America Essaus Pt XI - Love After The Fall

The next morning I awoke and got back on the road. The desert finally began to give way to green. After about an hour I pulled over by a riverbank and stripped down naked.

One pleasant surprise I have found on my trip is that there are clean, cheap showers available at truck stops all across the country. Usually for five or six bucks you can get a hot shower and most are surprisingly clean.

During the desert drive there were no truck stops, no travel centers. My body felt grimy with highway dust and with the sweat of my troubled thoughts. I used a paper cup from McDonalds and dipped it into the stream and poured the cold fresh water over my head and back. The cold water was a revitalizing shock to my body that was warm in the hot sun.

By the end of the day I would be in San Francisco, the city I marked as the goal point of the journey. It was a long journey, the joy of it undercut by the shock of 9/11, but I didn’t feel road-weary. I felt strong. I could have kept on going for months to come if the world would have allowed it.

As I stood naked on the riverbank washing my body with a bar of Dove soap and a blue washcloth, the highway was just behind me. A little too close for comfort really, but beggars can’t be choosers. A few yards away a yellow steamroller sat nestled among the trees. The little sanctuary was already threatened by the proximity of concrete and combustions engines, perhaps soon they would be plowing the whole place under.

It’s funny how boys are attracted to construction equipment. I never quite got it, although I suppose it might be cool to drive that big thing and maybe run over a few things for fun. Maybe flatten over America and make a fresh start? When David Letterman’s show was young and irreverent he used to run over stuff with a steamroller; six packs of beer, TVs, packs of hot dogs… It seemed hilarious at the time, but perhaps it is the time of humor that only guys find funny. Like the Three Stooges poking each other in the eye.

Despite my tales of struggle and woe, humor has always been a big part of my life. I suppose it comes from my father who had an abstract and surreal sense of humor. He was like an Andy Kauffman-type of performance artists. Usually his own goofiness was the butt of his jokes. Although at times there was an edge to it that kept you guessing.

When I was a little kid I used to ride with him in his tractor-trailer truck. The cabs of the trucks are high in the air. When I would go to jump out he would tell me, “Now remember Caeser never trust anyone, not even your father. Now go ahead and jump I’ll catch you.”

Everything he said, you had to think twice about it. You always had to stay sharp or he’d suck you into one of his farces.

At a later age I used to travel with him as he shuttled overweight loads of steel between Pittsburgh and Philly. Hanging out with the truckers was a trip like no other. Once I went bowling with a bunch of them just outside Philly. These guys were a hurricane of beer-swilling bad behavior. First they got the lightest bowling balls they could find, then they hurled them through the air like baseballs, usually landing on top of the pins from above instead of rolling down the lane. Often the pins would explode with such force that they would land four lanes over and the attendant would have to come and clear the lanes by hand.

Their loud mouths and foul language must have terrorized the other patrons. The truckers seemed completely oblivious to their own behavior. They were like a bunch of schoolboys run-amuck.

Their practical jokes were over-the-top and borderline dangerous. When they left the bowling alley they quickly began dismantling each other’s trucks. Pulling the pins so that when they pulled out the trailers would be left behind, or taking off the tall silver smokestacks and hiding them in a nearby dumpster. It was total bedlam.

That night I sat in the cab as my father slept. The trucks were lined up in a row by a dirty truck terminal. All night long white prostitutes with puffy blonde afros, blue foil hot pants, silver halter tops, and high platform shoes prowled among the trucks. As a twelve year old virgin the sight of them about made me cum on my pants they looked so lecherously enticing.

The next morning a small explosive device was thrown in the passenger window and greeted us with a deafening bank. It seemed the truckers also liked to play with fireworks. But no Chinese firecrackers for these boys, they hurled quarter sticks of dynamite at each other.

The fireworks were illegal in Pennsylvania, but the truckers would buy them on trips down south where anything that goes bang is protected by the law. I took this opportunity to start a side business selling the smaller firecrackers to my school chums. The demand was amazing. I had an eighty per cent profit margin and couldn’t stay stocked with product to meet the customer demand.

At one point nine of my classmates got suspended for the things in one day. Although they ratted me out like a flock of canaries, because my little business transactions commenced outside of school property they couldn’t suspend me.

The school principle called my father in hopes of discussing the matter with a concerned parent. When the phone rang, as a joke my father picked it up and answered, “Maggie’s Whore House.”

When he heard the principle on the phone he hemmed and hawed and explained that he was expecting a call from a friend. He assured he principle that he would curtail my business practices and hung up the phone. My mother laughed and said, “Well, maybe ya learned a lesson, didn’t ya?”

“Yes Dad, what if it would have been one of my friend’s calling?” my sister reprimanded.

I think my father was secretly proud of my go-getter entrepreneurial spirit, but at my mother’s insistence my fireworks supply soon began to dry up.

I think my childhood was a golden era for comedy. Richard Pryor could make you angry, laugh and cry, and in the end leave you enlightened and hopeful. He spoke of racism and poverty, yet brought people together in the process. George Carlin was brilliant in his prime. The comedians seemed to be reaching for something more than just delivering one-liners. They were philosophers and social commentators who helped bring self-awareness to a society struggling with social change.

In its early days Saturday Night Live seemed revolutionary. It was a national catharsis that spoke the unspeakable. They were really letting the cat out of the bag. Every one of them seemed to have a major chip on their shoulders. The truth they expressed with their humor, as often as not, made you want to holler out “Amen” and “Halleluiah.” They wielded comedy like an axe, cutting away at hypocrisy, commercialism, and rampant materialism. On that show the drug culture walked right out of the closet and the moral majority just about had a hemorrhage.

When I finally reached California I crossed the border on a highway that seemed to be suspended in the air. To my right was a tall cliff from which very tall pine trees shot into the air. The highway seemed to float among the tops of the trees. The scenery was majestic. Deep green covered the landscape and the sun was warm and bright.

Ten or twenty miles into the state I got off the highway to have lunch in a little college town whose name I have forgotten. It was very clean and immaculately groomed as college campuses are apt to be. Lots of walkways lined with green. I walked around looking for a friendly place to eat. The houses had an old fashioned quality about them. Potted plants hung from wooden porch trellises.

I settled on a boheme-café with outdoor tables. It had been quite awhile since I had any human contact and was feeling rather lonely, hungry for some stimulating conversation. The students came and went enveloped in their own worlds. This clearly wasn’t a place for a stranger to make new friends. After forcing down half of a bland sandwich I got back on the highway.

Driving with one hand I scrolled through the phone book in my cell phone, searching for someone to call. During the trip I found myself reconnecting with friends I hadn’t spoke to years, thanks to long lonely highways and the magic of cell phones. This time I chose Dan Spigelmeyer.

“Hallow?” he answered the phone as if asking a question.

“Dan, what’s happening?” I asked.

“Caeser? Aaahhhll, not too much. Are you in Town?”

Dan spoke with a bemused drawl. Most people took it for the sound of a depressed man, but I recognized it as carrying a tinge of sarcastic humor. He way a guy who always perceived life’s absurdities even as he labored under them. He was a broken clock that continued to tell time for the sake of others, even though he was secretly an initiate into the cult of those who know the futility of such delineations.

“Oh, I’ve been getting’ some overtime in. One day they say they might be closin’ down, the next we have to work weekends to catch up,” he explained when asked about his days.

Dan worked at the old steel mill that Lewistown was founded upon. The town grew from a bunch of row houses the factory built in order to entice workers to the area. Dan had a wife and a couple of kids, and built a house in a lot beside his parent’s home.

“What do you do fun these days?” I inquire.

“I really don’t get out too much,” he explains a bit woefully, “ahh, Y’know with the babysitters and all. I go fishin’ every now and then, and went huntin’ a few times.”

I was searching for away to pierce he façade of his humdrum existence and tap into the more rebellious spirit that I knew was hidden there, but all my jousts failed to connect.

“When I came through town I noticed that they are trying to reopen the old Embassy Theater,” I put forth, “Remember that time we snuck all those Malt Duck into that horror movie and caused a ruckus?”

“Oh yeah, I remember that,” he repeated with a little more energy. “You stood up and yelled ‘what the fuck is wrong with you people watchin’ this shit. You disgust me,’ then we ran out the fire exit,” he laughs.

“I won’t admit to anything,” I counter with a giggle.

His tone again sinking, he asked with a sigh, “What was wrong with us, doing that shit? Do you know?”

“I think we were just alive,” I offer.

This seems to hit a little too close to the bone. “Oh yeaaaah,” he responds with a long drawn out sigh.

Dan and I became friends in high school when we sat near each other in a history class. Just before I met him he got suspended for making a bomb threat to the school Soon afterwards he had a nervous breakdown and refused to come to school for many months. He later told me he was walking down the hall in school and began to hallucinate. He said felt like he was walking on the moon, and each step was a giant bounce. After that he was stricken with debilitating anxiety attacks.

We became friends as cohorts in bad classroom behavior. I don’t think anyone was doing much learning in that place anyway, but we sure didn’t make it nay easier. And if you’re going to be a class clown it’s always good to have someone to play off of.

After high school we became drinking buddies. We would hang out in front of a beer joint and wait for someone over 21 who would buy us a few six packs of Genesee beer. Then we would spend the evening driving around getting drunk and listening to the tape deck. We would cruise the dark streets of our nowhere town looking for excitement, wishing we knew how to meet girls.

Dan had a penchant for getting his hands slapped by the authorities. Once while we were driving drunk a cop pulled us over on a dark country road. Dan threw a can of beer out the passenger window in hopes of avoiding an underage drinking charge. When the cop came to my window, even though I was driving and obviously wasted, Dan got a $300 fine for littering and I got off scott-free.

On another occasion we were drunk and walking down the street when we passed a ‘no parking’ sign that some other vandal had bent into a U shape. For no apparent reason Dan decided to straighten the sign. It was a rare good deed on his part. As soon as he put his hands on the sign we heard sirens.

“Mr. Spigelmeyer, why do you feel the need to destroy public property?” the officer asked.

Dan protested that he was fixing the sign, not destroying it, but they weren’t buying his story. The more he talked the deeper he got into it with them. I couldn’t stop laughing the whole thing was so ironic.

When Friction formed Dan became our first court jester. Dan would follow the group and entertain us with his antics. These were the days when Quaaludes were the drug of choice and
Dan would eat a couple of them and then invent crazy new dances while the band played with a blitzed look in his eyes.

During those days Dan and I worked at a government run tree nursery hidden high in the mountains up in Amish country. On any given morning we would start the day by grinding a couple horse-pill sized Quaaludes into a chunky powers and then shooting it up our noses with a cocaine bullet. (A pocket-sized contraption that blasts powder into your nose.)

The shit made you an instant moron. If you could stay on your feet it was a minor miracle. In fact I hear that one of the miracles under consideration in John Paul II’s bid for sainthood includes walking a straight line after eating a Quaalude.

Of course, the brain trusts that we were, in this state we would arrive at work and climb tall rickety old ladder to paint the government buildings and garages. That we survived is a mystery that defies logic.

Except for one gay party-boy named Joe Slemons, and a violent drug addict named Randy Himes, our co-workers at the nursery were mountain Mennonites and hillbilly rednecks. Dan and I had a habit of saying surreal things to freak out the crew. The first day that we worked with Randy Himes I casually remarked, “Man, I shouldn’t have eaten those last three hits of acid. I’m getting’ the heeby-jeebies.”

It was total nonsense, I hadn’t eaten any acid, and the implied four hits seemed like suicide to me. To my surprise Himes replied “Do you have some? I ate three hits, but could do another!”

It’s hard to imagine that a guy would do acid on his first day on the job, but three hits really was crazy. But Himes was a crazy guy all around. He was way-too into violent action films and often came to work with a tall tale of the previous night’s adventures.

“Ooh man, last night I was walking along route 522 and these four big guys pulled over and came after me. I pulled a reflector post out of the ground and took them all on fuckin’ ninja style. I split this one guys head wide open.”

Himes was always good-natured with us, but on one occasion he took off his shirt to impress us with his manly physique. Dan responded by plucking one his chest hairs. Suddenly Himes got a look in his eyes that spoke or murder. He made it clear the affront was no laughing matter. It was a Jekyll and Hyde switch that left me warning friends that one day he would kill someone.

One morning he told us that the night before he had went to a gas station with a ski mask and a hunting knife. His story was hilariously absurd and I assumed it was just one of his tall-tales. It sounds like something from “The World’s Stupidest Criminals.”

“I took the gas-station guy into the office,” he said, “then I showed him the knife and told him to open the safe. He was dickin’ around with the safe and a fuckin’ car pulls up at the pump. I told him to go pump the gas and not say a word or I would kill him. So he pumps the gas and comes back and starts fuckin’ around with the safe again and another fuckin’ car pulls up! I tell him again, ‘go pump the gas but don’t say a word or I’ll stab ya.’ So he pumps the gas and come back and starts messin’ with the safe and another car pulls up. I finally just left without the money, what a bunch of fuckin’ shit,’ his voice trailed off with disgust.

It was such a nutty story that I didn’t think anything more about it, but about a week later the cops came and took him away. They should have locked him up for good because a few years later my murder prophecy came true. First he threatened his parents with an axe, then set the garage on fire. When the firemen came he shot and killed one of the firemen and wounded another. When the police came he shot and wounded one of them. The last time I saw him he was in shackles being led from the courthouse to the county lock-up. He now resides in the state pen and should be there for a long time to come.

The boss of the tree nursery was a crusty old marine that carried himself like a peg-legged pirate. One day he came into the room, stopped in his tracks, and took a long look at Joe Slemons the gay Party-boy. Spying his earring he came up to him and yelled, “You fuckin’ faggot! You see that? You fuckin’ queer. I used to have one of those and it got torn out of my ear by some motherfucker, look at this.”

He pointed to a shredded ear that looked like a piece of chewed-up beef jerky. Turning away he said with a cold laugh, “I’ve got you pegged you fuckin’ queer.”

The workers were a ratty collection of hicks if ever I saw one, and I’ve seen way too many. There was a big bloated Mennonite kid who used to brag about harassing his Amish kin. His favorite hobby was to drive up behind their buggies and push his car bumper against the buggy wheel. It must have been a frightening form of harassment for the Amish. At least once a year some hot rod white-boy ploughs down one of the buggies on a dark country road.

Dan and I used to egg the bastards on just to see what kind of racist rednecks they really were. We’d usually start by making a racist statement then waiting until they felt comfortable enough that they were among likeminded-company to show their true colors. Then once we got them riled up and revealing what a band of bigots they really were, we would take it further and further until our statements were so mind bogglingly idiotic that it began to dawn on the dimwits that either we were completely out of our minds, or were playing them for fools the whole time. Needless to say we weren’t making a lot of friends among our country cousins.

Among our co-workers was a crippled Mennonite named Rob. I’m not sure what happened to him, but his spine was bent up and his feet pointed in such cockeyed directions it was a wonder that he could walk as well as he did. When he spoke, his speech was a little slurred, kind of like a deaf person’s tends to be.

He didn’t say much anyways, but he worked harder than anyone. No laughing or joking around, down to business all the way. I think he was the only honest one of out of the entire bunch, bosses or workers alike, present company included. I always respected the guy because no matter how absurd the situation became he tried to keep his faith in an honest day’s work. And I’m sure that wasn’t easy given that the entire job was a bit of a farce.

The state gave us the jobs to ‘provide a positive work experience.’ The problem with the thing was that the nursery no longer planted trees, and therefore there was no real work to be done. Our bosses would scrounge up any menial tasks they could find, then think of the most ass-backwards way to do it, so that it took as long as possible. Because of this, no one took the job seriously. Except Rob, who refused to admit that the whole thing was a farce and no one really cared about a job well done.

Finally near the end of it all, after a weekend of rain a large mud puddle formed in the lower side of one of the fields. Our task was to remove the water from the field. To achieve this goal they gave us a couple of shallow shovels and a handful of garden rakes. Now in the unlikely event you’ve ever tried to move water with a garden rake, you would quickly learn that it just ain’t gonna happen.

The group spent the day in the hot sun half-heartedly shoveling and raking the water. Through it all we bitched and moaned while Rob went about his work as earnestly as ever. Then about two in the afternoon something seemed to snap. Rob threw down his rake and ran into the middle of the mud puddle and began to jump and down, splashing in the muddy water while flapping his arms like a trained seal and braying “Fuaaackkkk, fuuuaaackkk!”

At first the rest of us stood shocked and a bit stupefied, but soon we broke into applause and cheers. After a few moments he picked up his rake and quietly returned to his Sisyphean task as if nothing had happened.

It was funny as hell to see him finally admit that he saw the absurdity of it all, even if it was just for a few sweet moments. Afterwards he warmed up to us just a little bit. I think he knew that although Dan and I were a different breed, even while we harassed the others, we accorded him a little bit of unspoken respect.

The tree nursery job was seasonal and not long after we left, Dan married a local girl who had pretensions of becoming a rich sophisticate, and Dan and I soon began to drift apart. Quite a few years later he went home one day to find that his wife had unexpectedly left and took the furniture with her. It appears she felt that even though Dan always held down a steady job, that he wasn’t motivated to strive for great wealth.

By chance, at the same time I was ending my relationship with Leilani, and for a few short weeks Dan and I spent our weekend nights as bachelors prowling the local dives, looking for girls and having bizarre adventures with the oddball yokels we would meet.

I thought it was great fun but it seemed Dan couldn’t wait to return to the security of domestic life. The first girl he managed to hook up with, he quickly married, and soon had a couple kids.

I’m not sure why after a certain age people seem to panic if they are not married. With each year more and more friends join the breeder ranks. Men who were once full of fire quickly dissolve into contented homebodies, working their days to support their broods then collapsing each evening in front of the idiot box. The qualities that made them unique characters seem to evaporate in conjugal bliss.

For some even mentioning their bachelor days is taboo, like alcoholics who fear that a nip of the sauce will knock them off the wagon. One of my friends refuses to come see The Imperial Orgy perform because he fears that if he steps inside a barroom he will revert to his bad boy ways.

People seem to think that to be a single adult is a disaster. Once I ran into a female friend in line to buy popcorn at a movie theater.

“Are you married,” she asked.

“No, not yet,” I smiled back.

“Ooh, you couldn’t find anyone,” she intoned with a sympathetic frown.

I nodded my head and smiled, but was secretly thinking, “couldn’t find anyone?” Christ, I think it’s great to be single. The freedom and independence, the pleasure of discovery and adventure, and it keeps one hungry and vital. Contentment is a dangerous thing in life. While it may feel nice, it is also a form of surrender. Happily ever after means the battle is won, one can rest on their laurels, grow fat and prosper.

For me, even being in a long-term relationship seems to steal away my very will to live. I grow numb way too quickly. I once heard someone say that for a man, being in love is to always be saying, “I’m sorry.”


For me there is nothing like a lonely night to fill me with the urge to fight, to take on the world, to work harder, reach further, strive for loftier heights.

It was once believed that male animals fought each other for the best females. After some study it was learned that most animals fight over real estate or dominance in the social hierarchy. Then the guy with the best piece of land, or who is the top dog in the pack, gets the bests females based on his achievements.

The world of human interactions is far more complex, but essentially the same. I must admit that when I find myself as a single male in a public gathering with a beautiful woman in the room that I can’t have, a subtle taste of rage seeps unto my tongue. A primitive instinct beckons from within. This little fire makes my spine grown stiff and my eyes acquire a steely gaze. There’s no time for merriment. I would rather work, struggle, fight, be smarter, more creative, more aggressive, more wiley, more cunning, more vicious.

This feeling in public has often led to no good. I can often become a trouble starter at a party. Pushing people to misbehave, seducing and antagonizing them into losing their cool composures and behaving with uncouth manners. Every now and then it’s good to have something to regret in the morning.

Anthropologist Margaret Mead expressed a theory that it took eons of social conditioning to make men devote themselves to a family unit and help care for offspring. It is a modification that benefits the species, but goes against a male’s more primordial instinct to spread his DNA far and wide.

In the waning days of the year 2005, as I write these words, I testify that this tug-of-war between the two instincts still goes on within me. There are times when I see cute little black, Asian, and Indian children I feel the pangs of desire for fatherhood.

There is also a constant social pressure, a herd instinct to conform, to settle down and breed. It’s funny that often when people tell a man to grow up, what they really mean is to settle down with a family. It seems that people think you can’t be a mature adult unless you are married with children.

It seems a single adult male makes married people a little uneasy. To them it is a dangerous social aberration. The universe will always be off-balance until he finds a nice girl and moves into a house with a white picket fence.

Meanwhile each year I see my friends fade into the woodwork. Once they marry they cease to exist. They permanently retire from the roaming pack of wild dogs that once inhabited.

I am left feeling like the last man standing, making this strange left hand path I have chosen a little more lonely. My married male friends can quite decide whether I am a tragic figure or their secret hero.

A couple of years after I got to New York I picked up a book my roommate Samantha was reading. It was a pop psychology book that made the claim that personal happiness can be hampered by a person’s inability to make a psychological break from the mother and become a whole independent individual.

The author told a story of how little children often run from their mothers as a way of testing their independence, but they always look back, confident that their mothers will run and catch them. In fact, will save them from going too far.

When I read this it brought to mind a re-occurring dream I often have of being chased, but never being able to get away. I have heard it is a dream that many people have.

That night I had another re-occurring dream. In this dream the motif is always that either people mistakenly think that I have killed someone, or sometime in the past I have accidentally killed someone and now it has been discovered. It is usually a strange situation where it is a long buried memory that I now recall with a sense of dread. I was never been able to figure out this dream, but I always awoke filled with anxiety.

On this night the person I killed in the dream was John Lennon. I awoke with my heart racing.
As I tried to calm down I pondered the strange dream. Then it occurred to me that John Lennon is someone I identify with. Therefore, perhaps the person I am killing is a symbol of my self.

This idea seemed to give way to a rapid succession of thoughts that burst forth out of my head in a torrent. As troubled as my childhood was, I always felt like I came out of it without any unresolved issues with my parents. Especially with my mother, who gave me a lot of independence from a very young age. She was a woman who gave a lot and asked very little in return.

But with this eruption of thoughts there came some long buried feelings, I can’t even call them memories, from a very young age. As a child of two or three I must have sensed a need in my mother, a need that made me feel very guilty about asserting my independence. I think at that young age I must have felt a bit smothered, but soon after that I became very independent and she accorded me an inordinate amount of freedom.

I also realized that this dynamic has carried through and colored my feelings towards relationships with women. In relationships I have always felt a sense of being smothered and dreadful feelings of guilt for wanting my independence.

It was at this moment in life that I realized I really don’t like being in long-term relationships, and I must say, from that moment forward my relationships with women tilted in my favor.

Guilt has always been a factor in my relationships. I could never quite be what women wanted me to be, and they could never accept me for what I am. Usually my sense of failure was associated with money. I grew up in a traditional household and have always felt a failure because I couldn’t support a wife and children, although few men can these days.

But as an adult my financial troubles are all connected with being a musician and artist. I would likely be a millionaire if I wasn’t an artist. As an artist one has a separate goal that defies the demands of family. And again the pressure arises to get serious, grow up, and drop all this artist nonsense.

It’s funny how you can tell a woman exactly who and what you are, and they will nod their heads and say they can accept that, then soon after do everything they can to change you.

In my younger years I would try to explain right off the top that I was a musician and artist and wouldn’t be changing my ways. I guess they wouldn’t really think through what that meant because soon they would realize that they needed someone with a more stable lifestyle in order to have a happy domestic life.

I recent years I tell them up front that I don’t want to be married, that I don’t want to even be in a relationship, women will nod their heads in understanding then completely ignore everything I said. I can say it a hundred times, but they seem to be able to put that out of their minds. As one female friend warned me, ‘they always think they can change you.’ One of the things I appreciate about Jodi is that she accepts me as I am.

It’s odd how we grow up with these traditional ideas about life and love. People assume love automatically leads to a lifetime commitment. Possession is inherent in most people’s understanding of love.

I don’t believe that in-itself love has anything to do with possession, or marriage, or even sex. Love is something more pure and simple, something that is born and dies in each moment. All the baggage we hang on love limits our ability to love, and limits the amount of love in the world.

People tend to see a difference between the love one feels for family and friends, and the love one feels for a lover. I really don’t see that distinction. To me it all springs from the same source. The fact that you have a sexual relationship with someone, or make some kind of commitment to them, are separate practical issues. Love is not practical. It is inspired and purely spiritual.

I might see a withered old man from across the street as he is sitting on a stoop watching the traffic go by with a bored look in his eyes, and be filled with love.

As I write these words I sit at my usual table at the back of the Greenpoint Café. A young woman is at the counter. It is a gray, gloomy, wet November day. Everything feels like it is moving in slow motion.

Although it is fairly warm out the girl at the counter wears a long heavy winter coat. Her brown hair is tucked underneath a knit cap. From the tangled strands that fell out from under it, it appears the cap was meant to hide the fact that she didn’t bother to brush her hair before she ran out for the morning coffee. She looks tired, and her hands look so small as she reaches for her cup. Although I will likely never know her name, and might not even wish to make love to her if the opportunity were to arise, but in this moment I feel awash in love for her. I feel inspired by her ragged beauty, I feel a paternal sympathy for her weary expression on this dark day.

Tantrists believe that the material world is the body of God, and to love another is to Worship God. Our ability to love is boundless, but too much love threatens the social order, so love is bound and shackled by religious edicts, social taboos, and legal sanctions. Love, like truth, can destroy the old order and brings revolutions both in societies and in the hearts of men and women. Love is a dangerous thing, more threatening to the status quo than a terrorist’s bomb. If it isn’t carefully kept in check the walls might tumble down, and God only knows what might be left after the fall.

America Essaus Pt X - The Dreams They allow Us To Dream

Hours passed on the empty highway. Occasionally a car passed by going the opposite direction, or a group of teenagers in a hot rod blew by me at suicide velocity. But overall this was a land that belonged to nature. The environs were so harsh that it was not even worth exploiting. There was not a thing man-made to be seen as far as the eye could see.

Man-made objects are full of sharp angles, parallel lines and bold geometric repetitions. Nature is a soothing chaos, smooth random curves and irregular jagged edges. Chaotic, yet there is a sameness to it.

The curves of the sand massage the mind like a Japanese shiatsu, urging you to relax and expand your thoughts. Or urging confession to an unseen therapist or a priest whose curtain is the Earth and skies.

It seems that much of my personality has been shaped by poverty. In America a man is judged by his material wealth. I have heard women in New York say they look at a man’s shoes, if his shoes don’t look expensive enough they don’t bother to speak to him.

To be an artist is to be a bum. Unless you’ve made a lot of money at it, of course, but otherwise it is a joke from which the artist is often advised to grow up and get serious about life. To take the left hand path, to devote your life to gaining spiritual wealth is to be a pauper, if not a bit cuckoo to boot.

The house I was born in was a little cement block building in a little hamlet called Alfarata.
More often than not the house had no running water and my mother and sister would trudge out into the field to bring water from an old metal hand pump. Eventually the house was turned into a stable for horses.

As I child I couldn’t have cared less about my family’s lower class status. The only time it bothered me was when my parents were upset by it. In those days the bill collectors would come right to the door and just about pound the thing of its hinges. Often we would hide until they left. I believe it was a ritual played out in working class homes across America in those days.

To me this all seemed a big game, but I could sense the sorrow it caused my mother, and my young mind eventually took on her sense of shame. My sister would have her friends drop her off a few blocks from our street because she was embarrassed by our ramshackle old house.

By my teen years these class issues became more important. In high school class became apparent at first glance. Besides the obvious things like clothing, the rich kids walked and spoke with more confidence, and they had a sense of entitlement that seemed to magically pave their way through life. It was a confidence that we denizens of trailer parks and backwoods shanties sorely lacked.

This lack of confidence naturally created a social order. We on the lower levels automatically took our place at the back of the bus. We knew we were not winners in life’s game, and we protected ourselves by not reaching for the brass ring, and in fact, by mocking the entire system in which others naturally succeeded and we naturally failed.

Although I’m no longer one who takes a seat at the back of the bus, this outlook on life shades my approach to the world even today. The system seems to me to be a rigged game, so I am always looking for an outside angle, a novel approach with which to beat that rigged game. If the herd is moving in one direction, I assume there must be something wrong with that direction and go in the opposite. I mistrust the masses at every turn. I immediately place myself as an outsider at odds, at war, with the status quo.

I suppose this outlook was enhanced by the fact that during my childhood there was still a dying whiff of 1960’s spirit in the air. Although my parents were of another era, somehow those anti-establishment values seeped in from the media and from the music my older sisters played on their stereos. These values lodged themselves in my heart before I was old enough to develop a critical mind. Or perhaps they just seemed logical to me, because certainly the values of racism, conformity, blind patriotism, and sexism were just as, if not more prevalent.

In the fifth grade an older neighbor girl gave my friend a fistful of old rock albums; Grand Funk Railroad, Black Sabbath, Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones. At that time my friend was learning to play the bass guitar and I was learning the drums.

The music on those crickly slabs of wax were an elixir of life which poisoned our souls to the world of the nuclear family, the Protestant work ethic, and blind allegiance to authority. But it also made our spirits swell with a sense of purpose and an alternative system of values.

Suddenly, freaks that we may have been, we were connected to something larger. We were initiates into a cult that existed right under the noses of parents and teachers, yet which they failed to see or understand. And even more, they failed to understand that their children were gone forever. We were little lost heathens who were likely cursed to be trampled underfoot by the realities of survival we would soon encounter. Many like us would find themselves never quite able to join the straight world, but completely unable to make it as an outsider.

The old rock and roll albums we listened to often carried a political message that resonated with me. It’s hard to imagine today, but there was a time when rock and roll was taken seriously as an art form. The best of those artists were seen as spokespeople for their fans, and leaders for a generation of social revolutionaries. But oh how times have changed.

The political idealism of the music fit right in with the anger and frustration I felt because of the poverty. Beyond my own poverty, I saw injustice all around me. Most of the people I knew lived a hand-to-mouth existence. Unless they won the lottery there was little hope for a better life. And when people lack hope, all sorts of problems follow.

In my hometown there was a spirit of nihilism that permeated the culture and lead to drug and alcohol addictions, criminal behavior, self-destructive sexual practices, a high suicide rate, and random violence of all sorts.

As a young man and a struggling artist I vowed that I would never forget where I came from, and to try to find a way to create a better world for my hometown and the thousands of towns like it all across America. This is what underlies my drive towards political expression and social activism. As I look back on that vow, although I have never forgotten my roots, when it comes to affecting social or political change I must admit complete failure.

During my high school years my family’s economic problems reached the level of high farce. By the eighth grade we were bouncing from house to house as fast as the back rent would pile up. I could always tell when things were getting bad because we would start eating potato soup. Often flavored only with stale bullion cubes or garlic powder.

At one point we lived in a double house and our electricity had been shut off. My father crawled over the attic wall and ran an extension cord from the neighbor’s outlet so that we might have a few hours of electric light each evening.

When I graduated from high school, college wasn’t even an option that could be considered. By then I was playing drums in a punk rock band called Friction and drinking and using drugs. One evening I took a hit of LSD and at night’s end returned to the trailer that I lived in with my parents. The electricity was shut off again and my mother was asleep in a chair in the living room. She had lit a candle that had melted onto the coffee table and then down onto the floor. I sat down on a chair on the other side of the room and watched her sleep. The sight filled me with anger and despair. My father was out on the road trying to make a buck and she looked so lonely in the dark room. She could have easily burned the place down with the melted candle. I hated that she had to go through such things. This is still one of the most heartbreaking memories I carry.

While acid is known for disconnecting people from reality, for me it always made me face the cold hard facts of reality. In that moment I got it into my head that I was a burden to my parents and needed to go out on my own. I moved out the following week.

I worked a series of minimum wage jobs. I’ve spent more years wearing a paper hat and polyester uniform than I care to remember. During those days I recall sitting in the back seat of a car smoking dope with a group of my loser friends when the Sex Pistols, “God Save The Queen,” came on the stereo. Although it was many years after the fact, the lyrics spoke to me.

“We’re the flowers in the dustbin
We’re the poison in the human machine
There’s no future for you
There’s no future for me”

“Yep, that’s me, that’s us,” I thought.

My girlfriend Leilani and I lived in a tiny apartment beside the McDonald’s parking lot. Our lives were a drug filled haze. These were the days when CNN first reached the backwoods, 24 hours a day it brought images of violence and fear into the homes of simple country folk. I sat watching it all, mesmerized by the non-stop display of human folly. Between CNN and the pothead introspection, I was carried away by a bad case of existential angst. I felt like a monk sitting on a mountaintop viewing the insect-world of human society with sorrow and disgust.

I felt so at odds with the pillars of church and state that I began to think that I should join the Weathermen or some other armed militant organization to fight against the government I despised. I decided that before I made such a dramatic decision I needed to think things through and clarify my own beliefs. To this end I began looking for a political ideal to work towards. I looked at communism, socialism, even anarchy.

To make things more complicated I began to realize that before I could solidify my political beliefs I would have to re-evaluate my spiritual and moral beliefs, because these are what political ideals rest on. This lead to a whole other life-transforming journey that we won’t go into here, but I came out of it all with a spiritual concept from Hinduism and Buddhism that seemed to lead to socialism as an ideal political system. It seemed that the spiritual unity that Eastern religions proposed would be best exemplified with a social/political structure where all were working towards a common good, the whole above the individual.

In the highest order of certain Hindu priests, society was structured without individualism. Even the body didn’t belong to the individual and was shared by all, leading to a sort-of free-love community that echoed the ideals of the 60’s generation.

At this opportune time as I was struggling with these thoughts, a friend of mine gave me a copy of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. It was one of those moments of synchronicity when a perfect book comes to you just when you need it. In that book Huxley took those same concepts from Eastern religion and turned them into a political system, only in his vision that system was a strange nightmare of repression. In the end, the book’s hero is banished to an island where the individualists and free spirits lived in freedom, but outside the social order. It made me suspect that even within my own ideal system I would still be outside and against the system.

The problem with political systems based on common unity is that the only way to make them work is if everyone behaves in the same manner, and that can only be achieved with the heavy hand of fascism. The proof of this could be seen all too easily in China and the U.S.S.R.

I was back to square one, knowing the American political system felt wrong, but having no clue what I could hold up as an alternative ideal.

My spiritual inquiries where going through a similar process of revelations that led to brick walls, but as my struggles for knowledge continued an image began to seep in from the edges of my consciousness. It was an image of chaos that at first scared me, a frightening peak below the surface of things that was both horrible and magnificent beyond comprehension.

From this concept of unity within chaos a political parallel began to come into focus. It appeared to me that politically speaking, chaos was essentially freedom. The less government, the less rules, the less corrupt politicians, the better off we were. At best government was a necessary evil.

This idea might lead one to embrace anarchy, but I was no longer naïve enough to believe that such a lawless ideal could create a functioning society. The question became; what system could allow the greatest degree of chaos/freedom while still providing the protection and services that a society needs to function effectively?

As I looked around the world studying the various political systems I never even bothered to look at democracy. Not democracy as we see it in practice, but democracy as a pure concept. Although Western governments are an utter failure at making the most of its potential, the theory of democracy presented the greatest possibility for chaos and freedom. In theory, within that framework one could live as a socialist on a commune, or push the boundaries of anarchy to the limits within the law.

My journey has taken me full circle to embrace the concept of democracy, while truly seeing what a failure our political leaders had made of this great ideal. This presented and still presents a baffling quagmire for those who want to change the system. Since we already had a system that was based on a democratic ideal, it seems that the only answer is to throw out the bums who were running the show. The problem is that we essentially have a revolution every four years at election time, yet nothing ever really seems to change.

To paraphrase Henry Miller, “We can never change the world until we change the hearts of men.” And it is easier to move a mountain then change people’s hearts and minds.

At age 20 I wrote my first song to try to express the frustration and confusion I was feeling. It is called Dancing Now and was the title track to Friction’s first E.P. In those days people thought punk rock might become a social/political movement like in the 60’s, but when we played in clubs all that I saw was a bunch of kids drinking and partying. I found it hard to imagine that these people would ever be the base for a grass roots political movement.

We're angry now, but sedated still
We've been drugged, and too much time to kill
The media can always pacify
It's just another propaganda lie
Preaching the American way
Society has gone astray
Violence has filled the streets
Soon they'll be turning up the heat

*We're dancing now
But we could be shooting
We borrow now
Soon we may be looting
And it's so damned hard to appreciate
The things you've always had

Sit in your comfort so secure
Believe your future is so bright and pure
He way I feel these days you can't be sure
Anarchy may be outsider your door
Say that it can't happen here
The USA has nothing to fear
Iran screams and the Irish burn
But narrow minds will never learn*

They will call the gunman mad
Talk about the wealth they had
There's revolution in minds and hearts
But chaos ends where frustration starts
If you're brave turn on the news
Or try to hide if you choose
But when your children start to turn
You may wish you'd been concerned*

This period of political and spiritual introspection was a bit harrowing psychologically. Over a period of six months I had completely deconstructed my value systems and attempted to rebuild them based on conscious reasoning. After it was over I felt like I had overdosed on modern life and had pushed my brain to the edge.

I felt I needed to drop out of the world for awhile, so I moved into a little house deep in the forest. The house sat in a crevice between two valley ridges. A stream came down through the front yard and a large dogwood tree stood in front of a large porch. The house was surrounded by trees on all sides, and a few old sheds sat on the property.

In those days jobs were hard to find in small town America and Leilani and I lived in extreme poverty. We had no phone, no hot water, one channel of television, and the only heat was from a wood-burning stove that could only warm a small part of the house.

They were tough times and wonderful times. The surroundings were beautiful. We had a dozen chickens so we always had fresh eggs to eat. We learned to brush our teeth with baking soda and made hot bath water by boiling pans on the wood stove.

I started each morning by chopping the day’s firewood, feeding the chickens and collecting the eggs. In the summer we bathed in the stream and lazed on the front porch watching the wild birds flit about the bird feeder we made out of an old piece of driftwood.

It was also a time of intense study. Each week, if we could get my old jalopy to run, we would make the fifteen-mile trip into town to visit the public library. My reading list during those two years in the woods included War & Peace, The Golden Bough, Dostoevsky, Darwin, Plato, and Aristotle. I read science, history, literature, it didn’t really matter what I read I was so hungry for knowledge.

On the weekends Friction was playing shows at some larger venues. So the weekends were cocaine-fueled parties with crowds and chaos, and the rest of the week I lived in isolation.

The darker side of this idyllic life was that there were just no jobs and no money. Each week I would go to every factory and every retail store in the entire county in search of work. Eventually they refused to let me fill out applications I had filled out so many already. I was literally begging for a job. Some business owners looked at me with sympathy in their eyes, but if there are no jobs, then there are no jobs.

I was raised to never steal. Not even a candy bar from a convenience store. But out of necessity we soon began to steal food and clothing. I would go into the Weiss Market and cram a couple pounds of ground beef into my pants and head out the door. On one occasion someone saw me, a manager chased me out the door and ordered me to stop. He looked me over from about ten feet away. He must have seen the desperation on my face because he walked up to me and half-heartedly tapped my jacket pockets then whispered, “Just get out of here.”

Leilani was a much better thief than me. She was cool as a cucumber. I think she much have been a criminal at heart.

On day my shoes were falling off my feet so we went to the Jamesway department store and Leilani slipped a pair of sneakers under her jacket. On the way out the door she met a friend of hers and the two calmly chatted in the doorway of the store. The friend told her that she knew of a waitress job at a local truck stop. We drove right to the truck stop and they hired her on the spot. The only problem was that now she needed shoes to start work, so we went right back to the Jamesway and stole a pair of work shoes for her.

The whole mess makes me a little sick to the stomach to think about it, but you do what you have to do. If you’re a young man the federal government ain’t going to give you no help, Mr. Reagan made sure of that. When there’s no opportunity for honest work you still have to survive. Every day of the week in America, poverty makes criminals out of honest men and women.

For over two years I couldn’t find work. Then a small miracle happened. Leilani and I bought a scratch off instant lottery ticket. It was called the Baker’s Double.” When we scratched it off we won $5,000, and that was doubled to $10,000 thanks to another slot that contained an image of a loaf of bread.

Ten thousand dollars doesn’t seem like much, but to me it could’ve been a million. I had never been around any money before this, so I didn’t really have a clear idea of what it meant. Given my lack of experience with money I didn’t do too badly with it.

I had never had a checking account of a credit card, so banking and interest rates were all a mystery to me. The problem you have when you’re from the lower class is that you can’t get access to credit. In order to build up a credit rating I put the money into a money market CD and borrowed against it. This way I still had the original money, but I was building a credit rating as I paid off the loan.

After I won the lottery money I bought a decent used car and was able to go to the next town and find a job at the Kentucky Fried Chicken. I believe I made $3.15 an hour, hardly a living wage.

Around that time I made another investment that changed my fortunes. A dope-dealer friend convinced me to take an ounce of weed and sell nickel bags to my pothead buddies. By that time I had lost interest in using drugs myself, but it is amazing how much money you can make selling small amounts of pot.

Soon between the lottery money and the pot money I owned an eight-room house, a rental property, a fifty-per cent share in a recording studio, and a rather extravagant collection of Asian and African artwork.

During these years I studied art, music, performance, and film, as best I could in the backwoods of Pennsylvania. It was during this time that I developed the concept that would one day become The Imperial Orgy.

But at the same time my political and spiritual pursuits receded into the background. Being stuck in a small town makes one feel irrelevant. It seems egotistical to think one can change the world.

At very least I tried to express my political frustrations through music and performance. Friction’s music often had political lyrics and the group had a general anti-establishment attitude, but more often than not our words fell on deaf ears. People wanted cute pop stars singing loves songs and party anthems, not angry punks bitching about the state of the world.

I was the most radical of the band members, often taping photos of Ronald Reagan to my drum kit or draping half-burned flags over the bass drum. Overall though, I felt like we were running into a brick wall as far as using music to express political messages. In the age of MTV people no longer thought of rock music as anything more than nice non-challenging entertainment. The days when music was seen as a force for social change were long gone, drowned in the rising tide of conservativism that was sweeping the culture.

I generally had a sinking feeling about it all. Friction was having no success commercially within the music industry, and therefore we had no access to a wider audience to get our message heard. Behind the scenes the Reagan and first Bush administrations were pressuring the record labels not to support artists who promoted social activism. Distraction and complacency where the dictates from above.

Meanwhile the more comfortable I got financially, the more lost I felt spiritually, politically, and artistically. Security and contentment are the artist’s greatest enemy. There are always forces urging you to grow up, settle down, and conform.

Just as it looked like I would follow that path and surrender to conformity, I tool a sharp left hand turn and threw it all away.

Thanks to the pot money I was able to attend college at the Penn State University where I studied filmmaking. In the university film department I found a lot of support from the left-leaning faculty for my non-conventional film work, although behind my back the students whispered that I shouldn’t be allowed to attend classes because of the raw images and ideas I confronted them with.

Although my reputation caused most of the students to avoid me, a few bolder spirits sought me out. Mhina Dada, a Jamaican fellow who would one day help found The Imperial Orgy, became my partner in film crimes that shook the little film department.

Another fellow named Donn Garton, the handsome son of a New Jersey preacher came to me after class one day and said, “I’ll do anything, I’ll get down on my knees, I just want to work with you.”

Although we never managed to actually work together, I soon became his unspoken mentor as he struggled with issues of sexuality, religion, and politics.

My first project with Mhina was a short documentary on the issue of Flag Burning. For a bang-up ending we burned a flag in the middle of town and filmed the resulting chaos. As the flag burned two young marines ran out of nowhere and put it out, then proceeded to threaten to kill me. As the filmmaker I felt like I couldn’t take sides, so I stood nonchalantly as the angry jarhead screamed into my face from two inches away, “Why don’t you get out of MY country homeboy. The next time I see you burning one I’m gonna hunt you down and I’m gonna fucking kill you!”

Oddly a couple of hippies that I never met before suddenly ran up and one shouted “I helped him burn it!”

Quickly an angry debate ensued that verged on the edge of violence. Each side expressed the traditional arguments on the issue, sometimes with hilarious clarity. I couldn’t have written it better myself.

“The flag is a symbol. We need to protect the freedom not the symbol,” the hippie explained.

“Yeah, then you’re a traitor. Do you know what traitors do? They get fucking killed, assassinated…by death!” the marine replied.

“Why is he a traitor for burning a piece of cloth?” the second hippie replied.

“Why don’t you go try to say that shit in fuckin’ Russia and see what happens? Why don’t you go wipe your fuckin’ ass on some toilet paper,” was the marine’s well thought-out response.

Thinking I was well outside the camera’s frame, I turned to Mhina, who was behind the camera and gave him a knowing nod and a broad smile, as if to say, ‘look what we created!”

Little did I know that the camera was in a wide angle and my gesture was caught on the edge of the frame as the melee ensued in the foreground. To viewers it appeared as if I was looking right at them and inviting them in on a naughty joke. When the film was eventually viewed by film classes the students burst out laughing at my gesture, but it also perpetuated the image they seemed to hold of me as a reptilian force that manipulated people and places to create havoc and disorder.

The irony of the project was that we got a zero grade on it. Most of the students were complaining that they had to spend four or five hours editing their documentaries. Mhina and I got the keys to the film building and locked ourselves in the deserted editing room for a week straight over the Christmas vacation.

When we asked the faculty to look at the film they said we were past deadline and would get a zero grade. The next semester we convinced the professors to show the film to the students just to share our work. As the film came to a close our professors stood up and left the room. Soon they returned and asked us to come with them. They took us to the next classroom and immediately screened the film there. Later the film was screened for the dean of the communications dept.

I don’t think it was really that the film was that great, as much as it was that we were working at a different level than the rest of the students. And although we got a zero grade on the project, the film is still used as a teaching tool by film theory professors at the university as an example of documentary filmmaking.

The Flag burning scene caused a controversy among the students even before we filmed it. Senior level students were wisely counseling us that it was immoral for us to carry out our plan. They felt that we were crossing a line by creating an event that could lead to violence. I didn’t give a fuck about their line. What I saw when it was over was that people were excited, they were thinking, they were talking about issues. I had achieved my goals as a filmmaker, let the timid spirits tow the line.

To see an excerpt from the flag burning documentary click here

I did another social/political film project with Samantha, who would one day become The Imperial Orgy’s background singer. We drove the length of the East Coast, hitting cities between New York and New Orleans, filming homeless people, street musicians, prostitutes and beggars. We went into the shelters and into their cardboard box communities, trying to understand why they were homeless, why they couldn’t start a new life, but mainly, just allowing them to tell their own stories.

Samantha’s father was an X-army man, and although a seemingly good-hearted fellow, the family had a straight edge Republican view of the world. Because of this Samantha’s initial view was that homeless people were simply bums too lazy to work. It was an interesting process to watch her confront a reality that was far more complex than what she had been taught to believe.

The experience was an emotional roller-coaster ride. The first interview we did was with an old war veteran who was in line at a soup kitchen. As tears rolled down his cheeks he said, “I fought for my country in two wars, Mr. Bush sends all this food overseas and look where I am. This ain’t no life…This ain’t no life.”

Listening to him made my limbs go weak with sorrow. I knew this was going to be an adventure that I would never forget.

Throughout the trip we learned three main lessons. First, people are homeless for a variety of reasons. Some are mentally ill and have been shunned by family and medical facilities, others are people who threw their lives away with drugs and alcohol, many are Vietnam veterans who were never able to make life work after the war, but others were just average working class people who suffered a few tough breaks and found themselves on the streets.

Men told stories of working many years at the same job, and then one day the factory closed down and they were unable to find work. One man counseled us, “You might not want to believe it, but you’re just one paycheck away from where we are.”

The second lesson was that once you become homeless, the experience affects people in a way that makes it almost impossible for them to build a new life. The sense of failure and despair, the humiliation and degradation, essentially the experience makes one mentally ill. The spiritual depths that people sink to are a black hole that is very hard to crawl out of. One man explained to us with consternation, “If I go and ask for a job as a dishwasher or something they say, ‘give me your resume and we’ll call you.’ Now how are you gonna call me when I live on the streets?”

The third and most shocking lesson was that the homeless situation has created a business structure that many profit from. Charity organizations depend on public donations and government funding for their survival. On man in Atlanta explained it this way, “If you get one foot outta that grave they try to suck you back in, cause they need homeless people. These soup kitchens and shelters, somebody’s making a profit off this. It’s not done just to help people.”

The conservative view that homeless people are just lazy bums is a simple-minded view that cannot stand the test of reality. The conservatives say that people live off welfare programs because they are too lazy, and if you force them to stand on their own two feet they will become productive citizens. While this sounds good in theory, if people don’t have opportunity to make a better life, they will do what they have to do to survive. Without either support or opportunity, people will become criminals and society will deteriorate into chaos and fear.

One young man in a homeless shelter in New Orleans spoke about his experience. He seemed just a little slow in the head, and wasn’t someone likely to find a job very easily. “Well, I might go up to someone and ask them to lend me about two dollars or so. If they say ‘no’ I just might come up behind them and poke my knife in their neck a little bit and then take the money from them.”

It was chilling to hear. His spoke so matter-of-factly. But as I know from experience, poverty makes criminals out of people every day of the week. At least he was standing on his own two feet and doing what he knew to survive.

As we filmed the homeless documentary, little did I know that one day I would be joining their ranks, and learn to understand their humiliations all too well.

During my college days my old life began to unravel. Friction came to an end without a bat of the eye, my relationship with Leilani came apart in an ugly feud, I lost my business thanks to some shady dealings by my business partner, I was chased out of town by corrupt elements in the police force and sheriff’s department, and soon after I lost my home.

I lived through crisis after crisis, dazed by the events that had taken my life. When I look back I realize that I was at war with myself. My conscious mind fought to be loyal and true to the people and things of my past, but in my heart I felt that the past was a prison that limited my horizons and compressed my spirit. My unconscious mind led me kicking and screaming down a path of self-destruction. If I had been a little smarter I could have broken with my past with much less pain and financial loss, but I clung to the past even as I destroyed it.

Malcolm McClaren once said of the punk band the Sex Pistols, “Sometimes you have to destroy in order to create.” I can testify that this is a cruel truth, a truth that I lived with horrifying results.

When it was all over I found myself living in a basement apartment near an airport by the Penn State University. Mhina and I were plotting a new documentary on the ‘Trail Of Tears.” A horrible chapter in American history when the Cherokee people, after being repeatedly betrayed by the U.S. government, were forced to walk from North Carolina to a reservation in Oklahoma. Along the way about a third of the population died. A few remnants hid in the mountains and later formed a new community hidden in a valley in North Carolina. These people are now known as the Eastern Tribe.

I am part Cherokee on my mother’s side, and I felt passionate about telling their story. In order to get permission to do the documentary we had to appear before the council of tribal elders to appeal our case.

On a cold December day Mhina and I began the drive to Cherokee, North Carolina to meet the elders. I was sick as a dog and we only had a few bucks between the two of us. The air was freezing and snow littered the sides of the roads. For supper we found a convenience store that had large bags of popcorn for 59 cents, and we bought a box of week-old doughnuts. Most of our cash was spent on a cheap motel room that was discounted during the winter months when no tourists come to the reservation.

In the morning we split the last of the stale doughnuts and scarfed down the rest of the popcorn. By this time I was so sick and feverish that I could barely speak. I wrote out my presentation and told Mhina he would likely have to speak for me.

When the moment came we walked into the council room to find a tall desk like a judge sits at, except it made a long U shape around three sides of the room. The council elders sat around the table high above us. Mhina and I stood on the floor inside the U looking up at them. After a middle aged man gave the council an overview of why we were there he asked that a letter I had written many months before be read, A fragile old woman at the center of the table began to read the letter with a shaky voice.

I no longer recall exactly what I said in that letter. I know I spoke of having pride in my Cherokee ancestry, and of believing that film was a medium for social change. But listening to this elderly Native American woman read my words moved me nearly to tears. The oration must have affected the others as well because as soon as she finished they took a quick vote and unanimously Oked our film project, then they came down to the floor and showered us with handshakes and warm embraces. I left feeling proud, although I’m not quite sure of exactly what I was feeling proud of.

Mhina and I got on the highway right away. We dove late into the freezing night. During the drive we fell into one of those soul-mining conversations that one sometimes shares with friends late in the night.

Although I was excited about the new film project, something was turning within me. As soon as I left college I landed a job as an audio editor at an industrial film company. I bypassed the whole intern process and went straight into a pretty good position. At the time I thought, ‘I made it, I’ll never have to wear another paper hat and serve up greasy chicken again.” Of course the company was only paying me $6.50 and hour, even though they sometimes charged clients $120 and hour for my services, but it was still more than I’d ever earned before.

When you work in the creative arts, you have to be careful about earning your pay in the same medium where you work as an artist. It can spoil your love of the art form. This was happening to me with film. My company sent me on shoots on endless boring subjects. I made films on pharmacies, on cancer treatment, college recruiting films, and on rehab clinics. I knew more than you’d ever want to know about potatoes, fertilizer, and hip replacements.

I was beginning to feel the need to return to the immediacy of live performance. There is nothing like looking your audience straight in the eye. To this end I spoke to Mhina about the concept that would soon become The Imperial Orgy. Mhina was learning to play the drums. A few days later we met with another film student who played guitar and was obsessed with James Brown and Parliament Funkadelic. He was a perfect fit.

It was late December and by spring we were doing test runs as a four- piece band, by the next fall our little reign of musical terror had begun.

I thought my life as a fast food peasant had come to an end, but another hard lesson was on my heels.

The world was changing. The Berlin wall had fallen and the Soviet Union disintegrated. As the first Bush administration came to an end the economy was sinking. Business at the film company dried up and I was out looking for work again. To my surprise there were no jobs. And I wasn’t being snooty, I was filling out applications for furniture stores, factories, any damn thing that paid the bills. Eventually, when I was even turned down by McDonalds I knew I was in trouble.

By this time the rest of The Imperial Orgy had moved to New York City and soon I was homeless and living in the back of my car. I went to a town called York, PA in the Southeastern part of the state because I heard I could get work as a scab at the Caterpillar plant. To test to see if I had the ability to do the job I had to add the numbers 7 and 8 on a math quiz. From the looks of things inside I am guessing some of my co-workers might have been struggling with that one.

What a horrible mess it all was. I had no driver’s license, yet I was living in my car. I had no place to shower or use the bathroom. In order to save money I was trying to only eat one meal a day, and that meal was at the factory cafeteria. When the morning sun hit the windshield there was no sleeping so I was up at 5 AM each morning. It was a hot summer and soon my body broke out in a nasty rash from the unsanitary living conditions. It was truly a new low that I had reached.

By the time I got to New York my health was a wreck from months without proper food or sleep. By then it was November and I walked the cold city streets with resume in hand. One day I walked the West side in a cold rain. Although I had an umbrella, by day’s end I was soaked from head to toe.

The next morning my shoes were still too soggy to wear so I borrowed a pair of black work shoes from Samantha that could have passed for Men’s. They were a few sizes too small so I had to walk all day with my toes curled up. It was another rainy day and by evening my toes had turned purple and red from the abuse.

After a few months of this nonsense Samantha found me some part time work in the office of a multimillion-dollar children’s theatre company she worked for called Theatreworks USA. We lived in Staten Island and to get to the job we had to take a bus, then the ferry, then a train. On the first day of work I didn’t have a buck in my pocket, but I had one subway token to get on the train.

As we got off the ferry Samantha and I got separated in the crowd exiting the boat. As I walked I held the subway token between my thumb and index finger. Just then someone bumped into me and the token flew out of my fingers and rolled off into the crowd. It was lost in the sea of feet that streamed past me.

I felt like God wanted to slap me down one more time. With no money for another token I had to call my new boss and explain the humiliating details of why I would be late my first day. I had to walk about thirty blocks to get to the job. During that walk I felt about as low as you can go.

As first it felt good to be in a 9-5 job, even if it was a poverty wage. Once your sense of self-worth has been trampled down for so long, you’re proud to have the crumbs from the table, to even get near the table. This state of mind is a curse that turns many a young man yellow, makes them walk with their heads down for a lifetime to come.

In time I bounced around from one shitty job to the next, but always seemed to land back at Theatreworks. I didn’t stay grateful for the crumbs any too long. I was too angry for that, had seen, had lived with too much injustice.

After a couple years I began to get very angry at Theaterworks. Most of the people there made good pay and had good benefits. The boss in the office across from me was bringing in $200,000.00 a year. The place was a non-profit organization and the money for his salary was coming from public donations and government NEA funds, so it burned me up all the more. Other people in the place were making 90, 80, and 60 thousand a year. It was only the five or six peons in my department that got less the $15,00 a year and zero benefits. The lack of medical benefits was the thing that really pissed me off.

All the people in the place were snooty liberal types who saw themselves as always on the right side of every issue and morally superior to everyone else. But when it came to their own back yards they were just as greedy and heartless as the biggest right-wing fat cat.

I started bitching about it to the top dogs. They would twist themselves up like contortionists trying to find a way to justify their behavior. One of my favorites was that it was an honor to work there, a stepping-stone into the elite world of theater. I knew none of those people were trying to break into anything but a hot meal. One guy was a single father working two jobs to raise his kid.

As is usually the case in the corporate world, those who get paid the least do the hardest work. Our job was to schedule field trips with teachers all across the country. Most days the phones would be ringing off the hook until you wanted to go mad. I used to hear the things in my sleep.

If you want to cure what’s ailing our education system a good place to start is with the teachers. Many of them couldn’t do basic math or speak coherent English. Lots of ‘em were liars and thieves to boot. The worst ones were from the ghettos of Chicago and New York City.

Anyway, I kept stirring the pot until I had the whole group so riled up they were planning to walk off the job the next Monday if we didn’t get a raise. I wrote a letter to the boss demanding a three dollar an hour raise and medical benefits. But these people were just smart enough to know how to play the suckers, just how to keep the rabble quiet.

Come Monday they took us all into an office and announced a fifty cent an hour raise. It was just enough to keep the mules in the harness, but not enough to make a damn bit of difference. As far as I was concerned they could have taken their fifty cents an hour and shoved it up their highbrow asses.

But the others were happy as clams. I was the hero of the day for getting everyone a raise. But I wasn’t buying it. This wasn’t success, it was a sucker-pop without a lick of value in real terms. I quit soon after that and when the tech boom hit I landed a job designing websites for a porn company. Then after that I went to the electronics company at ground zero where I worked when 9/11 hit.

Back on the highway in Nevada I snapped out of my reverie to find that I was grinding my teeth and my fingers were white from gripping the steering wheel. A hundred miles of desert had passed without my noticing. The world had faded away and I drove on autopilot. I was probably lucky to be alive.

I switched on the radio and scrolled through the dial. Judging from the number of stations I must have been getting close to civilization again. Scanning the dial was like viewing a mosaic of the world’s troubles. The stock exchange was now open, but the president still had not spoken to the nation after 9/11. Reporters described lower Manhattan as a place where armed militiamen patrolled with machine guns in tow. I wondered just what kind of nightmare I would one day find when I returned to New York.

We lived in a new world. A dark new era. To be an activists had a different meaning now. To be anti-establishment would be a dangerous game. People like me usually believe in America as I ideal, and think we can work to perfect the ideal, but now everyone would be focused on protecting the ideal from outsiders who were clearly worse. My place in this world was not clear to me at all.

It reminded me of another political action I once carried out. One that would never be tolerated in this new era. It was a street theater piece called ‘Our Daily Bread.’ I had bread in the back of my mind for years, ever since I read Salvador Dali’s account of how he came to America with a loaf of bread strapped to his head.

For Our Daily Bread I rounded up a group of people from The Imperial Orgy circle and dressed them in peasant outfits. Everyone made a mask that had some kind of money theme to it. Isabelle, the Orgy’s keyboard player talked the people at Wonder Bread into donating a hundred loaves of bread to use in the project. Then we went down to Wall Street and placed a loaf of bread every five feet along the sidewalk around the stock exchange. Attached to each loaf of bread was an advertisement from Satan offering to buy people’s soul in exchange for materialistic prizes. The letter read:


Good evening ladies and gentlemen. I have an exciting new offer for you! An offer that's so very exciting that I know you cannot say no!!!

Now don't get frightened until you've heard the details of this fabulous new offer -I'm paying top prices! And if you act now, in exchange for your soul, just look at all the beautiful prizes you'll receive.

You'll get a new Hi-Fi Stereo System! A Clock Radio! A 25" Color TV!! An entire new wardrobe with all the latest fashions! A new Toyota Minivan with a full tank of gas!!! (seats 8!), Shower Massage with Rotating Head! A new Credit Card featuring the classic rock superstars 'Kiss'!, A VCR! A new High Speed Computer System! The complete Bon Jovi Compact Disc collection!!! A beautiful Microwave Oven with Spinning Rotisserie! The Popeil Pocket Fisherman! Great Sex with beautiful partners of your choice!! Free Movie Tix! Night Club Adventures! Attractive Friends! More sex!!! Instant Popularity! More Sex!!! Fun! Fun! Fun!!! Sex! Sex! Sex!

Plus if you act now! For a limited time you'll also receive - A Pocket Calculator, 20 Ginsu Knives, a personally autographed picture of Darius Rucker, A Wireless Telephone, Free Phone Sex, a Pinball Machine, Free Sex, 324 Channels of Cable TV, A snow white Shit-zu named 'Koko,' plus Sex! Sex! Sex! and much, much, more...

And here's the best part! All you have to do is this - look in the help wanted ads, or hurry out to your local employment office, and get a 40-hour a week job in a factory or office. It must be work doing something that is totally meaningless to you. Preferably making money for a corporate fat cat.

Then with your paycheck, buy all the things listed above! Yes, it's as easy as that! Then after you've settled in, I'll come and take your soul. I'll do it slowly, bit by bit, so you'll never even notice it's gone. You'll be too busy to even care.

It's true that at times you might wonder if your life is passing before your eyes as the best part of your time and energy are sucked away for economic slavery. Perhaps, in quiet moments, your life might seem meaningless. But what the hell, it's a small price to pay for all the great stuff you'll receive from this generous offer. Besides, spirituality is a greatly overrated thing in my book. Absolutely Passe! So just don't even think about it. You'll have a million mindless diversions to keep yourself from looking inward. Just enjoy your goodies and do your work with a vacant, obedient smile.

See you in hell.

The performance was a great, fun experience. At one point I looked around Wall Street and as far as the eye could see there were businessmen and women reading the letters with confused looks on their faces. Soon the cops came zooming in, bomb-sniffing dogs were brought in to inspect the bread for explosives, it was a regular circus. In the video of the event Samantha can be seen hugging the bomb-dog as he wagged his tail happily.

One man came up and yelled at me, “Pick this up, you can’t leave bread on the streets!”

“Why not?” I asked.

He got a confused look on his face as if he’d never thought about it before, then caught himself and bellowed, “You just can’t!”

The performance created an open debate on the streets with a bunch of passing students. By the time it was over we were taking pictures with European tourist in front of George Washington’s statue, and even the cops seemed to be smiling and laughing.

In an ominous note a middle eastern man came up to me and passionately explained that you can create change by doing art stunts, you have to use violence, guns and bombs to create change. I guess there is some pragmatic logic to what he said, but all through his speech I kept thinking, “There is a higher principle that he just doesn’t get.”

When we look back on history we see that Gandhi led his people to freedom without ever firing a shot, yet the Palestinians use violence and only dig themselves into a deeper and deeper hole.

That night we all went to celebrate at a club called Naked Lunch in honor of the book by William Burroughs. By chance they were filming a scene for one of the TV police dramas in front of the club. The club was playing come Imperial Orgy music over the sound system that happened to be written for a girl that was a casting director for the show.

The show’s main actor, a large black man with a suave demeanor, came in and joined our group. Scanning the scene he said, “What is this? Andy Warhol holding court with his retinue?”

In that moment I think we all felt like we were alive and doing something. Even if it didn’t amount to a hill of beans politically, at least we were out there expressing ourselves, making waves, waking people up for a moment.

I created the Daily Bread performance because I was feeling numb and losing my own soul within the mechanical grind of the corporate world. Every day I seem to lose myself a little bit more. The mundane existence of day-to-day survival pulls me into a fog where l I can only see myself as a regular working stiff, a schmoe of schmoes.

But a working stiff has limited horizons, limited abilities. In order to achieve anything extraordinary, to affect any real change in the world or in my own life, I must see myself as something more, as someone capable of more. And for this reason I find myself wandering across the United States, through deserts and between cornfields, across prairies and through forests, just trying to taste a little freedom and clear that fog from my head.

Sometimes when I feel lost I watch videos of my past work or read things people have written about me. I view my reflection as a stranger. “Who is this person?” I wonder. How could I ever inhabit this myth? So many extraordinary things have happened to me. Some many times I have led friends and fans into lovely flights of madness.

Looking at my image reflected in those words and images I shake inside. Perhaps like the Incredible Hulk in his moment of transformation into monster. Or like a voodoo priestess when the spirits capture her soul.

I know the things I see and read are true, I can vaguely recall living them, yet they are alien to me. I try to find this being hidden in the soul of the commonest of common men.

Over the years I have had a pretty rough go of it from time to time. But I’ve also been handed some gifts without ever having asked for them, handed to me gratis by an unknown force.

The truth is that every day I feel like a failure. A failure for not having used those gifts to their fullest potential. Every time I plop down in front of the idiot box to watch some prime-time drama, I feel like I have betrayed whatever force imbued me with potential.

So many times in my life people have handed over their lives to me, whether for the length of a pop song or for years on end, they gave their destinies to me, dreamed my dreams, and saw the world through the visions I painted. How can I feel any way other than that I failed each and every one of them?

Sometimes as I walk through the streets the vision of the world I see, the secrets I believe myself to have been initiated into, make me want to scream. Yet I feel mute. I want to grab people by their lapels and shake them awake. I feel like I possess gold, but it is invisible to the naked eye, and therefore cannot be shared.

I grew up believing that art and music would be my voice, my medium to communicate. But these days the corporations control everything, all that is spoken, and all that is heard. The last things they want expressed are screams of love and destruction. The last thing they want is a piper calling their obedient children to awaken from the dream they have so laboriously created, and so painstakingly perpetuated.

Because in the end, the greatest work of art is the illusion that this is the way it is, and the only way it could ever be, this myth of materialism and drudgery, this nightmare of obedient automatons, and this dance of soulless livestock whose only dreams are of new electronic gadgets, flashy cars, and empty mansions, this swarm of humanity that only dares to dream the dreams that they allow us to dream.

But I can’t help believing there is something more. I have glimpsed it on a few occasions. I have seen it reflected in a young woman’s eyes, heard it in the spirit of music of bygone days, seen the echoes of disappointment of that promise in the faces of junkies and alcoholics, felt the frustrations of that promise in bar fights and war cries, in crimes of passions and suicide notes. But this other dream alludes us with such perfection that few dare even speak of it, few dare to even admit if possibility in their secret hearts, because compared with this dream the reality of life is too heartbreaking to face.

America Essaus Pt IX - A Horse With No Name

Before this trip I had never seen a desert. I kept hoping it would look like they do in cartoons with three-pronged cacti and tumbleweeds rolling by, but in reality the desert is simply more desolate, harsher, and more well…deserted.

After a few miles I began to see piles of white on the side of the road that looked like snow. Of course, in the desert heat it couldn’t be snow, so I was confused by what it as. Soon the white stuff began to cover the entire desert. I called Jodi to ask her what I was looking at. She said it must be the Salt Flats. I guess even in a desert you can discover things you’ve never heard of.

An hour in the cell phone service went dead, and radio dried up except for the big corporate stations. At two hours loneliness began to set it. Throughout the longs hours of driving I spent a lot of time on the cell phone, often connecting with old friends I hadn’t seen in years.

The radio announcer was reading a sound-byte version of the news at rapid fire pace and with steroid-laden intensity. His voice was compressed into a loud bass-heavy boom that menaced the eardrums.

I flicked off the radio in disgust. Once you hit the Midwest classic rock rules radio. It’s hard to find anything but worn-out zeppelin riffs and cheese-ball-anthems with long-winded guitar solos. Start at one end of the dial and scroll down to the other, I’ll lay 50/50 odds that you’ll run into Free Bird somewhere along the way.

It’s a never-ending irony how Hendrix, The Who, and other revolutionary artists of the 1960’s became the easy listening fodder of trailer-trash chicks and good ole’ boys across the U.S. of A.

With the radio off and the phone line dead I was lone with my thoughts. It was really nothing new to me. I was always a loner and always felt lonely, regardless of how many people I was surrounded by, or if I was in an intimate relationship.

Perhaps there was a short time during the early days with Sasha that the loneliness subsided, but I am sure if we had stayed together, once the madness of love had begun to fade that it would have returned. I assume that my fundamental alienation from the world comes from within and cannot be cured by external circumstances.

It reminded me of a TV show I was saw where a group of teenagers were each placed by themselves without anything but a notebook for company for three days. Without televisions, cell phones, computers, or video games to fill their time, each and every one of them had a complete meltdown. To be alone with their own thoughts was shattering to them. Internal dialogue was not only alien to them, but also frightening.

The quieted mind is like a mirror. For many the first sight of themselves reflected in that mirror is a truly horrifying thing.

The desert is the Earth in minimalism and parched of life. The dry curves of the sand dunes affect one’s mind like the waves of the ocean. To drive among them for hours on end is like chanting a thousand ‘oms.’ The chaos of the modern world begins to fade and the disruptions of the mind begin to settle.

In meditation one tries to clear the mind, but as I drove I was searching for anything to fill my thoughts. I tried to think of music I wanted to write, women I dreamed of seducing, anything to fill the void. Too often my thoughts fell back to the pain and anger of 9/11. Eventually though there just weren’t enough thoughts to ground out the energy of my brain and I was left empty, except the road, the sand, and mirror of the quiet mind.

Driving across America to ‘find yourself’ has become a cliché of laughable proportions. I have known many friends who drove across country or backpacked over Europe in search of that great spiritual adventure. When they returned from their trips and I would ask them about the journey they usually listed a few tourist destinations and left it at that. The trips never seem to have inspired any passion or imbued any meaning for them.

As I grew tired and increasingly lonely I began to question the whole thing. The city of my home is in crisis, the entire country is in crisis, what the fuck am I doing so far from home wandering aimlessly through this desert? Like so much else that I do, it seemed a flight of narcissistic madness.

If I were to fall asleep a 70 MPH and die behind the wheel, what would I have to show for my life? For the sake of being an artist I have sacrificed all the things that a normal man desires; wife and children, home and material wealth, even leaving friends behind to pursue the egoistic dreams of the artist. In dark moments it all seemed a huge mistake from the day I drew my first breath.

From day one I seemed the odd man out, poisoned in the womb. In grade school the parents of my boyhood friends referred to me as a freak. Why, I can’t rightly say. Maybe they were just wise enough to see the truth before I did. But I wasn’t a criminal. I wasn’t violent or getting into trouble. When I think back I really can’t fathom why they reacted that way to a third grade kid.

By high school I was earning the title of ‘freak.’ By then I was disgusted by the willful conformity I saw all around me. To me they were all cowards. Afraid to stand out. Afraid to do anything except follow the herd.

In my high school the archetype of the cool outsider did not yet exist. A freak was just a freak.
But I chose to live that part because the last thing I wanted was to be like my classmates. To this end I wore crazy rock and roll clothing and my hair in an oversized white-boy afro. It stood so high that my eighth grade science teacher came up to me after class one day and said, “I’d like to study your hair, it just seems to defy gravity.”

Despite all this, except for a few backwoods cretins, most of my classmates were friendly enough. I generally got more harassment from the faculty than the students. I do recall one instance while waiting in line to enter shop class. A jock with a chip on his shoulder came up to me while his friends watched from a few yards away and asked me, “Pink, why are you so weird?”

I replied matter-of-factly, “I’m not weird, you guys are the one’s that are weird.”

He seemed completely flummoxed by this response. The audacity of even considering such an idea seemed to completely baffle him. As his friends giggled he returned to them and said with astonishment in his voice, “Did you hear that? He said we’re the ones that are weird!”

But perhaps the seeds of my corruption go further back. My paternal great, great grandmother was said to be a niece of Sitting Bull. She was purchased from the Apaches for 85 cents by my Scottish great, great grandfather who wore the name McCartle. Stories were told of how he would awaken during the night of the full moon to see her performing ritualistic dances in a ray of moonlight that spilled in through the bedroom window.

My own father was said to see ‘omens.’ When he was a young man he once turned on the kitchen faucet at the very moment it was struck by lightning. Instead of water, flames shot out of the faucet. An hour later, in the same room, his sister spilled boiling water on her infant child, killing the baby and emotionally scarring her for life.

I recall a time during my own childhood when my father woke my mother during the night to tell her he had seen a bouquet of roses floating down the hall towards him. My mother told him to go back to sleep and that he was dreaming. A bit later he woke her again and said he saw two bouquets of roses floating down the hall. The next morning we found that the woman who lived on the other side of our double house had died during the night of a sudden heart attack. Often he would smell roses and say that he thought a sick friend or relative would be dying soon.

In his later years my maternal grandfather would hold long conversations with Jesus Christ. It seems he saw the deity walk right into the living room and take a seat on the couch so they might converse for hours on end.

We can never really know what it looks like in another person’s head so we may judge what is the norm, but my own head buzzes with manic energy. That energy can too easily transform into poison that floods the bloodstream with lead.

As I child I would often hallucinate. We lived in a spooky old house, and the daughter of the previous tenants had died in my bedroom. I found her initials carved into the wood behind the closet door. I’m not one to believe in wandering spirits or that sort of thing. When people tell me they saw a ghost in the basement or in a field on Halloween night, I find it very irritating, whether coming from myself or from another it sounds like bullshit. So it is with some embarrassment that I must admit that as a child I would often imagine I saw strange people walking through the house. An overactive imagination, I suppose. Many years later after we moved out of that house, I overheard my father tell my sister that when he would walk past my bedroom door the hair on his arms would stand on end.

After my father died, for many months the hallucinations returned. Each morning I would awake with the sunlight to see a figure standing at the foot of the bed. One morning it transformed into a fox that ran towards my head, dissolving into air a few inches from my face. I never got too distressed about this, just a minor annoyance to contend with. In time it passed.

Despite the seeming disconnect, I have always felted grounded in reality. Often looking existence straight in the eye when others preferred to cling to fairy tales and mass delusions.

Suddenly as I drive I notice a rest stop. It is the first man-made object I have seen in hours. I pull of into the deserted parking lot. Instead of using the men’s room I urinate standing in front of the car looking out over the expanse of desert sand. My heels are firmly on the parking lot macadam and my toes are resting in the edge of the sand. All around are signs forbidding people to enter the desert. ‘Why do authorities forbid people to enter this vast emptiness,” I wonder. I think of the opening page of The Imperial Orgy website that begins,

“The Buddha Gautama sat silently under the bo tree. Jesus Christ wandered in the desert for 40 days and nights. Prometheus ascended the heavens, Aeneas dove into the underworld, and Virgil traveled through the inferno. For hero and heroine, the journey is within and without, and to look into the dark mirror will transform or defeat.”


Those in power, those who want to preserve the status quo and protect their place in the social structure, never want the masses to look inward. Because when one looks inward the entire edifice of the modern world begins to appear as a colossal nightmare, a house of cards held up by a fragile web of mass delusions. One moment of satori, even one single word of truth, creates a mortal danger that could bring the whole thing tumbling down.

It always appeared to me that we are all involved in a grand conspiracy to perpetuate the delusion. Certainly politicians, religious leaders, and corporate executives don’t want us to question the nature of reality or the meaning of life, they have far too much to lose. Advertising agencies chiefs are cynically aware that their job is to brainwash the public into embracing materialism and conformity.


But what is perhaps even more disturbing is the role that entertainment plays in our social conditioning. Movies, music, magazines, and television; all are mediums of artistic expression that could be used to inspire and enlighten, yet all we see and hear is mindless nonsense that plays to our basest instincts, and all seemingly designed to divert our attention from introspection and free thought. To question ones self, to question the values of our society, is to threaten all in authority.

Zipping my pants I walked passed the warning signposts and wandered about 30 yards into the desert, stopping on the other side of a dune that blocked the rest area and parking lot from my field of vision. I slowly turned around, taking in the horizon, first north, then east, then south and west.

It was a vast nothingness, almost devoid of life. For some reason the sight brought feelings of despair into my chest. My limbs felt heavy and a dreamlike malaise overtook my mind.

I reached down and picked up a handful of dry sand. As I opened my fingers to try to look at it, the tiny grains seeped out between my fingers like water, leaving me with an empty grasp except for a few grains that clung to my skin. With a closer look the granules seemed to glitter and shine like tiny diamonds.

‘What is this stuff?’ I wondered. We take what is before us for granted. We give things names and believe we understand them. But look deeper and we must admit we know nothing of the world around us. We live in a world of mystery. A tree, a rock, the Earth, the stars and the galaxies of the universe, everything is in motion, nothing is in stasis. Everything is becoming or decaying, and we know nothing of what these things truly are, nothing of their relationships to each other, or what their place is within workings of the universe.

But stand back and look at it from a wider perspective and it surely looks like something is going on. It may have no goal and no purpose, it may be a crazy clock that keeps no time, but something appears to be going on.

We focus on what we know, because to admit that we live in a world we don’t understand is too frightening for most to deal with. I wonder, ‘what is alive, what is dead?’ For all of our scientific discoveries, for all the words in all the textbooks in the world, we are still lost in an unknowable phatasm of objects and actions. The Hindus call it ‘Maya,’ the delusion of the material world, the dream to which we cling in desperation.

Everyday we build a tower of steps, reaching towards the heavens, but each day the heavens appear further away. And it is our endless toil as builders, the blueprints and construction details, that blind us to the truth that is right before our eyes and buried within our own chests, yet which we look for somewhere out there.

One thing I perceive is that the universe echoes itself. All the phenomenon of reality can be reduced to a few simple patterns from which infinite complexity emerges; the golden mean, the sacred circle, the waves of the oceans, the slot and the rod. During my life I have been blessed to catch a glimpse behind the curtain just long enough to glean a few secrets. Yet I find that the more truth I behold, the more that I realize how little I know. Each pearl of wisdom only makes me understand my fundamental state of ignorance.

Plato tells of story of a sage who was teaching the young men of Athens. The students asked the sage, “Who is the wisest man in all of Greece?”

“Socrates,” the sage replied.

The student ran to Socrates and told him what the sage had said. Socrates explained that he could not possibly be the wisest man in Greece because he didn’t know anything at all, and he spent his life searching for answers. Socrates went to the sage and asked him why he made this false statement to the students. The sage explained to Socrates that most men think they have wisdom, but really know nothing. While Socrates may know nothing, since he doesn’t believe that he knows anything, he is in fact wiser than all the others.

It is a story I keep close to my heart. As a younger man my desire to seek truth was a fire that burned with white heat. Today it is a cool blue flame that simmers beneath the skin and within the ribcage.

But at this moment, standing in the desert heat, I feel weak and alone, and even somewhat frightened by the mystery surrounding me. I long for the comfort of my own bed, or the warm embrace of a familiar lover. I begin to scan the four directions once again, searching for an answer to why a wave of anxiety has taken me.

As I turn to the west a gust of wind rises up and lashes my face with sand, like a bully challenging me to defy his superior power. My eyes are filled with dirt. “The gods must be happy,” I think. “They are having a bit of fun at my expense.” Or perhaps it is just my comeuppance for having the audacity to attempt to peep through the keyhole into their secret world.

Blinking my eyes, which are being scratched by the sharp crystals of sand, I staggered back towards the car. My pace a little too-hurried, as if I suspect a pack of wolves might be lurking behind the next sand dune. The job of walking made harder because with each step the sand melts beneath my feet, pulling me into the soft embrace of Mother Earth. The harder I try to push myself, the further I sink into the dry sand.

I reach the car out of breath. Unsure of why I am on the verge of panic. To calm myself I sing the first song that comes into my head.

“Jesus, he’s my friend,” it is the bridge of a lousy song sung by the Doobie Brothers with cheesy white-boy soulfulness.

“He took me by the hand. Led me all across this land.”

I sometimes sing this song at inopportune moments in order to annoy my friends.

“Jesus, oh yeah, he’s my friends.”

I would have rather if it had not been this song that came to my mind in a moment of weakness. It is said that in death we call out to God in the visage of the religion of our childhood. If this turns out to be true, when that moment comes I hope that I have the presence of mind to call out to all the deities with equal fervor.

I start the car, and before pulling out onto the highway, I take one more look out onto the desert. As vivid as the material world is to the eyes, close our eyes and it seems all too willing to dissolve into static and white noise.

As I head onto the highway I press the ‘play’ button of the CD player and the last disc played begins to blare from the speakers. It is a minute or so into a Public Image Limited song called Fodderstomp. A stuttered electronic disco beat rolls repetitively, the song’s disco authenticity undermined by a rubbery bass guitar line that can’t quite find a melody. Atop it all, two singers whine with voices that sound like Mickey Mouse chewing off a limb that is caught in the teeth of a mousetrap.

“Only wanted to be loved. Only wanted to be loved,” they whine.

“Love makes the world go ‘round.” The second voice answers sarcastically.

This song is from, what might be considered the first post-punk album, and wasn’t created to be an easy listen.

“Only wanted to be loved. We really, really need it, like all the mountains and the flowers and the trees,” they continue.

There always seemed to be something empowering about mocking our most basic needs and insecurities. After my moment in the sand a healthy dose of cynicism was just what the doctor ordered.

“We only wanted to be accepted by society,” they intone with mock sincerity.

‘We only wanted to be looooovvvedd,” the other screams as if falling over a cliff.

Within a day I should be standing on the beach of the Pacific Ocean, and have achieved my stated goal. But in the back of my mind there is another goal, a goal that I can’t quite admit to myself. When I hit that ocean the goal will be just within my grasp and demons of the past might be confronted and possibly released.

“Only wanted to be loved. I’m going to release my frustrations at society by spraying off that fire extinguisher, right over there,” the singer continues. After a few seconds of silence a loud wooshing sound fills the speaker and the singers guffaw like schoolboys.

The song is a funny joke, but goes on far too long.

“Only wanted to be..” with a flick of the dial I cut them off mid-sentence. Again it is just the road, the desert, and my thoughts.

Although I would never admit it to my friends, and I can barely admit it to myself, for the last ten years there has been a shadow over my life, a witch’s curse of unfinished business. Perhaps this would be the chance to finally erase that shadow.