cargo, don’t go for the I-just-came-off-the-tennis-court thing, go for the cargo shorts, and a fleece jacket, or, if you must, the Ahmadinijad poplin thing. You don’t have to zip it up, but it does say “I am capable of relaxing”
The black leather looks with those strange shorts like you got lost on your way to a Village People rehearsal at the little Theater in Lompoc…

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Back in the saddle again



Well not really, but I am sitting on the bus depot floor plugged in and T-mobile 3g wifi hooked up waiting for the 10:40 bus to Points North. Feels like home.
The lady at the ticket counter threw me a bit of a curve ball when I got up to the head of the line. She expressed some skepticism about the Discovery Pass being international, she thought it only was good for US but she said I should just get on the bus for Vancouver BC, do the paperwork for the border crossing and kind of go with a “fait accompli” type approach. Which I fully intend to do.
Plugged in, a quick but careful review of the website didn’t say any such thing, about one or the other, it says both with no distinction, North America included as the term they use.
I am fully capable of reading shit into the actual text that isn’t there, case in point the brouhaha about wifi on the buses, particularly the scam I fell for in Salt Lake City about the wifi I thought would then be available in all greyhound stations and was really only in that one and the snippy letter from their customer service guy to show for my $12.95
After having said all that I still think I am good to go.
I did refine my list of shit to bring with, for instance food, more pineapple in the pemmican, which it turns out is an excellent satisfying food to extinguish the hongries, and I put together some beef and rice and red beans burritos, three of them, and some apples and some tangerines. And its only for 36 hours up, one night and a day, and   48 back, longer because of a ridiculous 9 hour layover in Vancouver BC. The bus from Pr Geo gets in after the last Seattle bus has gone so you wait all night and get the first one in the morning. I brought a blanket, my little down comforter I swiped off the Eva Air flight back from Bangkok.Which is going to offend the chick at the Pioneer Hostel in PR where I am booked, "NO Blankets" bedbug phobia, a good thing, but I'm not about to go au naturel 9 hours worth on the bus station floor, no pillow will be bad enough, but goddammit, I'm bringing the blankie!
It is freezing at night in Prince George, but Prince Rupert over on the coast is just about same-same with Portland right now, but raining more, Stearns rain suit, Danner Gore-Tex boots, and a folding umbrella, lots of heavy socks and my old Jos A Banks tweed slacks, hounds-tooth heather. Should be good to go.
I also brought a bag of snickers Halloween candy bar mini. And I’m hungry right now.
PS (written Fri Night) I so did not bring the effing snickers minis I looked and looked and no I did not I remember putting them on a different shelf in my fridge than the pemmican and suff it goes to show there's always something..o.f course I obsessed about them all night but when I finally got to a supermarket in
Smithers I got Granola bars instead...

Sunday, October 16, 2011

Home for a Minute

I'm home. For now. Let me get something to eat, have a bath and a sleep and I will tell more dirty stories about the beat-ass road.
Oh, yeah, further wild hair.
I'm going to Canada and ride around on Canadian Greyhound until my pass is up, to Prince Rupert, via Prince George and back, which is cool, because the part where you are asleep on the way up is reversed and you get to see it on the way back. One night in a hostel. Leaving Thu...

.....more...

Friday, October 14, 2011

Sacramento letdown


This is a lot like being in jail. Sacramento. Big cement-floored room with torpid travelers watched over by large indifferent men in uniforms. TV on, too loud, echoing. Me trying to do something else.
I ran into two ladies, dreadlocked middle aged black ladies by the way, with Discovery Passes, headed to New York. They will learn. Faux pas # 1, watching a movie without headphones. She was a bit offended when I objected, but she will learn. Good Luck Ladies, I hope you are still friends when it’s over.
My side trip is also over. It went like clockwork. Up I-5 to Los Banos, then through the Salinas Valley to San Jose, to Oakland to San Fransco, the Bay bridge spectacular in the early evening, the new little bus depot in Frisco a sad ending to an era yet a nicer place to do business. Turned right around and back over the Bay Bridge to Oakland and so on and so forth and here we are, layover until 2 am charging the batteries fine by me.
Desperately in need of a shower, clean clothes, and a series of enormous bowel movements. Let’s just say its been since the other side of the Mississippi.

Wild Hair

Los Angeles. I'm layovering until 4:15. Bored. Hey wait a minute, I can go anywhere I effing want to!!!
The greyhound website is crashed in English so I check the schedules in espagnol.
I can go to San Fran at 11:35, be there at 8:20, hop on the 8:45 to Medford, and make the same exact arrival at 8 am.

I van to go san freesco, boys, which is another story for another time.
So
I went in and got me a ham an cheese on wheat and a banana and a huge cookie and a pint of milk.
More Important, I went back to the ticket line:
Priority Boarding  $5
Walkng past the sweating worry of lining up by the dooor and resenting every nuance of lineup order

Priceless  or, at least, worth the fin...
Postscript added  Monday Oct 17
The bus driver never called the priority boarding, thus I only got on halfway through the regular boarding by forcing my way through a different door...The enormous cookie was made of cardboard and I threw most of it away, and the pint of milk turned out to be rice milk with gobs of congealed cinnamon and sugar  and guar gum floating on the top I threw that away too. But I had a good ride, and I guilt tripped the driver into letting me  sit in his pissmarked very front seat for the ride over the Bay Bridge, I shot video ... asshole...

Migra Act II

We're in Indio. Not even daylight yet. Halogen lit empty acres of tarmac, sentinel palms.
La Migra has another Espanicio in the position over by their SUV.
Remember that polite little guy that gave me sanctuary after the crazy lady ran me off?
Him. That's who they got. Not a nicer guy on the bus.Maybe even because he knew he was vulnerable.
These guys are with CHP border service. They are bigger and more teutonic looking, better fed beef.
The feds last night looked at everybody's paperwork, and maybe they made a list and ran it, and voila, there goes homey. They were waiting for him when we pulled in...
Me, I'm tired,  haven't really slept very much at all.
But I feel OK, sad is all.

Never Mind

Never Mind
These two very young espanic ladies just got off the bus. But wait, we’re in Phoenix, by the time we got to Phoenix our bus was so old and fucked up it no longer held California licensing, so we debussed for a supposed 10 minute lightning round. NOT
Whoever spaced the replacement bus so we hurried up and waited for half an hour in the terminal, just enough to get me some coco puffs ‘n milk. Because I had the preboard gimmick in El Paso, I had front seat priveleges which translated into first in line privileges because I made damn sure I got my kit slung on and hit de do’ like mos’ rickey-tick.
But this asshole driver is one of those territory-poor drivers who sling their inevitable shoddy two overnighters in the front seat, my seat, and get shirty about it, Christ, that weird chick back in Pendleton, Miss Duckface, had suitcases in all four front seats. She, however picked out a handsome and self absorbed truck driver with an ego big as all outdoors to move a bag for so she could yammer with him for six straight hours. Neither of them had a thought worth repeating. I know, I was right in the battle zone. The bombs bursting ion hot air.
At length they found us a nearly equally fucked up coach. We boarded. 38 of us on a 60-passenger coach. Then a dozen more startees, originators they call them, and then a trickle more. We were damn near full.
Me, I am utterly cold about it. I done got burned twice, which is “shame-on-me” territory, so I plop my humongous black pemmican purse and laptop bag and stare out the window. One chick tried, and I was so slow, and radiated so much bitterness she gave up. Fine by me.
Then these two young women came up the stairs, and there was only me, the older black guy across the aisle, and the driver’s pissmarked front seat. The girls didn’t get it, but I decided what the hey, don’t look too crazy, so I invited the older one, and the younger one went across the aisle. Good to go. Not really. Mine didn’t think it was fair. I egged her on, explaining about the priority boarding. She waxed indignant, went down and got right up in the driver’s shit, politely, much hand wringing and appeals to cuteness, no avail. She called for the supervisor.
Evidently he offered them a better deal, so the both of them got their handbags, their checked luggage, and followed the supervisor into the bowels of the depot for a blowjob and a cab ride or something. I don’t care. I got mine.
Got a bit of a PS here.
Back when I assidently wet the guru’s panties, after he moved this one tall skinny older frizz-haired guy I had a bad vibe from leaped into his seat. Either the guru dried it out or the new guy was oblivious. The latter, I’m thinking.
Anyway that’s the guy the Migra took off of here last night at the AZ border crossing. Nobody that knows will tell me what happened. I assume. Since they were checking ID, he didn’t come up with something they liked.
He’s gone. I saw the driver dragging the giant plastic lawn and leaf bag that constituted his luggage across the parking lot to a little locked garden type corrugated shed. Apparently this kind of shit happens.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

La Migra On the Bus

 
La Migra is swarming  the bus. We’re stopped twenty miles w of El Paso, these three young and extremely tidy looking perfectly groomed and polite border patrol dudes came on the bus when we stopped at the weigh station. I have my passport, and I flirted shamelessly with the guy while he checked it out, I was glad I did although it was a bit excessive. How cool is that, when I handed it over boastfully, I brought it on a whim and eventually got into handing it over when the greyhound drivers demand, like they rarely do, only the officious or bad mood ones do. The US Border Patrol guy, perfect complexion, not a hair out of place, got a nice close shave today and I think even trimmed his perfect young mustache, with the cuffs and the spray and the light and stick and of course the Glock high and tight and the  creases in the shirt, allowed in his perfectly cute and young handsome way, that it was, in fact, pretty cool. 
I'm a white chick. Past the age group. I got no problem.
They got the dogs. They got one passenger out there explaining himself, fighting for his life as it were, in low tones and as much casual sincerity as he can muster, now there’s more Migra, the dogs alerted, the tattooed ex-con just got called out, there’s trouble. I’m pretty relieved that the stash I found in my purse I left in New England, a bit of bud that Terry gave me long ago and got lost in my vast and mysterious black leather bag in which I keep all my pemmican and water bottles.
Now there’s three more of the young miscreants assuming the position on the tarmac outside, trouble for sure and I feel the wind from the bullet that just missed me.. wow…
I think they’re busted. Wow… I didn’t expect this.
OK now I’m hearing it was a disrespect when the Migra were first here, the gofers threw spitballs, and the cops didn’t see the humor.
Heavy…
Now it has degenerated into a smoke break while the wheels of justice turn...Even the cops. Decompression. Good for the soul... Funny how I just almost shot your punk ass. Yeah, pretty funny how I almost got a federal felony posession beef down here in the ass end of America..Ha Ha Buddy buddy...adrenaline... fade...
to black

Boys Will Be Boys


Boys Will Be Boys

OH shit it didn’t work. Patience. Acceptance. Quiet for a minute, then brrp, brrp, like starting a moped, brrbrrr vroom off she went. I waited it out in silence, the occasional comforting murmur, saying nice things, making little conversation, then when went in for our first piss call I bolted, two hours was enough, El Paso still six hours away.
Tears in my voice if not in my actual eye I begged this little espanish type Mexican kid (30) English as a first language by the way, you cannot tell by looking, and he graciously allowed me in, having slept so tiny he could practically stretch out on the double seat.
I should have known when the fat lady wouldn’t put any of her shit in the overhead bin; pointedly keeping it balanced in her lap. Why bother, she knew damn good and well I would fold like a cardboard suitcase,
Later on passing her seat on my way back from a smoke break, I leaned over to her and in as menacing a voice as I could muster I muttered, “sure you win, you fat fucking cow."
The next time I went by she had her special crazy-lady-little-girl-lost expression of innocence like I associate with fecal smearing,kind of a "who, me?" look so I said " Yes, you, lady, smear this" and  from three feet away gave her a fully tumescent middle finger, my only remaining middle finger by the way, the one you can still see.As distinct from the secret finger, the ghost finger, which I reserve for stealth insults, that only me and God can see.
She got the message, I think. Although you can never tell how much a mind that far gone can retain.
Now for the ego meditation guru with the lacquered fingernails and the perfect hairless chin, who by the way takes his laptop with him to the shitter in the back of the bus. What’s up with that? Tibetan porno?
On my way back through an empty bus I assidently poured, wait, did I say poured?? I meant to say accidentally spilled, no, sloshed a half a cup of Evian water in his seat. It wasn’t deliberate, the cap on my water bottle was loose, and I lost it…Oops.
He sat back down when the break was over and we headed back out Interstate 10 through the century plant and prickly pear desert of central Texas. He assumed the lotus position, but not for long. Apparently he couldn’t get into Buddha mind with wet panties.
But he got his earlier wish (he tried to worm into the front most seat when the crippled vet went in out for a smoke) and moved into that coveted front seat, the one with no seatback jeopardizing your knees...
Where, by the way, I am now proudly ensconced. Bribery, plain and simple. That priority boarding is the shiznitt. Five bucks. First on. Happy.
But there’s no reading light up here, and it is gonna be dark in a minute. We all pay the price.
The boys in the back row spent a good half an hour goofing on the chick in the pink hat, the one not wearing a bra.....ME?.....  Me.... I sat on a fresh bag of crackerjacks and it esploded and I had crackerjacks plastered over my ass like fried chicken cracker breading. They don’t mean any harm, the future prison population of America. They’re just having fun. Like I said to the Emo kid sharing the seat with me from Van Horn to El Paso, “ Boys will be boys!!”
I don't care, they were goofing on a chick. As long as I am passing, I'm good to go.

More bullshit

There's this guy sitting across from me, some kind of oriental/native looking sparse-bearded skinny who keeps taking his shoes off to sit cross legged and run his worry or meditation beads , nice shiny big black beads. HI-tech backpack. New fleece pullover, very long hair in a perfect braid. I hate guys like that. I keep wanting to tell him to cut it out, this is America, we don't do that shit here.
And now there's another fat chick whose racial profile I shall leave to your imagination, defiant, petulant, talking to herself workin up to a shoot, is my guess.
I said  "Madam, Please refrain from talking constantly to yourself."
We'll see. a lot of times you gotta give a person in a bad mood some slack before they calm down.

Out of the Big Easy

This here is the miscreant bus. New Orleans to Houston via Baton Rouge, Fayetteville, Beaumont, Texas. Full of young black men. I say that, and then a young man passes forward and around the front half of the bus a full bag of little 3-packs of milk dud malt balls, making sure everybody has one if they want. It’s a great and beautiful world.
WE left that magnificent perfectly maintained spacious art-filled NOLA depot a little late. I had another chance to walk around the vast hall staring at the Diego Rivera style mural that runs all the hundreds of feet around the upper half of the walls, bright southern colors and lively vignettes. Oh bullshit. I didn’t even look at the effing murals. I have no doubt they are truly fine and all that but I didn’t and don’t give much of a shit about anything when I’m in go mode, which I was. Ready to get the fuck out of New Orleans, and just in time to get my paperwork together for the bus to LA, that is Los Angeles not Louisiana. I reconsidered and got the priority boarding, for five bucks you get to jump the line, and worth it too.
Like I said we were a little late, but not so very much considering there were 80 plus people trying to get on a 60 person bus, so they added another coach, and now, after our stop in Baton Rouge this coach is full, too.
Ish took me around the lower 9th ward today to see for myself how much rebuilding has been done. We were both astonished at the progress made everywhere, and how these working class folks got the energy and the wherewithal to rebuild such an utterly devastated neighborhood I will never know, but build they did, and all praise to them and to their city shrunk down like hot-washed long-johns, but warm just the same.
I ate some red beans and rice with smoke sausage on the side, and I had some gumbo. Butter sautéed crab claws, and a little bbq baby lamb ribs. Beignets in the kwahtuh at the DuMonde, with a café-au-lait to go.
And voodoo too…

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Nawlins


Of course I fell in love with Nan which should come as no surprise but these days I’m a little wiser than formerly, and her daughter was there every second so I was happily prevented from doing anything stupid even and I got out of there without embarrassing myself. Way to go.
And I fell in love with the life of the Keys all pastels and tropical foliage just a little sunburned and a little worn. I got on Craigslist last night and found me a sailboat I could live on for not very much money, and even an Ericson 27 like the one I have now up in Scappoose, for sale in Miami and for a brief moment I had the move in motion, to go there and no maybe about it once I would have been all in an uproar but not now, no, beautiful and warm and gracious as they are, I’m good.
24 hours on the bus, this was on my phone written yesterday:
Panama City in the bitch-pouring-ass rain wipers ripping cold white sheets into flung bandages silver dawn.
Betty’s Red beans and rice for lunch, gumbo for dinner, and crab claws in “The Quarter” with some little lambie ribs in Coops rundown all the wrinkly hipsters with their chin beards and slouchy hats but the Quarter, “kwahtuh” with the ironwork galleries and the leaning narrow streets and the age of everything showing on its face and I did feel the pull and the mystery behind all those shutters perpetually closed and what goes on in there in the dim daylight while the street swelters and tourists click their cameras?
Me and my pal Ish went on the Natchez, an actual steamboat paddlewheeler for the two hour cruise, steam calliope blaring to the lined-up tourists by their hundreds. That there steam whistle is just about the loudest thing I ever did hear and all the boats on the Mississippi south of Vicksburg knew we were entering the stream. We cruised on down the river and we looked at the battle of New Orleans and the Domino Sugar refinery and so forth, a crane bucket unloading bulk salt all white and shining into a lighter barge and all like that.  Beautiful day, just warm enough, with a bit of a breeze on the water.
 I like that steam propulsion business, it’s quiet as can be, even down in the engine room, and that’s a surprise, how quiet that is, and how little equipment it takes, just the boilers and the two big power piston expansion chambers driving the walking beam in and out. While I was down there by the paddlewheel shooting some video the walking beam stopped and then went backwards a little and the went backwards a lot and pretty soon the Natchez was shuddering and the water alongside commenced to boiling up and we began to swing off to one side to make our turn to go back upriver to town.   We had a good time It was money well spent.
We’re back at Ish’s place now, her little shotgun single in the Triangle neighborhood, a little gem of a home she brought back from all the misery of the storm. We looked at pictures from the aftermath, and we talked about Hoodoo and Voodoo and how one was dark and the other white and one good and the other bad. There’s kitty cats all over the place. I’m hoping that black one sleeps on the foot of my attic bed again tonight I liked the warm weight when I woke up a little to turn over. I know I will sleep good tonight, and that I am well loved.

Saturday, October 8, 2011

Key Largo

 
I have to tell you I wasn’t much impressed by the Miami bus station way out in the back of the airport, which is, by the way, a very model of your modern architectural marvel, the bus station  all run down and tiny and broke. The folks who run it, however, are cool. Laid back, don’t worry about it, slow down, you’re here it will be OK.
Hot.
Go outside, siddown on the Greyhound standard issue bench and take you a little snooze. Those benches are the same all over the country, metal, uncomfortable to exactly the right degree to prevent casual napping only the desperate can tolerate. Little cast-iron armrests.
A guy on the bench with the most elegant  purple shiny pointy-duck-billed gold buckled men’s shoes and gold grill and the embroidery on the back jeans pockets went all down the sides half to the knee worn, by the way in the fully upright and locked position, and together we snoozed in the fully tropical shade.
And eventually the bus did come and I got on and we did get there to Key Largo.
The next thing I need to tell you is how beautifully I have been received in all my travels. My pals are the great hostesses of the world beyond my imagination and living up to the highest ideals of loving warmth and generosity. Lovely loving homes. Collections of meaningful things chosen and arranged with taste and elegance. Affectionate people. Great food. Crazy cool oddities, personal encouragements at every turn.
We drove in Nan’s convertible all down the Overseas Highway, US 1, all the way to Key West about which so much has been written so well and so thoroughly. It was a hoot. Picture all the yuppies of Chicago with cigars complete and preening girlfriends strutting boldly through a crowded tropical themed mini-mall while being fleeced dollar after dollar by a gang of suntanned hard-faced charming gigolos and you will have the idea.
I swam in the surprisingly salty and warm ocean, collected tiny coconuts and bits of weather-and-wave-worn coral from the wash of tiny wavelets on the beach, while sweaty shirtless men played volleyball and unnaturally skinny women with breasts like artificial pumpkins sashayed forlorn and alone along the strand. Home in the dark.
Nan and Nicole grilled some tenderloins.
We slept.
Today it rained and the wind howled and lightening flashed in the gunmetal roiling cloud and the palm fronds tossed while the birds-of-paradise danced to the thunderous crash. We’re sitting around inside, each to her own laptop tinkling keys, catching up and reaching out. I’m having a damn good time.

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Madwoman In The Night

Something about the black people changes as you go east and then south. I'm not hardly qualified to make any real sense of the subtleties and gradations of black culture. However I kept noticing something.  It did seem that the vibe I got from blacks in Ohio differ from Portland from Denver and moreso in New York. The formidable-ness increased markedly. Then through the old south it seems more relaxed, more at home, more indigenous so to speak. The difference is pleasant to your observant senior transsexual. And there are more dreadlocks. A real tam-wearing graybeard rasta across the aisle, weary and calm. But no accent.
A lady got on in Orlando has actual ropes woven in with twisted fake dreadlocks. 1/4 " twisted gold nylon ropes. And not just one or two, a whole head-full, twisted up into a rather attractive parody of the Victorian padded halo bun.
No racial tension I can sense at all. Not even undercurrent like 1969 when I was through here last time. Black guys of the twenty -something hanging with white guys. As a matter of course. This surprises me I don’t remember seeing this in Portland. I like it.
It would appear from what I observe as this beat down rattletrap speeds through the Florida night, that one way black men are just like white men: they like to hear themselves talk. And I see that black women can also have an insane sense of entitlement. When I pulled the little lever and laid the back of my seat back to go to sleep the lady in the seat behind me immediately and violently kicked the back of my seat  and when I asked her to please don't kick my seat resentfully pouted you on ma  legs and kicked it again. That pretty much tore it for me.
 Lady, we all got problems. Go fuck yourself.
Of course all the adrenaline woke me up. I left the seat reclined for an extra 20 minutes just to fuck with her. And I looked into my heart and the hatred I felt towards her was utterly colorblind. Assholery is colorblind. To paraphrase Shakespeare if a rose was an asshole they would all smell the same. Then to emphasize this very point I scrunched my butt as far back into the crack between seatback and seat, as I raised the back to its fully upright position I passed what I hoped was a stinky half-gallon of high-test right through said crack.Take that, ya crack...

Cashiers on the Barrelhead

I love sally Janez Mom.Charming, warm, bright, kind, and curious and talented. Her house could pass for Samuel Pepys lumber room. Beautiful. Old stuff everywhere, and not just stuff, but beautiful and sophisticated objects of furniture and decorative arts almost casuallyheaped together. For instance a five-panel display of 1828 silkscreen wallpaper depicting the battle for  Heliopolis, stylized French Dragoons and exotic Mamelukes on horseback. Sally and I talked about the difference between a Fauteuil and a Bergere. You can google it and Wikipoedia will tell you all about it.
Her  Husby is nice stays in his basement with his hundreds of restorable twenties radios and his computer array and his glasses on a string around his neck. Cashiers is a rich people’s Resort town, such as was Simla in the Himalaya foothills for the Raj, and Cashiers is the cooling off place for the effete Raj of the American South.
Sally’s antique store she calls Dovetail is a serious place, far beyond what I expected, I’m kind of immune to the antiques business, or I was anyway, but she has things in there that deserve to be cherished and Sally cherishes each and loves them and it hurts her to sell these beautiful tender things. She does, just often enough, and it makes the world a richer place.
When she and I were out walking we saw a local curiosity, a White squirrel scampering among the pines and thickets of. Rhododendrons.Sally told me all about them, that I was lucky to have seen one, and I did feel lucky, in many ways.
I was fascinated by the convoluted granite you see revealed in the cutaway mountainside on the way up to Cashiers.. NC mountains, so they told me are very very old, late Cambrian, never inundated, so there is no sedimentary rock and thus no fossils.old.
I slept in the most comfortable bed in the world and I was damn sorry to have to leave it.
For lunch on the bus out of Asheville, to console me after a very much-too-brief visit, I had a Tupperware tub of leftover and delicious meatloaf from the dinner at the golf course brewpub the night before which had been served by ta distinctly surly bartender whom I actually grew to respect if not like. All those rich assholes. All summer long.
I think fondly of little Sally in her mountain redoubt, surrounded by a pack of the ugliest and sweetest dogs on the planet, cherishing her beautiful things amidst the summer dust and dog hair. I had a fine time in Cashiers

Knoxville

This here Knoxville, Tennessee must be a bad, bad place, the Greyhound Depot is jammed with folks trying to get out. I been into this trip for 8 days now and this is the first or the worst, however to say it, the most people and the worst setup. This is the bus system I remember, crowded and dirty. Yet the ironies abound, I’m on one of the new coaches, leather seats, (well, leatherette anyway) kind of bucket style, plugins that work and WiFi like the website brags about.
I was warned about Knoxville last night in Virginia someplace somebody in the dark was talking about how backward it was. It seems so harsh to say so and to go on and on about it. I wouldn’t but when I thought up this trip this is what I figured would be the norm.
Maybe it’s the south is all, and an infrastructure still recovering from the war. 150 years later.
And the resource tradeoffs might be a regional thing, out west the money goes into new real estate facility, here it goes into coaches. And the density of population and the tradition of the poorer classes…
There’s a thing about standing in line, some are fanatics about who’s where, some don’t know and some don’t give a shit. There’s a minority that fuck the system and ooze in to the line especially in a night mare like that scene we just left with people gobbed up wall to wall, there must have been two hundred people in an area a quarter the size of Portland’s . Oh well, we’re rolling.
Asherville is apparently over the ridge from here and I’m ready to see the south and particularly these Blue Mountains.                              

Monday, October 3, 2011

Appomattox Courthouse

Lynchburg Virginia, typing in the total pitch-black dark by the glare of my screen. My cptr was making plaintive strangling screaming noises rather like when you step on the cat if the cat was r2d2 I don't know why. Rolling along on through central Virginia in a nicely newer coach for a change with wifi and plugins that don't work, the plugins, but this little netbook has good long battery life.
When we got to DC this afternoon I immediately felt at home, the bus they put us on southbound was the worst one yet, seats broken off and dangling into the aisle, stench of portapotty like a blue haze you could almost see it, just like Greyhound used to be, enough of this prissy New England hoity commuter line, this here is America!!
Still, I had a seat to myself, that is had, until Charlottesville, and this nice pudgy young thing asked politely if I minded, which you can't hardly say NO, but lord she was such that to describe it would be wrong. I lasted about 30 seconds and bailed out as she sat there with all her bags on her lap challenging me to stay in my seat, Flannery Oconner would have been proud, especially when the Mom showed up, whining in that Southern entitlement womanhood way that just sets your teeth on edge. Her, I would have locked out in the rain and laughed myself to sleep, the daughter was scary the utter lump passivity, the sullen expectation that I would feel sorry for her and move, and I still can't bring myself to talk about the smell, I'm not saying emanating from her, coincidence is not causality etc.
But silver lining there's a very nice goodlooking espanol sort of young man in the seat ahead who kindly made room for me, nicely dressed , polite, wearing the biggest stainless steel wristwatch you ever saw, so all good things etc...
I understand from the signs along the way that we passed Appomattox Courthouse. Did stop for 2 minutes at the Lynchburg RR station. I think I remember reading about Stoneman's cavalry riding hell-bent down this valley. It seems so safe and ordinary now.

Northeast Corridor I think

They've got this bus thing down pat here in the Northeast.Its a nice coach, there are plugins and wifi, no intermediate stops between NY and DC, and best of all, cell phones are considered bad form, so the only ones so far overheard were in some unidentifiable African language.
The Port Authority bus depot near Times Square was a terrifying place, labyrinthine, claustrophobic, dark, grimy and worn. You wind around and around as the bus drives deeper into its bowels, parts look abandoned, it all looks threatening, and I did not want to leave the little campfire of light where they let us off the bus from Hartford. The express bus to Washington left from a nearby gate, and there was a convenient snacks kiosk hard by the gate where we were waiting. I do love New York, terrifying as it is, even a lousy bus station sandwich is made with real italian breadrolls and lots of a nice juicy ham.
I just caught a glimpse of Chesapeake Bay and a factory or two, I think that was Baltimore.
Point being this isn't particularly third world at all. Quite civilized. Oh well, maybe there will be something colorful on the next leg through northern Virginia.

and then it was over

Sad. Sad, sad,sad. Its Monday Oh dark:thirty, leaving today its over...
Jane is such an amazing woman, smart, funny, utterly and totally authentic to the point she hardly knows that's an issue for most people. Not her authenticity, theirs. Which is totally the kind of thing you say to Jane.The word impetuous went through my head this morning although I'm not entirely sure it fits, if there was a milder version it would, headlong flight into the world is more like it.We ran around and did things and talked a mile a minute, I met her friends Stephen and David, and Pam and Kyelie and I think his name was Jim the teacher or John or James or something J whom I thought would never go home last night but funny thing he's probably the most actually like Jane of all of them.
And then we rushed into our rooms and did our email and watched TV on the internets.
In the morning Jane texted me hello what did I want for breakfast. Texted me , from 25 feet away, but it made perfect sense at the time, its a respect for space thing.
Jane took me up to the VA where she works and I saw her little office with a photocopy of her MSW certificate which tells you how Jane is about herself, selfless in fact, which is the joy of total authenticity just don't get lost in your own shuffle darling, is all I ask.
Bus today, 8 am, to Asheville, NC which is another story for another time..

Sunday, October 2, 2011

Found Object

Found this in my phone I do notes in there so I don't forget shit and also get kind of a flavor of the moment that gets lost when I think about stuff later on.

Thursday Night 
Doing the rt 30 thing jersey stoplight highways Artie Lange country.
Now to Newark. I'm incredibly strung out tired eyes burn throat raw head swimming hot tired and stinky my nose has giant boogers I can't find need clean panties and socks. Hope I poop soon been days.
On the turnpike yay. 95 I think. Hoping we make the 8:30 bus out of ny. Reading pepys.