Lucky Bastard

This is a collage I made in Boulder, Colorado, home of the decent chile relleno, reasonably priced. Man, when I lived in Boulder, all I could focus on was the collective unconscious, therapy, renting movies, and consuming vast amounts of chile rellenos.

V.

When I was a kid, I grew up across the street from a train switching station. The CSX line, which a lot of fellas from my hometown worked on, ran up and down the rails, north to south, all day and all night long. I grew accustomed to the sounds of the railway, and even now am comforted by the sounds, smells, and graffiti of locomotives. When I was young, though, I spent untold hours forever daydreaming about hitching a ride on one of those trains that passed through the switching station. I daydreamed about all the exotic places it could take me, through the kudzu, and into the wild world’s heart. Those trains were like good friends. Even though they killed a several of my dogs, everything about them seemed friendly.

My decision to go “on the road” as a young man in 1997 was, as you might’ve guessed, informed by those trains and Jack Kerouac. But you might not have guessed that it was also informed by 3 other forces: Henry Miller, William “Least Heat” Moon, and…Fortuna, the goddess of luck.

I had pretty much been in an identity crisis since I hit puberty. Since higher education had not provided the clarity I was looking for, I found myself deeply yearning for an experience that would provided some sense of who I really was. Like a lot of people that age, stuck between two disparate generations, I had no fucking idea what I was about. Really, I just wanted to feel the experience of being alive, of having an American pulse.

I had graduated college and gotten a low-paying full-time job with the folks at the Peabody Awards. They had hired me to make archival digital videos of old, degraded films, television shows, and kinescopes. Basically, my job entailed running a 16mm projector for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week in a sweaty, darkened room on the seventh floor of the UGA library. Even during the interview, it sounded horrible to me. But earnest old me was well aware that I needed to pay the rent, so I took the job. As soon as I accepted the offer, my equivocations truly began to rumble deep in my marrow.

I ruminated day in and day out about quitting my job and, if I did, what I should do and where I should go. “Should I stay or should I go?” became my mantra. “Work is the responsible thing to do, but I have a feeling it’s going to kill my spirit. Then again, maybe I’m putting myself on.” This went on for weeks, and finally got so bad that I decided to end my ceaseless ruminations by flipping a coin. Heads I go, tails I stay. For whatever reason, to make the moment more official, and also because I distrusted my own ability to distort facts, I actually wrote down on a tiny sheet of paper: HEADS I GO. TAILS I STAY. I taped this mini-slogan to a wall, took out a quarter, and decided my fate.

Say what you will about Fate. No one knows what it going to happen from one minute to the next in this life. And that’s really the most honest thing anyone could ever say about life. It’s that fact - Fortuna and her wheel of fortune - that has constantly driven me into all my adventures, mires, snares, sojourns, battles, respites, tricks and traps. The coin landed on HEADS. So off to NYC I went.

After my car burned to crisp on the NJ turnpike one month later, I washed dishes awhile and saved up enough dough to catch a ride out West. Finally, I was off. The aka cords were broken…mostly, anyway. I had at last left the ionosphere of Home. New air filled my lungs. Between Georgia and Portland, Oregon, where I settled, I saw many a beautiful landscape, man, woman, and child. In the bottom of the Grand Canyon, I looked for God and Woody Guthrie. Didn’t find either one, but I found something about as amazing - the Colorado River and a family of mule deer clambering on red rocks. Me and the car I was traveling in got searched in the Painted Desert when a lady cop thought she saw me try to smuggle petrified wood out of the park. (Little did she know that she was unwittingly fulfilling a sexual fantasy I had harbored since I was eleven!) I traversed ancient arroyos in Taos and, in Yellowstone, back country camped with the bison, grizzlies, and magical, secret geysers. In all places, the night sky enveloped me like I was one of life’s prodigal children.

Luck. It will spin you, all right. Beware when you think you’ve got anything figured out. A bad thing just might be a good thing. And a good thing might be something not-so-good. I kept traveling, joined the Renaissance Faire circuit, and lived in a few other places after I finally got seasonally depressed in Portland, Oregon and left for more good times, more chaos, more road. I took a lot of photographs and made some films along the way. Also, I still have that HEADS I GO TAILS I STAY scrap of paper. I keep it in my wallet, in case of emergency, or if I need a reminder of what a lucky bastard I am.