Finally

I'm in New York racing up Amsterdam Ave making all the lights and finally for a fucking change they got wifi on a fucken bus. Its not greyhound surrise its peter pan or some shit but I fucken made it onto the fucken LAYLINE!
The Bronx Parkway up past Washington Heights by the cloisters its my favorite route out of manhattan onto the Merritt.. Talk to you later

Just so you know we were actually on that little road through the tunnel in Central Park and the Peter Pan bus just went up 95 like everybody does.

Down the Mountains of Western Pennsylvania

Arch St Louis. Cardinal Stadium. Blazingsk8r was a kid with a 4g wireless hotspot, skinny hoody wearing young guy on second glance just the 4chan reddti savvy anonymous type. Finding under the mask more of real peoples.

Old buses all the dam way across, never no WiFi. Two young Russian college girls slouched across the back o bus.

Strange chick driver Bernie an odd cross between peewee Herman and Oscar Wilde Did a strange duckface thing with her lips when she wanted to appear pensive, and stilted exaggerated body language gestures like Peter Sellers or S Martin.

Birth of a community as we crossed the big flat deserts rolling past the sage brush. As always I found myself making eye contact with the weird kids is it just my denial of mortality?? Old person thinks she’s cool.

The layered hors d’oevres salami and cheese in little alternate layers in a fake Tupperware smells bad after three warm days but a very little of it took away the hungries, and the Ensure did the rest have spent very little on rest stop food. The pemmican is so-so, like the jerky part but the raisins, ok aren’t the real answer, and I’m parsing out the pineapple chunks maybe more of them. Cashews not the nuts either, dunno, think about it more.

Tuesday morning my phone froze when I tried to turn it on after battery saving night in my pocket phone glass smeared with carmex maybe did it I have no idea, really,  but it freaked me out and I thought it was dead for good what am I going to do no phone how call Jane because by this time the sched was newly dead and I was very lost and confused the lockbar wouldn’t budge and no unlock no turn off by holding the little button I was truly hating and regretting the touchscreen wanting buttons comforting mechanical buttons. It scared me so bad I actually took a poop, which is what panic and fear do to me organically, we were in Denver so that was good, or someplace on the road in a rest stop, which are all alike, gas out front, a fast food thing and a grocery truckstop type affair more about that later felt good getting the bm over with very inhibited in teis situation can’t hardly even go pee maybe twice yesterday 2 pees in 24 hrs, anyway mentioned the frozen phone to this scrawny looking twenty something who, of course knew the fix, take out the battery, which he did for me, then reboot from scratch, presto back in business, once again the community looking out for the least of these…

Are these truck stop franchise things a meme? Is that the whole franchise phenomenon? Looks very like the same sort of evolution and morphing spread and there in this community the different styles of travel, me, hyper-prepared, the guy from Alaska, same clothes, two hoodies sleeves pushed up never changed a molecule, looking straight ahead the whole time, never no reading, activities, didn’t talk not a word unless spoken too a big lump, then there were the2 young Russian chicks in Jammie bottoms and bed jackets hair in birds-nests no brushing, little Cyrillic laptops at the ready, the boys in their dickies or Carhardts and the hiphop white kids bandanna under a baseball cap not the one size adjustable but real sized caps with nice design and quality material, whether you have a blanket and a real bed type pillow, or whether you make phone calls or not on your cell, older guys, serious workingmen with no carryons sitting silent and still, watching and waiting to go to work. The seediest looking characters turn out to be inside themselves sparkly people, with attractive personalities people you would never think that of, thrown together you force yourself or are forced through the cultural stereotypes, now back east serious Negroes, serious black people of a type we do not see out west, and now also we have unidentifiable languages and women in headscarves.

Amish guy last night giving me the stink eye over his seatback hiding his little beatle bangs he heard me say the f word to Josh as he was leaving the bus in Ohio.

This western Pennsylvania is gorgeous now there’s some vertical texture on a familiar scale and verdure, full all full maples and oaks and those locust fast growers just past height of the greenery barely now there’s some sunburn you can tell its going to soon turn to autumn but not quite yet. Early barely light through that little key-handle of W Virginia, the tree-clad mountainsides turning in the mist into civil war colors, blue-gray and lonesome looking and sad for the slaughter that still reeks here in the human heart of memory.

Indianapolis

The first thing I have to say is this is a hella interesting thing to be doing and I don’t mean la la lark but it’s engaging in many ways. Just to see this stuff, the Plains, the Rockies which are, by the way, turning a brilliant poplar / beech/aspen yellow at the top and all those mountain sport d’hivers towns are looking lively and hopeful.

It was a long night. Ironies accumulated to the point where I am really back to as good as normal ever gets considering.

The bus I got swarmed off of night before last, I think it was, broke down out on the highway stranding for two hours while the company got a replacement out there, and lo and behold, in Denver, we were waiting for a second coach to Kansas and here they came streaming into the lobby like long-lost friends. And off we rolled into the night piloted by

A natty little fireplug of a very focused no-nonsense black man  who kept a tight ship slamming on the brakes in the middle of nowhere we thought to throw a rowdy from the back row where the kids were cutting up pretty fine, but he just had to take a leak, and did, after scaring those with a guilty conscience half to death and reducing the noise level considerably.

Jose the horny Mexican finall went away after trying manfully all his Spanglish game, including tipping a half pint of tokay just like would have at one time really rang my bell but he wasn’t very attractive, kind of skinny dumb unlike his friend a real Mexican, squatty and compact and self-collected and never said a word.

But it wasn’t free, I scored a seatmate anyway, a big seatmate.

What you have to do is stack some shit on the seat beside you and get busy when a fresh batch boards and just refuse to give a shit or make eye contact and this guy was the very last and I chickened out and he clocked me and won my respect by asking permission to sit down. Luckly he was a stoic of epic proportion, never in my actual space, more intelligent and well spoken than looks would lead you to believe, and we did OK.

I’m always busy and I got a lot of shit. Digging something out, putting away, taking off boots or finding different glasses. I read , I type, I fiddle with my phone, well everybody does when its dark you can see the glow from a dozen screens bluelightine the dark back of the bus like little towns from a high up airplane passing by. And I nosh, salami and cheese cocktail food, jerky and raisins, apples, hardtack, sesame crunch. 

Swarm

All of a sudden about six seconds after I hit the publish post button on my last post they swarmed on me and it fucked me up. A baggage guy and two drivers with no-nonsense looks on their faces surged through the very crowded waiting room calling for passengers to Denver. Critical distinction we all missed at the time, “to Denver” Me, I’m through Denver. Too late now.

I said ME, she said that’s right, the baggage guy grabbed my rucksack and we were off, at 7:15, and I was like cool I wo’nt have to do this mass crowd scene for another half an hour. They herded me onto a nearly empty nice smelling (at least neutral smelling bus, motor running. That was it, they shut the gate, we were rolling out of town. The back way.

Now we’re leaving steamboat springs Colorado and my schedule is toast.

This bus, ironically the same actual coach I was on last night all night, runs to Denver via

US 40, a secondary road roughly midway between I-80, to our North, and I-70, well south of us. We went up through the nearly exact upper left hand corner of Utah and now here we are. Hard part to swallow, my bus for Omaha leaves Denver at 6:30, and I GET to Denver at 7 or 7:30. Depends.

The actual malfunction occurred when somebody put “Denver “ on my paperwork instead of Hartford where I am actually connecting to. What happened is the 1418 at Salt Lake got full. 60 passengers and more to come. So we pulled off a few to ride the milk run. Oh Well. The guy keeps saying I might make it, and that I can go to Chicago via St Louis and rejoin my putative schedule but I don’t believe it. So now I get to practice the principles of recovery this particular one being acceptance.

No Problem.

Now I’m in Denver, in a very quiet modern, nearly clean depot. The kid behind the counter says they’re putting on another coach to New York and I should just park a bag in the as-yet-nonexistant line behind gate 16. So I did that.

Then we found the plugin corner, dozens of wall sockets and a little counter so like I’m plugged in but not hooked up there’s no wifi here that either of us can find there’s another serious looking young man also typing madly and getting nowhere. At least I’m charging up, that’s very good.

But and there’s always a but , I got no idea what’s actually going on, if anything and I’m apparently operating on pure faith.

Oh man, though, what would Jack and Neil think and say about this place tonight. I remember the days of slouching down the road in the backmost seat with a Sneaky Pete of Gallo Tokay and nobody bats an eye. And the bus depot being the most down the beatest space in the city, where you could get out of the rain, sit a minute and figure out your next move. Especially those times hanging up on the roadside hitching and getting cold and tired and making it to the Greyhound and calling somebody for the few bucks a ticket cost in those days, San Francisco to Portland, man, 24 dollars and you were warm and dry for a few hours.

Yet it doesn’t feel spiritually void here, it feels OK, even though there are a lot more rules and the dollar figure is higher. It’s still a beat world in here, it feels OK.

Salt Lake City

Hi little kitty cat!!! H’areya?

Anyway I got to t he bus station ok after I got my running around accomplished and I gotta say one thing I GOT TOO MUCH SHIT my knees actually buckled when I got it all on ditched one 500ml water was about all I could do which is approx 1 lb. BFD.

Sitting on the couch this morning at 7:30 trying with limited success to eat a bowl of actually delicious oatmeal thought to myself with a blast of revelation/insight obvious truth “this feels exactly like an enormous geeze of high-quality methedrine, that sense of  fear and excitement and omigod this is what I was afraid would happen and confidence and doom all at the same time.

And the readiness to do what needs to be done, not just do it but precisely and immediately…

And like all those times I knew that the best thing would be just to let it all float over it about 3 feet off th deck and let it go…and a great sadness

The irony is that the Greyhound station this Monday morning is clean, spacious, relatively quiet, organized and tranquil. Of course there were the obligatory crackheads out on the sidewalk I don’t know where central casting gets them, the woman with the bulging eyes and the crow-caw/donkey–in-pain voice, but they were all perfectly type-cast yet minding their own business.

The lady behind the counter (nobody in line) was pleasant, well dressed in a kind of high grade work outfit a great big white watchband and sparklies all around the great big watch face revealed casually in conversation she happened to be the station manager, the boss, the big cheese, and yet she was, like I said, nice. Competent. Printed out my boarding pass, answered my questions, said I might get away with not checking any of my bags but it was up to the driver.

And I got the priority boarding upgrade which will obviate the necessity of standing in line. We even have our own waiting area ( im the only one in mine) 1 hour to go.

My only criticism is the tv is right over my head and its CNN thank God not on to the jerry springer channel and the volume is loud enough to echo a bit. Earplugs and headphones . At least there’s nobody yelling or banging their trays on the cell doors, oh wait, Im not in County… and thank God no country music at all. And, really, better ten tvs than any stupid music at all.

The little kitty is the screen helper in the MS Word 2000 I had leftover from back in the days when I was working on my never to be published book. I love my little screen kitty I wish I had one on here all the time.

Further drama now that its later at night and I’ve been on the road for 7 hours, fed at McDonalds in Baker city. This kid got on in Stanfield Oregon or Pendleton maybe big guy twenty five at the most obviously not happy slugging from an industrial size bottle of some pink prescription stomach remedy so we get a five minute stop in LaGrande me and him make the briefest of eye contact earlier but it’s a five minute stop only and the kid barrels off the bus before you can say boo and later on wee rolling to baker city and hes not there. His seatmate showed us the bag he left behind and Omigod we left him at the Lagrande 5 min stop we were warned but he didn’t make it back in time OI figure hes in the can  and I was sad for him and how fucked up his world just got. 

But no, its like this, some guy from the rehab he was supposed to meet the kid at the bus in Baker City and the kids not there. Bailed out. They tried to make him go to rehab he said NO NO NO.

But the bus us great, nice guy driving, spirit of comraderie back here in the coach. My 5 bucks bought me first boarding rights I felt like a bit of an asshole passing up he entire lineup to get on. Like the guys getting on first class on the airplane dude I paid for it. I didn’t really hardly get the stink-eye at all.

Of course its an ancient heap of a bus, rust streaks on the overhead, windows permanently effed up, gumstrips left where the engine cover used to be duckt taped on. And judging from that how long they must have left the tape on there looks like a while. Not very crowded, though it was for a minute there. A young native American woman sat next to me. I don’t think she was all there, the way she kept mewling out MAMAuh you promised, then things thinned out a bit and she went back to the seat net to her Mom who had a nice blankie for her and now they’re napping. I love the human race, goddammit, I really do.

And the pemmican isn’t bad either, but I did go over to McDonalds for a big Mac and a small chocolate shake. It didn’t seem right to pas up the chance for real food. Did I say real food ? Relatively speaking of course. You can take this re-enactment shit too far.

Shit I Bought For My Trip

Shit I bought for my Trip

Discovery Pass…………………………………………459.00

Windows 7 Anytime Upgrade…………………………..79.99

REI  Lookout Trailpack (used Deke’s)………………….36.00

REI goosedown jacket (used Deke’s)……………………26.00

Tevas (used Deke’s)……………………………………..14.00

Zipoff hiking trousers (used Deke’s)…………………….11.00

Misc thrift store fleece, tanktop, ………………………...10.00

External DVD drive (Fry’s)……………………………  .36.00

DVD cases    x2 (Office Depot)……………………….... 18.98

USB hub (Office Depot)………………………..…….….14.99

Movies (8 used Ebay Paypal) 6 plus shipping…………...51.83

Movies (12 used Meese’s Pieces)12…….………..……...30.00

Movies (2 used everyday music)………………………..14.50

Pemmican ingredients…………………………………….8.50

Other snackage……………………………………..……16.00

Books (used & new Powell’s)………………………….. 43.36

Electric shaver (new Remington@ Fry’s)……………….39.98

Mini Maglite (new Fry’s)……………………………..….9.99

                                                                                         931.11

Stuff besides the ticket…………………………………..472.11

2 rolls of quarters and 20 singles for machines etc………40.00

   Total stuff not counting the pass…………………………$512.11

I think I have issues that need to be addressed…but I can’t afford therapy @ $65 for a for a 50 minute hour. I spent it.

Dude its like waking up from a blackout.. I'm amazed to be still alive, humbled. Thankful I stopped in time. But I have to tell you : I had a really really good time. And I am definitely looking forward to  what will amount to a film festival. However I did read the fine print on the Greyhound website and most buses don't even have plugins, much less wi-fi. I will have one 8 hour shot at the computer, less if I watch a movie, and if I can't plug it in I'll have to read books or something.

And all this obsessive planning and making lists. I feel sick. I just want to go so I can quit thinking about it.

Shit I'm Taking With Me

Movie Titles

1 Lord of The Rings

2 The Peacemaker

3 The Maiden Heist

4 The Good Shepherd

Apparently all this shit is necessary  note pemmican in center by baby wipes

5 Children of Men

6 Matrix Revolutions

7 Stop-Loss

8 The Departed

9 The Matrix

10 City by the Sea

11 Crime Spree

12 Moscow Zero

13 Killshot

14 The American

15 Heat

16 The Bourne Identity

17 The Bourne Supremacy

18 The Bourne Ultimatum

19 Inglourious Basterds

20 Blood Diamond

21 Lord of the Rings two towers

22The Limey

23The Wrestler

24We Were Soldiers

25 Hatari

26McClintock

27Donovan’s Reef

28Kings of the Sun

29Troy

30 Stigmata

31Pirates of the Caribbean world’s end

32 Cat Balou

33Enemy at the Gates

Books

1 The Concise Pepys

      by  Samuel Pepys

2  Civil War

   by Trevor Royle

3, 4  Victory and Chance

   by Joseph Conrad

5  Beyond Reach

    by Graham Hurley

Pemmican

I’m almost finished talking about my plans, but I have a confession to make. I didn’t just get a good rucksack. When I first started making plans for this absurd excursion and looked on Google Earth at the route I would be taking I realized I would be crossing the Great Plains. Two things came to mind. First thing was the Native American substitute for the wheel, called travois. Two poles with a lashed on blanket or something, and towed behind a pony, like Johnny Depp in Dead Man. I think the analogy of the greyhound bus and the travois makes perfect sense.

And Pemmican. Dried and smoked buffalo meat and sundried sarviceberries drenched in congealed fat, carried in a deerskin pouch. To cross the great Plains on your travois you had to have Pemmican. But then I had a question. What’s a sarviceberry? I had no idea, but all the authorities, like Little House on the Prairie the books not the TV show although Michael Landon was hot in kind of overly Hollywood hunk kind of way, say so. And who’s got the buffalo? Fred Meyer had some for a while but I didn’t like it and I don’t think anybody else did either. It made me think about genocide which is always pretty much of a buzzkill.

And if you’re going to dry you some dried meat you have to have a smokehouse which I don’t so at that point I began to improvise. I put an electric hotplate in my little propane grill on the dock by my boat, and cut up a cross rib roast and put the pieces in a bowl  with all the brown sugar I had in the galley and a handful of rock salt and some soy sauce and some grindered up thyme and some rosemary. I poured on the garlic powder and a handful of dried onion flakes poured in the hot water and a shot of cheap mustard that’s been on the boat going on three years and stirred it all up and let ‘er soak all night long. The next day I plugged in the hotplate and threw some regulation alder chips on there and kept it going all day long. I chickened out and unplugged it when I went to bed. It was making me nervous, there’s been a couple of fires out there lately and you never know.

The next day I had me some pretty good jerky. But I still didn’t have any sarviceberries so I went out to Winco and looked around and they have those  golden raisins that looked pretty good, so I got some and if anybody asks I will just let on they might be sarviceberries I don’t know for sure and change the subject. And I’m not going for the melted fat part either. I don’t care what the authorities say. So I put in some cashew pieces, they got a lot of oils in them... And since I didn’t have any deerskin pouches I got me a couple of fake Tupperware leftover containers and good to go.

I got me some pemmican.

Great Plains look out!

Rucksack

I was going to say something last night but I got carried away telling stories. I’m getting to that age. A couple of things, really, I was going to say.

The first is to give props to a couple of people, Colby Buzzell for one his style and presence burning through the written word make talking through a keyboard attractive. And he makes irony a spiritual value, an astonishing feat. If I can capture any of that lightening in my own little bottle I shall be well served. My kid for another, who goes travelling simply as a matter of course and finds the entire planet accessible. And he tells about it in such a matter of fact voice, not to point out the freakiness of it but the absolute normality of every place he goes without cheapening it or objectifying the otherness of the world’s minor cultures.

But enough about other people. Lets talk about me!

I didn’t used to plan shit, I just did it, and I couldn’t tell spontaneity from impulsiveness, and I held, we all held, back in the hippie days, that spontaneity was godliness. It ain’t like that now. I plan the shit out of everything I do , especially shit like this bus ride business. It pays to know what day it is, because they changed my main bus route here where I live and she don’t run on Sundays anymore. That’s fundamental. Which is too bad, because this 17 bus goes a lot of very convenient places, like out to the Wal-mart, and the fabric store, and Alaska Copper and Brass, and to the Good Sam Hospital, and Central Drugs downtown where I get my meds. Which works out, because they aren’t open on Sundays anyway.

The Corollary is that it pays to know the schedule, and the route, and the transfers. They’ve got an effective website, Trimet.org. You can plan it out.

The other thing is bring a book. I spend most of my free time reading, when I’m not on the boat, and a lot of time even then, and I don’t hardly know where I am anyway when I’m reading a book, so I might as well be on the bus going someplace interesting.

So I have been on greyhound.com and on Google Earth and I had the printer going and I printed out the detail itinerary for all 6 legs of this trip and I looked them all up on Google earth and put the little pins in the map and I know where I’m going and when I’m going to be there and where all that is in relation to, say, the Rocky Mountains or the Great Plains or Buffalo Bayou and the Mojave Desert.

And I went crazy on eBay and haunted the pawnshops and I go thirty DVDs most of which are movies I been wanting to see anyway. Phillips noise-cancelling hifi headphones and a nice little netbook and there I am, 60 hours of mindlessness. And a couple books. And a little banana shaped pillow filled with millet seeds for the back of my neck.

I remind me of Kerouac when he was living that one month in Denver all full of plans for the good life and going hiking with Gary Snider and Jack bought a rucksack, he was just so excited about a vision of the grand American Buddha west and he put it on and walked for miles into Denver to try it out nearly beside himself with imagining. And how sour it got and how little that rucksack finally meant besides that grand rushing dream crushed by alcoholism and paranoia and inner demons.

I did get a new rucksack, though. And that scares me a little. It's not a rucksack, really , its an REI daypack, really light, and big enough, but it still represents the hopes. I'm sober, though, and I know what dreams are worth, and I have faced most of the demons and made friends, and I understand that spontaneity isn't impulsiveness it is the way you encounter the moment and the way you open your eyes and your mind at the same time. So I look at that backpack and all my stuff and I'm almost  ready. 

Back In The Day

I'm in recovery now, ten years and counting. I'm a senior now, I get all the discounts. And where once I was usually the scariest person on my side of the street, I hate to admit it, but I am just the littlest bit timid these days, and I'm vulnerable. I understand these things but it wasn't always like this.

Back in the day I hitchhiked all over the place. At the drop of a hat, so to speak. Just walk out the door, go to the nearest highway and stick out my thumb. I went to escape where I was at, and it took many years and much grumbling before I finally realized that you can’t do that. You are always where you’re at.

But changing where I was at seemed back then to do the trick, and maybe it did. At first. It had a lot to do with the innocence of youth, and hippie fatalism, “If God wants me to get to Portland, man, after I smoke the rest of this doobie, man, there will come a truck, man, or a schoolbus or a VW camper, man, and they will stop, man, because the universe, you know, man, wants it that way. It can’t NOT stop, man. That’s God…”

One time me and Bob Olson, Bo, took a trip.

Bo was a great man and an outstanding philosopher of the hashpipe. He was a big guy, long hair in an unkempt ponytail.He had a gravelly voice and a thoughtful air and a love for the old bluesmen and he read unusual books acquired at random and he thought in his own untutored way about what he read. Sadly he is no longer with us. That is beside the point for now but it is a sad fact. Oh well. 

We decided at 1:30 in the morning that we had to go to the free concert the Rolling Stones were putting on the very next day at the Altamount Speedway. We were smoking hash at the little house he  shared with Doug Stevens, also sadly no longer this side of the water, way down at the end of Roosevelt  Boulevard in Charleston, Oregon. Doug was another philosopher and you should have heard them argue, air blue with smoke, about things they had read.  I digress. Again. Doug didn't want to go, but I did, so we put on our jackets and walked out the door.

I swear to you this is true, and man we were in God’s pocket. We walked up to the Highway in front of Red’s Tavern in the misty hours well past closing time, which is a place you can stand for a very long time and never see a soul in the middle of the night, and within five minutes a dark sedan, not very new, rolled to a stop, loaded us up, and  dropped us off on Highway 101 in North Bend just before the big green bridge. The same thing happened. This next big sedan dropped us off in the middle of Reedsport. In those days it was a very bad idea to hitch within the Reedsport city limits. Cops.

We walked through a dark and sleepy town, and on the other side, starting up the long grade of Highway 38 heading up the Umpqua. And it happened again. A big sedan, not very new, rolled up as if bidden, the first car we had seen in the half hour we had been in Reedsport, and we were on our way once more. It was, I think, just starting to get light out when we walked up the onramp to I-5, not even full day. This time it was different. The first southbound vehicle we saw was an old Ford pickup truck, and it was wobbling down the shoulder in the breakdown lane at about 35 miles an hour. It stopped.

The fellow behind the wheel was loaded. High as a kite. He explaind that he was on his way to San Francisco to pick up a load of heroin, was junk sick, and had taken a handful of Seconal to cut the cold turkey. Bad idea. The windshield, I couldn’t help but notice, was entirely missing. There were glittering crystals of safety glass all over the front seat, on his Levi jacket, in his hair. He said he had hit a guardrail end-on, and it had ridden up over the hood and punched in the windshield, but “It missed me, man, and it woke me up, too, and the wind, man, its keeping me awake now, so that’s good, but could one of you guys drive for a while, man I gotta nod off, man, you dig, just for a minute…”

And we were at Altamount Speedway by three oclock that afternoon…
And then a couple years later I spent 26 1/2 miserable hours in the same spot beside Highway 101 in Smith River California in the rain. 

A greyhound bus ticket is a luxury I still appreciate..

Seamy UnderBelly

There’s a social and economic divide represented in the choice of travel mode. While not everybody on an airplane is rich, I believe I can safely say that nobody on a greyhound bus is rich. And Amtrak is strictly for the NPR crowd. If you aren’t amused by Garrison Kielor’s self-congratulatory social values you won’t feel at home on the Coast Limited. I gave it a trial earlier this summer and there was a definite air of gee-aren’t-we-culturally-superior in the cars, as train travel was known in the last century but one, not to mention the German Shepherd that ran up and down the line of waiting travelers in Portland’s Union Station as we waited to board, slobbering around my ankles at the end of a very short leash tethered to an unsmiling character wearing government issue Ray-Bans and cute little black BDU bun-hugger trousers below a Kevlar vest. Packing a Glock in a ballistic holster high and tight on a muscular thigh.

I chose Greyhound bus, seduced by their perfectly sincere and patently absurd claim that all the buses which they invariably refer to as coaches, have wi-fi and AC outlets for your laptop. And they took out a row of seats to give each passenger an extra 1 and 5/8 inches of legroom. Nice.

The Greyhound stations are still the anchor tenants of the decaying inner city core. The Old Towns of America. Wino America. Crack-ho America. Pimp supply America. Even in hip progressive Portland. Sure it’s a relatively new building, and an integral part of the transportation nexus of bus, streetcar, Amtrak and light rail, but the same social misfits, substance abusers, lost souls and demented predators still gather in its shady places and transact their dime bag and sneaky-pete dealings. It’s the seamy underbelly, America’s Third World.

Like the King’s Table of travel, for a prix-fixe Greyhound offers unlimited mileage within a time-frame depending on how much cash you part with. I could go where I want to go and see my pals old and new and make it back to Portland in the 15 days but just barely. And if Murphy is still writing the laws of scheduling, it wouldn’t take much of a traffic delay or a breakdown to send the house of cards atumble. And my credit card wasn’t quite maxed out, so for an extra hundie I doubled the time frame and got the 30 day Discovery Pass, used to be called AmeriPass. It isn’t much of a document, graphics by DOS printed by what looks like mimeograph, but the nice man, who by the way is nobody’s fool and utterly cold about the orthodoxy of baggage weight limits, put my little mimeographed slips of A-4 paper in an elaborate blue plastic folder much nicer than the ones your airline tickets go in, so there Richard Branson, take that. Like I said, it’s the King’s Table of travel, unlimited portions of awful.

Anywhere in Central or South America, or Asia, or Central Europe, the people travel from town to town with their chickens and goats and plastic carrier bags of produce, life savings, or grandmothers on the autobus. If you tour with a backpack you do too. I don’t know this personally but my kid goes all over the place with his camera and his backpack and his smile and his curiosity and I figure it can’t be that hard. Here at least I speak the language. And here also there is rarely if ever livestock with which to contend. And I understand the cultural niceties of the lumpen. After all, I’m a lifelong if not currently practicing alcoholic and drug addict. These are my people!

Revving Up

I'm counting down the very few days before the bus leaves Portland for a thirty-day tour of the seamy underbelly of the USA. I have a Discovery Pass. I'm retired. I'm bored. I miss my buddy Jane, who lives way on the other side of the continent, and I'm getting older so I might not get another chance.
Way back in the late 80s I was a roadie on a reggae music tour of the west coast. It was a sublime nightmare, riding in a bluebird equipment bus with a bad clutch and a worse muffler, loading in every afternoon, loading out in the wee wee hours, and sleeping on a bug infested lumpy mattress draped on top of the wall-to-wall equipment while we rolled, or in the empty bus while the show rocked on without me.
Now I'm going on my own tour, with no amps to carry, no tour director trying to weasel my credit card number, and no lazy drummers to bum my last cigarette.
The itinerary is all set and everybody down the line has been given fair warning.
I have an ex spouse in New Orleans whom I am still friends with but I haven't seen in more than thirty years, and I have a pal way down in Florida  whom I have never met. I'm gonna roll.
They say the modern Greyhound has wi-fi and plugins for my laptop so I should be able to give a running commentary. I don't believe it but that's what they say, bless their little hearts, I know they mean well. I will post when I can, copypasta stylee, like a microburst transmission.
Right now I'm just setting this up.
Newbie.
More later