“Well, see, there, you forgot to enter your vehicle information.”
By default, I tend to find myself doing silly or strange things to try to impress good looking men- “Sure we can listen to the Dave Mathews Band.” This of course is highly ridiculous behavior, as it only causes me to look completely clueless and uncomfortably weird in an otherwise calm situation. “Show them your BOOBS!” I heard a group of girls giggle-out, trying to single out one of their sororitron brethren to a group of tattooed-military-nipple-shirts smelling like a bottle's worth of Old Spice XXXTreme.
So when “forgot to enter your vehicle info” park ranger handed back my registration card with pen, complete with bulging shoulders and sparkling green eyes- as much as I wish I could have nervously shown him how incomprehensibly stupid I was for forgetting to mark down the license place number plus make and model of my vehicle at the drive-up registration kiosk of his camp ground near Monterey, California... I recognized that I was, instead, going to have to take him down a couple of pegs.
You see, mister tall-dark-and luscious, notice how my brow is all a'sweat, and this huge back pack is strapped to my back like an elephant? And that I'm standing in front of your drive-up kiosk, and not in some kind of futuristic invisible transportation machine? Well, the truth of the matter is, I walked here.
I wrote “n/a” over the appropriate fields, and returned the card.
He looked the card over again, puffing his chest out. Undershirt, fruit-of-the-loom v-neck.
He flipped out with an exasperated exhale, “You walked here from BERKELEY?”
Smart to have checked the address I wrote down, sure, but again, it seemed perhaps the ranger had been kicked in the head by a horse once or twice in his time.
“No, from the bus station, about a mile from here.”
“Oh I see, well, we don't get many walkers around here. Just put your receipt out on the number marker of your camp site so we know you registered.”
When I got to my camp site, I understood why he said they don't get many walkers; RVs and redwoods dotted the cliff line, no tents.
It would be imagination to say I didn't know I was sticking my finger in the socket by diving off into these journeys. Since about November of last year, I have been on tour of sorts- a musician, wandering about California, getting from here to there, playing music, writing music, meeting people, smoking a lot of weed, getting drunk sometimes, getting crazy a lot of the times, and visiting all the places that scare me.
Cumming a lot, basically. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the video-biopic Pumping Iron, “I am cumming all the time.” (If the internet proves of any value in our human history, it is that you can literally type in a search for “Arnold coming” and see the very clip right now. The search engine will probably even finish spelling it for you.)
So when I said my next destination was Oceanside, people's faces began to drop. It didn't take anybody long to figure out what attracted me to Oceanside: the Marines. It is where they go to get drunk and stupid while in San Diego, and I was there for a week.
It's like jumping into the pool of balls at Chuckee Cheese- gay kid in a rainbow candy store.
It fooled no-one that I might be there just to explore different parts of San Diego. I needed a place to get a legitimate flattop, and what better place to do that in, than a beach town where I can stick my finger in 20,000 volts every second.
It jump-starts the heart. It gets the body moving. It tells you you're alive.
It brings you up to the borderline, and asks you if you are ready to jump.
I don't believe that any of us are born without the innermost desire to do just that- do what takes us to the brink, and try to go a little more.
The “how” in that, the window dressing that makes up our stories, is little more than an arbitrary place-holder. The pursuit of window dressing, however, it has fractured off our human existence into believing that there are borders between people and matters of difference worthy of violence or intolerance. If growth is being able to incorporate previously unknown aspects of nature into one's self, then a constant turning away from fear, or the unknown, is akin to stunting one's own growth. Believing that there are borders, either physical or mental, is just another way of saying, “I'm afraid I don't know how to incorporate that yet, so it must be labeled as different.” Fear then is a motivating factor.
Like a cherub with my arrow, puncturing the “how” and getting to the meat of the matter, the secret heart of what drives all of this, I perused Oceanside with my head exploding, nearly unable to keep my eyes from popping out of my head.
“Well, that's idotic.”- My father.
“If I had a more sensible approach, obviously that's what I'd be doing.”
Amanda Palmer- The Dresden Dolls, “Gravity”
People began to question whether I had any sense when hearing my Oceanside plans – to their credit, out of concern, for which I am of course extremely grateful.
But I like the excuse: if I had a more sensible approach, I'd be using it. Life, like art and beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. So the way we always contort ourselves to fit what we believe are the expectations of others, is rather humorous, even when, and perhaps especially when I find myself gel-haired and cologned like some a-hole in a magazine. In some ways, artists are nothing but contortionists. And going to Oceanside was a contortion of biblical proportions- epic floods.
Trapped. Stepping off the train, no real place to go, but too much to carry too far, I realized I had made it, but hadn't at all thought through the ramifications of the train pulling away from the station, and having only my two feet to guide me the right way, and my eyes to push me into a zone of racing heart and pinching stomach.
A recollection, a photograph. The setting, outside, San Diego most likely. Still a baby. Naked. Without any explanation, muscle-chested military-shorts-clad studs surround my body. No faces in the shot, there is no reference to who they are. Or why I am there, naked.
In my dreams, or perhaps my fantasies, they were my secret keepers, keeping their influence even secret to me. Vulnerable, they held me, protected me, circumcised me, fed me and raised me, all from under the cloak of their spell. Attached to them like an infant, still unable to let them go, they beacon and I am compelled to follow. The smells and the tastes entrance me, though they leave me bound and gagged. Identities unknown, just a force, encompassing chemical reactions to desire, and growth. And still, they send me out into the world, naked, exposed, unable to help myself, carried along at their command.
I know I can't reach out for them. I have to recognize them when they come to me.
“You smoke pot?”
Back in the wild beach woods of Northern California, I stumbled upon a raggedy looking fellow pushing a bike up hill. Leathery brown skin, dressed in combat-black, nearly head to toe.
“I'm going down the coast on bike. Got some killer bud with me.”
My first reaction was just to stay focused on the task at hand, maintaining my urban apathy, “Who is this insidious jerk? I'm busy trying to get to the grocery store if you please.”
One thing any indelibly shy person can take heed in, is the idea that life works better when you don't try to grasp at what you want, but take it as it comes your way and use creativity to fashion it into the ideal you were originally thinking about. It takes a fair amount of training, and the fact that I almost immediately tuned this fellow out, probably while thinking to myself how nice it would be to meet a random smoke-buddy, means I still have many habits to flush through.
Magic words like “pot” or “music” or “cheesy slasher flick” are good key-words to snap me out of my habitual approach.
“Uh, what, who, me? Oh yeah, I guess I do. Hello.”
We were traveling in opposite directions, but what is the freedom of the road if you're stuck on a direction?
Not unlike Chong of “Cheech and Chong,” a sort of road pirate, he and I marched together for a couple hundred yards, while I filled him in on the particulars of my story.
I was beginning to make a case about the state of the rangers in the park, given my first experience at the “drive through” kiosk, when at that exact moment a ranger truck carrying two new rangers arrived on scene. Both the pirate and I made facial expressions like we were defecating in our pants.
Ranger 1 glistened with pot-o-gold shiny hair and fiery red beard, and Ranger 2 was sporting the proper “authoritarian” Ray-bans. I was busy trying to not get too entangled into their masculine physiques, the steel biceps, the bulging zipper fronts, the guns, the swagger... all while being encroached upon by the sinking sensation of “Oh my god, we're being busted.”
Red Beard and Ray-ban both had their hands on their hips, gazes locked on us. Surely a better explanation for what was happening is that these two rangers were my original keepers, and they were currently using their piercing eyes to beam my soul back to the father-ship, leaving my personality and body to flop around on Earth like a gasping fish.
Pirate Chong, on the other hand, immediately figured it was a sting against him, and was about a hair-fraction from taking off.
“We saw you earlier. Didn't you see us... see you?”
The heat was on me.
What? Were my pants on at the time? Because with so many trees around, one really gets into the joy of being in nature out here.
“You were on a path you weren't supposed to be on. Do you have a proper justification for your actions?”
The last phrase hooked me, “a proper justification for my actions?”
I barely understood what it was he was trying to say, and had to filter it through about a thousand different scenarios for what could be meant by “proper justification.” Was I supposed to show them a piece of paper? I think I left it at the camp site.
Hitting on the right moment, I recalled that between meeting the pirate and my original intent to get some food, I ended up in what seemed like the back yard of a house. I guess I had meandered off onto the wrong trail, but I was pretty certain that there were no signs to warn of such an occurrence from the direction I was headed. I did indeed cross paths with the ranger's truck while I made my way off the unexpected wrong turn. The event was so un-eventful, it barely crossed my mind that I'd need some kind of justification waiting in the wings for later.
Again, rather than having been completely enraptured in the authority, I felt the need to smack them for being idiots.
“There was no sign from the direction I came in to say so.”
They dithered around like a couple Tweedles for a moment.
Ranger 1 to Ranger 2, “uh, does that qualify for justified reason?”
Ranger 2, “uh, what? I was concentrating on this pose.”
Ranger 1, “Sorry to bother you guys, you go along, and have a nice time.”
Chong and I bee-lined to the nearest tree cover to enjoy a smoking celebration of not getting busted.
I recalled, “I was once busted in a park for smoking pot. The ranger came up to me and said, 'If you're doing what I think you're doing, you can't do that ANYWHERE!'. I said, 'you can make a boy sweat with that tongue, Mister.'”
The pirate was extra relieved. “I thought you were a narc. I was so glad when they started talking to you and not me. Here's the chronic I got,” and he busted out a cornucopia of bushy green goodness.
The barber shops in Oceanside are like conveyer belts of strapping young men, getting ready to ship off, ship shape, or man-over-board. I could have gone to a bar, but the true physicality, proximity and intimacy I was to endure could best be uncovered inside the shelter of the red, white and blue barber poles.
With a razors edge pressed up against the taught skin of my stretched out neck, head steadied in the palm of the elder barber's hand, I felt the heat of the thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Marines who have laid their vulnerable heads in the same hand. I felt the jolts sparking off the razor, electrifying my body. Only then were the hooks, the bait, the Brothers Eros in line behind me, free to move and slither, like tantalizing demons, postulating with their fruits in their baskets, raising their arms in the air to unleash the scent of their man-pits; like potpourri, heavily weighing down the atmosphere and confusing the senses. Staring, playing games, pushing their deepest desires to the light where it fears the most.
Before being branded with the fiery poker, my heightened state of neurosis encounters a paused moment of eternity. The combination of being at the mercy and in complete trust of the barber, requires me to relax completely or risk getting my head lopped off. The dripping testosterone in the room calls my attention to be pulled outward, like a fish on the line. The simultaneous push and pull knocks time out of the cosmos and unveils all the arbitrary structures that hold all these ideas into place.
Like in the photograph, the vulnerable naked baby, forever trapped in a room of headless demons. But also forever relaxed, in the hands of love.
One of the most beneficial qualities I find in reading spiritual teachings or philosophical ideas is that inevitably, they all call upon the reader to pay close attention, both in detail and the overall movement of things. Whenever you get too cocky, whenever the ego wraps itself around your ideas and starts to penetrate you with thoughts of the “out there world,” and “other people's perceptions,” spiritual teachings and the philosophical questions will always come back to the same fundamental “pay attention.”
Proud for having carried myself so well with the all rangers bewildered by a walker just figuring out the layout of the land, I sat in my tent near the cliffs spilling into the Pacific Ocean and proceeded to get very stoned while staring up at the stars. Naked and enjoying nature, the sounds of the distant waves below, gradually turning the biggest rocks into tiny pebbles, I drifted off to sleep.
“Excuse me, wake up in there! Excuse me!”
Two flashlight beams in my eyes. Like a scene out of the X-Files, I was blinded, naked, white, scared, still asleep.
Since their flashlights were so bright, they could probably see my heart about to jump out of my chest.
“Did you pay?”
I began to recognize the silhouettes from behind the blinding white lights. It was Red-beard and Ray-ban, looking at me through the top mesh of my tent. Scaring me once wasn't enough, they needed to come back to catch the full Monty apparently.
“What?”
“Did you PAY? There's no car here. We have no way to verify.”
“I taped it on the pole right where you guys are standing.”
“Oh is this it?”
I heard them muttering the contents of the registration receipt between each other, sleuthing out the possibility of an elaborate forgery.
But the bright lights never stopped raining down on me while they discussed the terms of my release. The glass pot pipe lit up like a disco-ball, reflecting light shows all over the tent.
“Oh, okay, sorry about that. You can go back to sleep now.”
“All that, and you're not even coming in? I thought you guys came with the entrance fee.”
But they were long gone. I was left, naked, shivery, heart beating wildly, looking up at the stars. Somewhere in the constellations are drawn the headless demons that dance around this camp fire. The animation of the dance resembles life, but the longer I observe the dance and dancers, the more they reveal themselves as symbolic gestures, pointing to, but never to be mistaken for actual experience- like an image in a magazine, or an icon on the altar.
===
RD expands his touring this summer, starting June 28 in Portland, OR finishing some time in August in Boston, MA, with special guest JP.
