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.