I was ready to be patient; to be there when the station opened and figure things out somehow from there.

  Instead, the night had other plans for me. An inebriated, or otherwise off-kilter, middle-aged man sort of stumbled from around the corner after about five minutes and began mumbling to himself while slowly circling the building. When I asked him if he was doing alright? he was quick to begin asking me if I knew when the busses started and if I had any change for a phone call and other such conversations. I was a penniless traveler by that point in that particular personal odyssey that I found myself on, and so, I couldn’t help him there.

  He complimented my shoes and asked what size they were, and he said he wore the same size shoes as me.

  Now, after the conversation had continued on to other topics by a wide degree, I was listening to this man’s voice with this five-star food in my stomach and having just been randomly blessed with a safe ride to that spot; and realizing what it might mean to him, I interrupted him on the small rant he was on about the government and the media and the prisons and the schools and I asked him if he wanted to trade shoes.

  This is not the kind of move most neurotypical folks would have considered at this point, but in my heart, it felt like the best thing I could do for the man. He gladly took me up on it and now I was wearing some cheap thoroughly-used sneakers instead of whatever shoes I was sporting at the time. The man hugged me and said he’d be back before the buses started running, if I was still there, he’d see me then.

  I had bought many thrift store shoes in my years thus far, and I was just fine with the exchange, even as I walked around the parking lot a little to sort of ‘break them in’ a bit and get my flow acclimated to them. Then, I was inclined to wander in search of a good place to use a restroom without getting any cops called or any weapons pulled, or threats being shouted in whatever dimly lit neighborhood I had found myself in.

  I got about three blocks away, still looking for a good patch of trees or bushes somewhere that would be a good karmic place to take a piss unnoticed, when I heard a bit of calm music coming from a nearby porch that had a light on above the door and several prayer flags and a tapestry hung on display; the sights and sounds of which all-together sort of coalesced into an unplanned moment of pause in my very footsteps. After standing there in the street for just a moment, I began to walk a little bit closer and saw that a young skinny man was out on his porch with a glass in his hand and almost all at once, we mutually caught sight of each other. I gently raised one of my hands with my two fingers up like a peace signal and said, “Hey brotha, how’s it going?”

  “Doing alright…You doing okay?” he asked.

  I was instantly relieved that his disposition was kind enough to ask, even if it was just a phrase of courtesy and curiosity.

  “Honestly,” I said, stepping forward slightly, to be better heard without waking up any neighbors. “I’m kinda looking for a place to take a piss without being a problem to anybody.”

  He told me that he had his kid with him inside the house and couldn’t let me in to use the bathroom for that reason, but that it’d be fine to piss on the side of the building.

  As I was walking away, I thanked him again and he asked if I needed any water or anything. Turns out the man had a few minutes to spare and was enjoying a soda on his porch while his kid slept inside. He brought me a bottled water and a can of cherry cola and two granola bars from inside his home.

  I could’ve cried with the gratitude I had in that moment. It wasn’t because I was in such a dire need for food and drink, but rather just that it was another cloud-parting moment when humanity once again reminded me that there was still light and warmth in the world, no matter how dark and cold it could seem at times.

  This man cared, basically, just because… for the sheer sake of my humanity… and it is these type of things that really keep the warm campfire at the end of the tunnel well-lit and tended to, even in the cold confines of the long dark night.

  The free-rides and granola bars and places to piss without incident are just tiny examples, but there is warmth in the big cold world and the way to have more of it is to be it, every reasonable chance you can find, and to the fullest extent possible; and to not need or want after it… Easier written than lived, I know; but there ya have it.

  It is imperative, I believe, to know that the good that you do in the world need not always come back to you in this lifetime, and that ultimately, true giving isn’t for the returns or rewards anyways, but just for the sake of what good it might do for others. This type of knowledge builds endurance to walk in the cold rainy nights for long miles and not be mad at the world, but rather surprised and grateful when humanity or the universe manages to come through for you after all.

  “We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses”

  – Abraham Lincoln

  That night, I was gonna keep walking ‘till I got somewhere safe to sleep and then get back up and keep going, but that nice couple fed me and got me there to the greyhound station and before I know it, I’m enjoying a soda with a kind person on the steps outside his door and onward to wherever was next, until I could return to some true sense of ‘home’.

  It would take me several more weeks as it would turn out. I didn’t make it back to the bus station that morning after all. And while I would pick up a few stories and a few scars along the way before I would make my way to where I was headed, I’d spend a week or so with my peoples to whom I was walking and then, with a fresh new gifted baseball cap on my head, I journeyed back by flight to the Midwest and stepped off the plane into another new chapter of my life with a return to restaurant work and renting out a room with 3 strangers in the hills outside of town and so on.

  All of that, however, is a whole different story for some other time.

  Chapter 3: The Way the Summer Sun Sets Behind the Waves

  When considering where to take things next, I guess I feel inclined to point out that there are easily a million or more places or directions to take this piece from here. But if I don’t pick someplace now while I have the time to write, then for all I know this will progress no further in my lifetime and end up as just another half-finished saved work-in-progress file on some dusty old laptop, somewhere.

  So, let’s dive right in someplace uncomfortable, shall we?

  Let’s spin the wheel:

  ‘Love’, ‘Music’, ‘Money’, ‘Drugs/Alcohol’, ‘Government’, ‘Death’, or ‘The Human Experience of Natural Reality (and How It Has Changed Over The Millennia)’…

  God’s not on the list because Love was already a category.

  On a side note, by the way:

  I’m awfully fond of the Tom Waits quote that says:

  “There is no devil, only God when He’s drunk.”

  For the purposes of that tangent, I’ll give this much to say that the word ‘God’ is like ‘Tao’ or ‘Zen’, there is a reason to have a word for it, but to define it with words is, in itself, simply a means to grow further from its true understanding… at least, initially.

  May the concept of ‘it’ never eclipse your view of what ‘it’ really is.

  So, let’s go with Music for 400, Alex…

  My first guitar came to me on Christmas one year when we lived back in a mid-sized farmhouse about a mile from the 6-generation family farm and about 15-20 minutes from the two nearest towns. It was an electric guitar my folks picked up for about 50 bucks, that came already adorned with an old Misfits skull sticker and a small black and white Nine Inch Nails sticker, both already affixed to it by the previous owner. I was far beyond stoked.

  I began taking guitar lessons at the local music shop where my folks had found the guitar and there at the shop, they often held contests whereby a guitar would be up on display near the front of the store with a giant fishbowl below it, where people visiting the shop could put in their raffle tickets or whatnot. We put in one for me, one for my dad, and one for my mom each time they held a contest and sure enough one day, there was this message on our answering machine that was addressed to my mom and declared that she had won the latest guitar, and that she could come in anytime in the next 30 days to pick it up. It was a considerably heavy piece, compared to standard electric guitars – a black Hammer ‘Slammer Series’… I was still a very novice learner at the time, but damn, did me and my buddies rock hard and fairly-mercilessly on that guitar over the next several years.

  I remember that by the time we moved to a small town in the Metro East of the St. Louise region, which we’ll call Laterton, I had already found myself in possession of a few pieces of musical instrumentation of my own, which me and my buddies played the absolute shit out of just about every weekend. My collection of commonly-used instruments was essentially two guitars, a cheap bass, and a cheap drum set with some amps and a cheap microphone with a stand, which took several years to collect.

  I can never express enough gratitude for those instruments in my life. I didn’t need fancy-ass, top-quality instruments at that time. I just needed to be set loose into the playground of music in a way that resonated with me.

  As far as instruments went, though, our house itself was garnished with a sizeable collection however, which included everything from a banjo, and a small wooden harp, and an old Gibson acoustic from a few generations back, and a tambourine, and so on, all the way up to an old baby-grand piano that sat in the corner by the front windows of what otherwise would have been a living room.

  Displayed throughout the house, the collection made the place sometimes feel like a little gallery of musical instrumentation. My parents didn’t play any of them really, but my father had been trained as a child in how to play the piano, so on some rare lounging occasions, he would (almost all of a sudden or sometimes upon request) meander over to the piano bench and play a song or two beautifully and then go about his day or evening.

  I personally never went through the training for piano, but instead played rather experimentally by ear and then, on occasions, I would transcribe a few things from guitar or bass and play them on the piano.

  In all of these regards, I was very blessed.

  I had formed and performed with a few bands in my teenage years – one of which was named Dyonisus… This one came together primarily from out of the local Laterton public school. And, in part, it was because, in a small enough social setting, musicians often find other musicians rather naturally, given enough time, and bands just seem to coalesce out of thin air sometimes; but Laterton had a secret weapon in the cultivation of great musicianship that could be found in the small house on Oak Street where twin brothers Fred and Fin lived…though, as a matter of specific fact, it was most common that they were listed in the opposite order, when being mentioned. We would commonly and simply refer to the place as “Fin and Fred’s” as if it were some sort of open-mic lounge, inside a residential neighborhood… These two had moved back from Seattle a few years before I first moved to town and began making friends and otherwise slowly integrating myself into the local culture and community in my own semi-reclusive way… They moved into the tiny old house on Oak Street, directly next door to where their cousin lived with her husband and 6 kids, if I remember things right. Their cousin, Loraine, was amazingly musically-oriented as well and was involved with a few musical projects locally; still is, after all these decades, if I gather right.

  I used to walk, ride my bike, skateboard, or snag a ride with one of the older guys over there and we would jam into all reasonable hours of the night, when they were home and in the mood for music and company, that is… See, the house didn’t have ‘standard hours’; it didn’t have a land-line and neither one of them carried a cell phone or a pager, both of which were still rather new to the general public in those days. So, we were always just kind of stopping by and checking it out as an option from one occasion to the next. We’d usually hear music as we rolled up and when we’d knock, it was a flip of the coin, so to speak. Sometimes, we got to kick it and jam, and sometimes not.

  The quaint little 2 story brick house had a small kitchen right inside the back door which was the only one that anyone ever used… The front door to the living room was indefinitely blocked by a table with speakers and a humble little P.A. board and a 4-track recorder. These two had a nice full trap-set drum kit in the corner and a base with an accompanying bass amp, several guitars, two mics - complete with mic stands… It gave the type of vibe like a permanently ready-to-go, open-mic spot-meets-coffee shop in someone’s living room… And these guys loved to jam. It was low-key epic and fantastic. And just about every ‘rocker’ in town had managed to make it over there at least once or twice a month or so. Some of us made it over there far more often. Fin and Fred treated me kindly and with a sincere sense of mutual respect. They felt like family to me.

  Fin had moved back after his marriage came to an end and he felt he had to move to the Midwest where he had family and a free place to stay, so that he could rather perpetually hustle and save until he could afford to move back.

  One summer, after we had lived there in Laterton for a few years, but before I was old enough to drive, we took a family trip back West and my parents were doing well enough, in terms of money and credit, by that point to invite Fin and my buddy Duke to come along with us. So, to be exact about it: my dad stayed behind for the first week while the rest of us flew into San Francisco to stay at a local hostel and then drive a rental vehicle up the coast all the way to Seattle where Duke and I had always wanted to go and to where Fin could visit with his daughter, and back.

  In San Francisco, we stayed at a hostel along the edge of the bay and out back, where there was a scarce little lawn area with some benches, there was indefinitely stationed an old cannon from long ago when defense of the coast demanded cannons be pointed out to sea every day and night; ready at all hours.

  It was on the last night before we left to head North, after Fin had gone to bed early, that the hostel was suddenly all but over-run by a high school girls basketball team from Ireland who were there for some sort of championship tournament the next morning. Duke and I, as high schoolers ourselves, had no complaints on the matter as the night’s air was then fated to be filled from that point on with Irish-accented giggling and chatting and all-out laughter of a dozen or so girls our age until well past midnight. There, under the stars and moon which seemed to hang weightlessly in the night sky above the bay, the sharing of traveling stories between newly-met travelers from different sides of a great ocean was a fun way to close out the night.

  The next day, Duke and I slept in late and then, throughout the day, I remember reading through my old Jim Morison poetry books and my new copy of a Hunter S. Thompson book and making sketches and poetic notations in my notebooks. With Duke and Fin both plugged into the music on their headphones, my mom drove onward, as we made our journey up the coast for many hours…

  We got as far as about an hour and a half outside of Portland when we started discussing the ‘pros and cons’ of either stopping for some lodging or driving on until we made it into the city.

  Duke and I exclaimed in a very Beastie Boys type of way, “No. Sleep. Till Portland!!!!” and laughed amongst ourselves in the back seats.

  We made it another half hour or so down the road before Fin took over driving the rental vehicle and ultimately, we stopped at a small motel on the outskirts of Portland. The motel was connected to a Mexican cantina and so, while Duke and I hung out in and around the motel, Fin was occupied till well after midnight with his bar experience.

  Once in Seattle, we also stayed for several nights at a local hostel there. Duke and I played pool with some of the other travelers there with the topic of music, once again, naturally coming up in conversation (as was rather common for us in those days) and almost-immediately. We ended up finding out about a concert at a venue called Pier 71 the very next day. A folk-indie artist was touring for her latest album, which one of the two of us had stumbled onto a few months back, and we were indeed interested. We managed to phone-in for some will-call tickets and the next day, we packed a backpack with snacks and other items including a disposable camera… From well before that early age, I was already in the prolific habit of documenting through poetry and prose as well as pictures and videos about as often as I could and at the time, that disposable camera was what we had. No camera phones or whatnot.

  Well, security took the camera when they went through the bag, and we were forced to enjoy the show without snapping any pics.

  About 2/3 of the way through the show, however, from center stage, the artist raised her hand to her brow between songs and squinted out over the crowd towards the back.

  “Is that what I think it is?” she said with a chuckle into the microphone. Someone from the back of the venue had managed to smuggle in a small potted cannabis plant and everyone was sort of crowd-surfing it towards the stage. She ultimately said, ‘thanks for the new house plant’, basically, and went about her show before it even made it all the way up to her, if I recall properly.

  It was a rather beautiful thing. At the time, though, I was still so new to things that I was genuinely perplexed how or why my small camera couldn’t make it in, but somebody out there could manage to make that happen.

  Nowadays, I can imagine with ease how it would make all the difference in the eyes of those music-loving individuals working as hourly security for a show like that… Cameras? no. Weapons? no. A potted pot plant… (?)

 

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