Ill Wits and the Iranian Connection

One funny thing about this whole "luck" phenomenon is that it always seems to stick around until you actually count on it being there. Take the following example: a network of now irrelevant factors led me to change out the normal travel gear of backpack, sleeping bag, clothes, etc. for a bicycle and an acoustic bass. The destination was San Francisco, and I'll be goddamned if it ever took the Fates more than six hours to get me there. No need for all the burdensome gear; I'd be strolling down Stanyan by sunset. I was counting on it.

By sunset I was posted up at the south end of Willits with my thumb out, observing with an ironic frown the hopeless demographics passing me by. Old people. Lots of old, vaguely rich people in cars like Scions and PT Cruisers. Lots of bald rednecks, too. Obviously ganja farmers or run-about wanna-bes in lifted Dodge Rams with camoflauge trim. Lastly, an anomolous bulk of Mendocino gangsters looking dim and restless in tricked out Civics with underaged floozie girlfriends in the passenger seat roared by at regular intervals. Why all these assholes decided to clog up the streets with their tripe when a simple hippy van blasting the Dead and passing a doob would have suited my needs just fine, well, I'll never know. It's likely incredibly cosmic.

Regardless, I biked back into downtown Willits just as the bar lights came sputtering to life in anticipation of another wild Mendo Monday. I poked my head into a few of them: JP's, Johns, the Red Room - but they all seemed a little off. Maybe it was just me, but the notion arose pretty quickly that the majority of the people around me were quietly plotting to either take my wallet or give me the clap. The rest would just as soon have me incarcerated on priciple alone. Admitting some sort of defeat, I headed toward Burrito Exquisito to gather my agenda, but somehow missed the doorway and ended up strolling down an ivy-walled alley-way into the pavilion of an Irish pub.

Well, what the hell? I grabbed a Racer 5 ale and rolled a smoke, finding a seat on the patio. The atmosphere was mild, even classy. A gaggle of obvious pot-trimmers-on-leave drank and conversed enthusiastically at a table nearby, and before I knew it I was exchanging small talk with a couple of locals. "This is the only bar in Willits worth a shit," a tie-dyed native informed me. I was inclined to believe him. "Wednesday nights are karaoke," the other added approvingly. We drank and shot the shit for some time before they went in to play darts.

A woman, older but not elderly in shocked white hair sat down next to me. "Faith Walker," she said, wise traces of wrinkles forming around the mouth as she smiled. I introduced myself and smiled back. Faith Walker carried a shallow box of leather goods - tobacco pouches, lighter holders, wrist wraps, and braceletts. She handed me samples of each, talking about the materials used and demonstrating where to put the papers in the pouches.
"How much for this one?" I asked, holding a deerskin pouch.
"Oh, however much you want!" She said delightedly. "You see, for eighteen years now I've sold my crafts all over the west coast for donations. I wake up every morning and replace what I've sold the day before. Eighteen years and I've always made enough for a motel room and meals. The Fates have taken care of me each and every day so far. Faith Walker, see?"
I did see, and I also saw then why the Fates had seen it fit to maroon me in po-dunk Willits for the night with only a guitar case for a blanket. I bought a few gifts from Faith Walker and we talked for a while longer before she left for the other bars.

I passed some time playing my bass for anyone in earshot. Someone reccomended I check out the coffee shop across the street. It was song writers night. I finished my pint and breezed over to see what it was all about. Groups of two's and three's hunkered on couches mulling over sheets of lyrics and scrawled chords as a true songbird of a girl sang a Joni Mitchell-esque heartbreaker from the piano. I introduced myself to a murmuring couple, trying to figure out what this thing was all about. "You look like a bunch of Communists," I said half-jokingly, "who's in charge here?" "Nobody," said a girl in her young twenties. "That's the problem," chimed her boyfriend, who also toted a bass. "We've met up every week for over a month now, but still nobody has come up with anything." A look around the room revealed the culprit. Everyone was looking busy working on their own tunes, trying to involve each other by not really knowing how. No common denominator amongst these bright-eyed ambassadors.

What you need, my friends, is a swanky Stalin - keep the moustache, fine - but get hep! Unite these yearning souls! Snap your fingers and incite a barbershop quartet! Kim Jong-il hitting the hash pipe in a tutu on a neon cequinned chariot! Marx in the matrix burbling psychedelic non-sense, with saxophones! Muff-munching Mao on MDMA! Hegel making love in a hailstorm, on top the haberdaschery! Lenin in linens, making lemonade! Titillated Trotsky with no trousers, and how!

A song, like every other artform (poetry, painting, really good sex, violent outbursts, spontaneous combustion, etc.) can't be faked and can never be forced. It's like taking a shit - you allow time for the thing to build-up inside of you until the time is right and then let that fucker fly. There is no shitting on an empty stomach. Let's not be rediculous.

Woah. What the fuck?

Oh right. So I went back to the pub for more juice.

This story is really getting long. Are you truly prepared for it all to amount to naught?
Ok, fast forward.

The next morning I decided to bike to Ukiah, a mere twenty or so miles down the mighty 101. A few miles deep the hangover struck with a vengence and the sun oppressed me like a poor Cantoneese sharecropper from Kansas. Enter the thumb. In not time quick I was passing a bowl of high-grade hashish with two brothers from Laytonville as we zoomed on down the Good Lord's hiway.

(Fast forward and shift into present tense for no good reason)

Blam! I materialize anomalously in San Fran at sunset, radiating pure sex and vast possibilities. Fortunately, there is no time for either. I bike up and down several times before arriving at Le Tim & Dustin estate north of Golden Gate park. My beloved friends and I reacquaint, speak of bikes and Humboldt circa harvest season, then hit the streets for some of the hard Thai stuff. Pho sho!

After a bitchin' meal we smoke cigarettes from their lofty abode. Dustin inquires about the impending trip to San Diego. How was I getting there? A good question. Due to an incident involving an aborted call to my mother, a malicious bumble bee, and a spilt cup of coffee, I no longer had a functional cell phone and had therefore made no recent contact with prospective rideshares. Utilizing le phone de Dustin, I find three urgent voicemails from Saeid, who boasts a limo van, a bike rack, and certain jammage with his accompanying friend, who has a Spainish guitar.

We blast out of the city at 7 the next morning. Saeid is a middle-aged gentlemen from Iran. His friend, Francis from France, is slightly older in sweatpants and huge gloves and at first I think he's a hobo. "Oh shit," I realize, "we're all hobos!" Men without a country, opinionated naybobs with no podium, brimming with ripened idealism and hard-to-pinpoint malcontents, die-alone types who took books instead of wives and mescaline instead of Christ, glorified perverts without an alibi, over-educated and under-showered would-be disillusioned college professors, if only we gave a damn! Pop-gun revolutionaries who can only run...

Jesus.

Anyhow, Jeff also jumps aboard - a fellow craigslist rideshare recruit. He's headed home to Poway. Saeid rigs my bass up to the van's sound system and sets Jeff up with a drum machine on his laptop run through an Ipod dock and before you can say "who broke the lock on the henhouse door" we're sailing down Interstate 5 cutting loose with hackneyed covers of Diana Ross, Jimi Hendrix, Steppenwolf, and beyond. Somewhere in the Central Valley the jam falls apart and Francis tells me his story. He's been in the US for twenty-some years teaching French at various high schools and taking odd jobs when he can. He's been married three times, detests pornography, and yearns for the touch of woman once more. France, he says, loves American culture. Especially tabloids. We exchange political babble and, upon his request, I correct his English ruthlessly for an hour or so.

We're in the depths of Orange County when Saeid finally breaks down.
"You smoke?"
"Yeah, you want a cigarette?"
"I don't smoke cigarettes."
"Ah."
We get slightly toasty as the sun sets and the Obama/McCain debate fires up on the radio. Nobody says anything until the debate is over and by then we are pulling of the Interstate to drop off Jeff. The van makes a wide right turn into a Shell station but misses the driveway completely and we plow into a bush.
"Out of gas," Saeid says matter-o-factly.
We are lodged there, halfway in the scenery and halfway in a busy intersection until we collectively lash together a funnel from a slushee cup, a guitar slide, and a length of string and pour 58 cents of gasoline into the tank in order to coax our vessel the remaining 10 meters distance to the pump. Jeff goes on his way and we go on ours.
Back on the highway, Saeid takes on a new vitality. Perhaps it was the reefer, perhaps the politics - he was a man empowered and on a mission.
"Jeff is a good boy," he begins sagely, "he understands the path."
I don't follow, really, but I think Francis may have heard this one before. He rolls down his window and seems to stick his head out as far as possible.
"We all have a path, you see. There is a point you must get to, and your path will take you there." His tone is preachy but well intentioned. It sounds like generic psuedo-spiritual prattle, but I sense he's doing his best to convey something vast in his second language.
"Tell me," he continues, "what is the definition of brotherhood?"
I'm not sure if it's a test or if he truly is unclear on the meaning.
"Well, it's like treating people as if they are your brother, even though they are not. Brother from another mother, ya know?"
He doesn't register my response, and I realize I've probably failed. Nobody speaks for a while and we pull up at my house. My mom comes out to greet us. I give her a hug and begin unloading my bike from the rack.
"You've got a good boy here," Saeid tells my mother. "Either you create your heaven or you create your hell. He understands this."

We say farewell, then.

My mother and I walk back to the house and she asks, "so, what did you guys find to talk about?"

I didn't really know how to answer.

Life in the Fog: some notes on Arcata

A special sort of sadness can be found here.

All day gray reflects from pothole puddles on 11th.
Sea breeze smells of Pacific end-of-the-land whatnow?ness
dabbed on earthen fern&redwood funk.
Molding walls, borderline madness, and
streets entirely vacant, save the evening sojourn
of a single
stray
cat.

Downtown nightlife inevitably evokes
the purest of melancholia.
Half-retarded frat dropouts and weirds
of every variety plague dance floors with
brutish, apelike courting rituals.
Some women, the weak ones,
succumb.

I drink alone and watch all the meaninglessness
passing me by.

Bicycling across town in a mist, a sense of absolute
aloneness sprouts in the chest like a cool
metallic cactus.
Faces blur and everyone a stranger.
Like most of the town, I am broke, bored,
and without a place to go on this
dreary, rain soaked Sunday.

Anything can manifest here,
if you try.
Trouble is,
I seem to have forgotten how.

babys, powerplants

its that grin, that sparkle

she told me not to dance with pint in hand

asked me away from my own mother for a spin on the floor

high school idealist romance chance across the now living dance of what-the-hell-can-we-do-now anyways

and i thought i singed up for esoteric parties


eyes engaged and emoteral - robins slow cooks em, ya know

a spark contagious, alls we got - and ya got it , yep

dance like its ending cuz it is, it is

keep on, ideally

alls we got

Freedomfest

Once every year there is a gathering in the woods where Sol Duc road meets Hiway 101 of the most unholy, most satan-loving, most evvvvvvvil of local death metal bands that rip yr spine out of yr ass and serve it to Lucifer Himself on a flaming silver platter garnished with the big toes of a thousand hapless infants.
Somehow, this whole thing has been dubbed "Freedomfest".

I arrive just after dark, approaching the dirt road someone yells,
"Did you pay?"
"Huh?"
"Did you pay? Ten dollars."
"Man, what kinda Freedom is this anyways?"
It was American through and through.

Five minutes of mellow bush-whacking found me on the other side of the gate and my integrity in tact. The band was sounding something like the Devils flatullence run through a Big Muff with all the knobs turned up and now blasting out of a pile of large amplifiers.
There was unfriendliness in the air. The mosh pit was the rowdiest thing I have ever seen; every other minute a brawl erupted that everybody would get in on and punch or kick or gouge whatever they could until a few walked away bloody and angry.
Everywhere you look there are broodish, primitive red-neck types looking for whatever they can get their hands on to fuck or fight or both. This is the creame of Port Angeles.
The whole thing was a Heironymous Bosch nightmare.

The testosterone hit boiling point somewhere around the wet T-shirt contest. A slew of twitty little high school girls needing to stuff their voids with whatever would fit sauntered across the stage, leaning over the crowd to be groped by half-wit degenerates that marveled aloud to each other about what incredible sluts these were. It was some sort of back-country rite of passage and on the whole just depressing.

Anyways, after that it was all a scene from hell. Bottles flying across the crowd to land wherever they hit, beatings taking place everywhere. Bloody ravaged faces stumbling by with hollow eyes. This is how Port Angeles has a good time. Who forgot to invite the Hells Angels?

Talked with a girl who had two black eyes as a result of not exposing her god-given-groodies thoroughly enough in the t-shirt contest. Then some dude whos a friend of a guy that wants to fuck this girl comes up to start some shit. His posse looks on like rabid dogs in wait of a face to kick in. We exchange some shoves and then somehow the interaction loses inertia and I tell dude to fuck off and tell girl see ya later.

Up the road I curl up in the bushes and sleep.
Then the rain starts and I'm freezing, so I get up to trudge the 13 miles down Sol Duc road to home sweet home. Some girls spot my headlight and say,
"What are you doing in the bushes!?"
"Sleeping!"
"Here, follow the light."

We chilled around a fire until sunrise.
They thought I was crazy. They couldnt understand why I was sleeping in the bushes.
"Well...I forgot to bring a tent and its 13 miles to home."

So anyways, hitched down the road eventually feeling groggy and somehow cheated.

What the fuck kinda Freedom was that anyways?

A daydream allusion for Old Bull Lee

Wild boys got no mother.

Born in a supernova,
raised on wolves teet gnashing teeth to the beat
of the bare-footed free world.

"Candy&girls" smiles Wombat
blood stains cracking where the lips meet like
early-morning wino doesn't know his name yet.

They tear down the mountain -
twenty, thirty at a time all
whooping&howling the locals
hear and
lock their doors,
board up the windows,
pray to GroB Gott
not again, not again.

A mansion on the hillside bursts
into flames full moonlite but
it is only a diversion.

Weasle leads a pack to the
Sweet Shop
kicking down the door they all
howl and the clerk
disappears in a closet
whimpering.

They empty the place
out
leaving another last
peppermint swirl
for the clerk & his kindness.

Cougar nabs
Sweet Sarah Swanson
from her
virgin feather bed
while Pop patrols the porch
with a shotgun.

Rhino throws a Robins
twin over each shoulder
and
they sparkle eyes behind
his back -

They were being taken away by the wild boys.

Fox puts a flynt into Cheif Lou's forehead
and fumbles back into the forest with
Little Lexi Lou.

Madame Dorsai on Graves Street
stuffs her jewelry into a stack of
dirty sheets
mumbling husband three years dead
"Didn't I tell you Harold they'd
be coming for my jewels!"

They storm the house while
Dorsai dies of heart dis-ease
in her
dearest of diamond decorations -
the house left in tact save
the mints in the foyer and a
ginger snap beneath the couch.

Wild boys roar into the mountains -

the moon looks down and
is inclined to howl.

Summertime - Yow!

Back in my element
bare-assed on the beach

high-noon combustion on the
longest day of the year.

Ole Mr. Sun burning all's he
got and
leave us broadside grinning
forever
in those eternal beams of
pure silent zen.

Paint me Exploding!
and sing me a song;
go blind staring at the sun
and
see for the first time.

Seattle - Meine Liebling

Our trip was blessed from the get go;
our mandala perfect and unspoken.

A fifth of whiskers and a half pack of smokes - Wyatt Riot and I post up at the end of town. I hold the sign and Wyatt, who is a tall Pisces/Aries cusp, looking something like a young Thurston Moore, heart of gold still knows how to talk shit and have a good time and turned out to be the greatest hitch companion I've ever tempted the fates with...well, Wyatt flew the thumb. First ride is the unheard-of beautiful chic picking up two strange hitch-hikers in a creep town. A smiling freckled sunbeam on vacation from Montana rides us out about fifteen miles. Sip some whisk and disreguard some guys admonishion about $250 fine for hitchin in WA and yadda yadda yadda...

Debbie picks us up in a beat old pickup and a twelve year old kid stoned in the passanger seat. We cram in there, all four of us; Debbie fresh outta jail for a week after attacking her boyfriends pickup with a pick-axe for sleeping with "some junkie slut" and now playing a tambarine, theres three on the dashboard, to disco hits on the radio and track marks on her left arm. Man, she was crazy! Shes moving to Port Townsend to "get away from drugs", which haunt her everywhere and always so we got stoned breezin outta Sequim on ole 101, she pops a Zima and we sip some whiskers and warm Bud.

Lights, flashing, at us.

Pulled over, the trooper informs Debbie that her registration is expired, the headlights dont work, we arent wearing seatbelts, and the truck is registered to someone that Debbie has never heard of. Ok. A potentially volatile situation, he lets her off with three warnings and we all sigh and keep drinking the beer half-spilt under the seat. Deb wanted to hook me up with her 20-some year old daughter, size 2, burnette, who is NOT looking for any sort of commitment. If shes anything like her mother...well, forget about it! Things got kinda dreary when she began lamenting her lack of a sex life lately when after all she was probly a true knock-out twenty years ago. Ho ho, the reaper will have us all, and thats a fack.

Some dead time in Discovery Bay where Deb lets us off...Wyatt demonstrates some roadside sorcery as the sunsets beautifully by invoking the "Gas $$" tag on our Seattle cardboard sign and the first car to pass pulls over and rides us right on in to Bremerton half an hour before the last ferry of the night sets sail. We pud around the bar there, scandalous so-cal type girls of Bremerton everywhere looking bored and plastic and desperate for some Navy lovin. We cut out and drink some whiskers on the ferry under summer stars talkin loud and fast and loving loving loving life.

Seattle looms across the sound in a glorious somnolent glow, Fritz Lang vision of the future with Metropolis skyway cutting cross her and us tickled pink at the sight. Wyatt's friend Andy picks us up at the ferry and we hit the Knarr, a sweet little bar in the U-district where we compounded our inebriation and played shuffleboard until close. Zip line at the park for a while then go to do some geocaching but then forget to go geocashing, and back to Andy's pad where we drink and talk and smoke well into a new sunny Seattle summer morning.

The next day is HOT and we are sick as dogs. Trudging up Market with an anvil on our skulls, we grab a bite and spend the better part of the day walking off the hangover. We whispered&wondered over the beautiful girls of Seattle, who breezed on down Broadway in sunny summer skirts & pursed lips & buggy shades, smiling for us & for summer & for their life in the city buzzing by always. In a park on Capitol Hill that sensation hits and I rememeber that everything you will ever experience will be felt in a dream before it happens, of course! Downtown we run into Dana, who is drinking on the patio of a bar with a few strippers...always with a few strippers and in fact met him through a stripper that Mikey and I met somehow at Deja Vu last summer. We exchange a few merry words and cut out, by god! Sonic Youth was playing!

The Moore is an old theatre downtown the looks on the inside exactly like the Wilshire theatre in LA. The opening band is Awesome Poet, the singer convulsing and clawing at the air, really feeling it, with quintessential funny-face drummer and hair blowing in the wind guitarist. All sounding something like Television and Iggy Pop, so fine. Ah, and then the show!
Sonic Youth hits it and, man...
WE WERE THERE!
Like, best seats in the house, there.
Like, zen perfect daydream, there.
Like, Crowley & his True Will, there.
Like, there's not even a word for it because words ain't shit man, THERE!

Deja Vu visions of every life ever lived and every pure undiluted emotion ever felt and the silence of NOISE!
No line drawn between band and audience...we were all the audience and the band and all just experiencing this THING together, all had to be there or it would have been different, something else.

So after the purest thing I've ever experienced, we pull our heads back from the sugar clouds with still a sucrose frosting on our lips and stroll up to Capitol hill a have a few with a friend of Wyatts, then back to Andys to craaaaaash.

Next day catch the ferry out to Bainbridge Island under a sweet summer sun and throw up the thumbs on 305. In no time a few girls that Wyatt was noticing on the ferry pick us up with their mother driving. They're heading to Paulsbo for a peace conference where you sing old union worker songs for a weekend and eat quinoa. Sweet girls on summer from school in New York, they give us wheat germ cookies and all smiles and waves as we get out at the intersection for hiway 3. Soon enough dude on a skate park tour picks us up and drops us out in Discovery Bay at the Port Townsend intersection. Then we get a sweet ride.

Ok, so, one of the best things about hitchhiking, besides the fact that you go wherever you please for free, besides throwing yrself at the fates and coming out on top everytime (knock on wood), besides feeling great in the uncertainty of it all, besides all that...one of the best things about hitchhiking is meeting people who tell you about their sweet fucking lives!
We hop into Coreys old roaring Jaguar; he's in a tank top and camo pants, a single sea shell on a necklace, fifty-some year old grey hair. Well, Corey is the Cous of a small island in Micronesia. Whats a Cous? Well, golly gee, it's some well respected title that you get (everyone has a title there) for being real fuckin swell. Not long ago, Corey was a fishing guide. On a trip to this island for a wealthier client, he gets into a bar room brawl, somehow, knocks out a dude thats trying to smash a barstool over a girls head, and then gets the shit kicked out of him. No big deal. But wait! That girl was the Cheifs daughter, and she was so greatful she fell in love immediately and they got married and had a beautiful daughter which Corey is now showing us in a photograph as we buzz up 101. Fuckin eh, man! So he lives on the island for half the year, and landscapes is Sequim for the other half...summer year round! Ole Corey really instilled some faith in my sense of the best intentions of the universe when you give it a chance and listen to that gut boy and heed those sparks of spontaniety! Rock on man, thanks for that one dude.

Puddin across Port Angeles as the sun sets, we make the end of town around 10 and get a little bit wonderin if we will make it back to the Duc tonight. The longest wait of the trip...we seemed to have lost some inertia somewhere around Frugals where we chilled out for a second to drink rum and eat burgers. So we whoop up a Gas $$ sign and stand under a street light where gun fire rings out from the trailer park next door and waaaait. A truck pulls over and it's a redneck with a dash of frosting on his cheek. Boy, I tell you, that redneck was beautful, what with saving our hydes like he's just done here. He was a sewer worker.
"But the pay is good. Eh, shitty job."
We laughed out loud for that, but the pun was either burnt out or beyond him.

Strolling down Sol Duc road nearing midnight, we drink rum and laugh and talk shit and marvel at what a sweet trip it had all been. Josh scoops us up in his beat old Taurus eventually, like we planned, and takes us home.

Beautiful.