I don’t trust anyone with my problems anymore.

“So how are you going to do a fourth or a fifth step?”

“Uh, a priest or a hobo or a hooker probably.”

“All excellent choices. It just says it has to be another person.”

“Exactly. I can rent a birthday clown or a mime to make angry faces at my resentments and scared faces at my fears, and I’d better get a damn good show during my sexual inventory!”

“Well there’s one thing I won’t miss about America. All the obligatory holidays I’m forced to attend.”

(Josh): “There’s a loaded pistol in my backpack if you can’t take it anymore.”

“Uhhhh if it was my own family I’d probably take you up on that.”

(Josh): “By the way this an orgy house. Michelle’s dad is gay, he’s a bear and they had a 6-person shower custom built for orgies. Hopefully there aren’t any dildos laying around today, I don’t need my daughter seeing that.”

“Theyyyy wha-?” Good god, no wonder I don’t faze you or your wife.

They were nice people. Her father and his partner were apparently the kind of high strung bears who’d hyperventilate over a carelessly flicked cigarette ash landing in the wrong direction on the patio if you know what what I mean though.

The best thing about thanksgiving was their 5-year old daughter announcing that “Grandpa’s stuffing tastes like penises.”

“I’ll bet grandpa’s stuffing DOES taste like penises.”

:HORRIFIED LOOK FROM MICHELLE:

I drove from Seattle to Los Angeles and then onward to Austin.
I picked up a couple of Russian hitchhikers in Tucson and they kept me company for the next 1,000 miles or so.

I was a little incredulous at their plans to sleep in a tent out in the desert.
“We are from Russia. And sleeping outside is good for you.”

They’re on their way to Cuba and then South America via New Orleans and Ft Lauderdale. Any other week I would have taken them the whole way but its a company holiday, I’m off all week, and I have plans for Thanksgiving.

We swapped stories and they told me about working as harvesters out in the marijuana fields out in California and all the strange addicts and miscreants they’d encountered along the way.

“Oh boy, and then you ended up in a car with me.”

I’m glad they’re experiencing the America that I know and love. 😉

I appreciated having some company because Seattle to Austin is a long, long, long time to be out there alone on a highway and lost in your head.

Their English was decent enough. One of them coined the term “minery,” as in a “mine,” and this prompted me to come up with ideas like a “minery tour” where you drive a convertible around the back woods of West Virginia and stop at every mine for a coal sample.

That sounds fun. I’d totally do that.

I had a sad, and it was beautiful all the same, when one of the girls sang along to Anna Nalick’s “(2am) breathe.”

I told them that was the album/song I was listening to when I was moving out of Key West.

I’d barbacked at the 801/New Orleans house and one of our DJs (Junior) played the Blake Jarrell remix of that song all the time.

They asked where they could set up a tent and I don’t really do that sort of thing, so I took them up on the top of the 360 bridge overlook and I  found them a clearing in the woods. It was pitch black out, and boy aren’t they in for a surprise.

On 11/11/15 I found myself in one of those stuffy old church basements somewhere in Texas again, actually identifying with what a speaker had to say for himself for the first time that I could recall in ages.

Some dude I was crushing on had a tattoo of Isaiah 41:10: “Don’t be afraid, for I am with you. Don’t be discouraged, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you. I will hold you up with my victorious right hand.” 

I looked at the clock and noticed that it was 11:11. So I made a wish: I wished that I would never have to sit in another goddamned meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous in Austin TX again.

I put the house back on the market the next day.

Then I threw all my shit away, and I moved back to Los Angeles four days later.
Fuck wishing: I make things happen.

The house was under contract in five days, we closed in January.

I’d owned it for 5 years and it was as hard for me to let go of a house and all of my stuff as I guess it is for anyone else. Thats quite a long time for me to stay in one place.

It was a really cute place but I honestly don’t miss the $250 bills from Austin Energy. I don’t miss mowing the lawn. I don’t miss the demon possessed circuit breaker panel that neither myself nor three electricians ever managed to solve.
I do, however, miss my sunflowers and working from home out on the deck under the Texas sun. I’ve driven over a million miles now and when I started this trip I hit a tumbleweed about the size of a deer.

I felt bad for running my mascot over.

Some guy I’ve talked to in passing on and off for the last few years said hi and I really just wanted to turn the car around, drive the 160 miles, and crawl into his bed because being held sounds a lot better than whatever else I’ve got going on right now.

There were dozens of tumbleweeds rolling around on the interstate at 11:11 last night. Oh well, these are my friends now.

I was supposed to find out on Wednesday if I’m being transferred to another team in Belgium, so I’m in between places and it’s kind of hard to plan for the future right now.

This is one of the few times that I’m not drifting around and indecisive about my future by choice. If they say no, that’s fine. I’ll just go get an apartment and have my car fixed. I like the job I already have and I am okay with both outcomes.
I was originally going to shelter in place in Los Angeles for a few weeks and maybe hit some of those meetings up again. They were kind of entertaining in LA.

But instead I found myself rolling my eyes and thinking “You did that for eight years and those people wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.”

So I’m just going to key it up and try somewhere else this time.

I was minding my own business and swigging my beer on a rooftop deck on W 28th St when I was cornered by the Jersey Twins.

They were both really cute, they had me feeling a little insecure.

We’re talking and getting to know each other.

I’m asked what I do for fun.

I explained that I was roaming around America with a backpack and taking it all in.

I don’t think they believed me.

The one on my left sneered and asked “And how is America? Is it beautiful?”

His friend, who I favored more: “Is it horrible?”

From my left: “Is it amazing?”

His friend: “Is it tragic?”

I didn’t have a good answer for that.

But I was living for how these two bitchy manicured cosmo sipping queens from Jersey were trying to make fun of me … or flirt with me … or perhaps both… and in the process had managed to accidentally sum up the human condition from the roof of the NYC Eagle.

They had just made my night

I thought about the question.

I grinned and simply replied “yes.”

I took my beer over to the edge of the roof and sat down alone wishing that Donald Trump would lose the election, stay in New York City, and build a Great Big Beautiful Wall to keep New Jersey out instead.

— snip —

We walked down the block through the dead trees.
You were smiling.
And I was smiling too.
From the time we were little.
You were always taller, thinner.
You were a kind of lanky Matt Dillon.
I was strong but awkward.
And born with an armour of imagination.
I loved music.
And so did you.
But you loved those loud guitars.
And venom.
That venom with a lost angry sadness.
While I lived in the sadness.
I remember Roy Orbison on an AM radio.
All falsetto and loneliness.
That day was so sharp it cut through glass and warmed the carpet underneath me.
You were out with your friends.
Your best friend’s name was Ray.
He’s in jail now.
A few weeks ago you were sentenced as well.
I sat in my room still surrounded by a sad song thinking.
Thirty years.
It’s been thirty years.
And you’re going to be in there for thirty years.
Now I remember that day you had just gotten out of rehab.
And I was happy to see you.
Happy to hope.
That from that point forward.
All would be better.
And I was proud of you.
And we were going home.
The complete family.
A complete family.
Just you and me.
Mom and Dad.
A complete family.

— Matthew Ryan

Whenever I look down at the ground racing below me, I’d be well advised to remember that I only got this job in the first place because some recruiter ended up getting my number mixed up with some other candidate and calling me on accident.

I was heading south on the outer drive and Res (“They Say Vision”) came up on the radio. Steve used to always play a Robbie Rivera mix of that track and he’d just gone off to prison for dealing again.

I’d just warned him: Dude. You have got to get out of the game because you have a gigantic neon sign over your head that says “Arrest me.”

Be he said he’s “got this.”

He wasn’t going to slip up this time.

It was cold outside but it was sunny and beautiful.

I shook my head and I thought “Thank god you’re not on that horrible fucking drug.”

I was on US-41, right next to Soldier Field. Where I’m still banned for life. The phone rang. It was a call from Tina.

Tina sounded a little manic. She said she was airjamming a pretend guitar in her office to Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” while she looked for a Puppet Master.

I was ostensibly leaving for Texas on vacation that morning, but I had despaired at the thought of returning and I honestly had half a mind not to. I wasn’t sure but I had some time to think about it and perhaps begrudgingly make the right choice to turn those wheels back north towards February, the looming cloud of my boss’s halotosis, and an alarm clock set for 5:15am.

I wasn’t actively looking for another job. I didn’t even have a resume posted anywhere. But I had a feeling that I was about to say adios to the doublemint twins and the stock exchange after all.

Before I was doing stadiums or chatrooms, I was staring at > 250,000 transactions per second and porting all the stuff that starts and stops the CBOE every day from Linux to Solaris.

I did what I was hired for and stayed until it was completed. The migration and the move from Chicago to New York was successful. They had offered me permanent work and I didn’t want it. I loved it there but I have sleep apnea like a motherfucker and it was all I could do to show up on time every day and finish the scope of work I’d promised to and crawl across the finish line.

“Well, I’m really beginner to intermediate with that and I only learned it under duress. I was kind of forced to learn it so how about a Puppet Slave instead?”

“That’s closer than I’ve gotten all day!”

Before that phone call was over, she was like “OK fuck that other guy, we’re submitting you instead!”

“All this time I’ve spent looking for a Puppet Master, and I should have been looking for a Puppet Slave…”

Tina ended up placing me at eBay and Cisco. I literally owe everything else … from that point forward … to a recruiter calling me on “accident.”

Went to the desert
On a mission
To have a vision
Or write a song
I left real early
I left my cell phone
I took the Prius
It gets good mileage
Something’s gonna happen
To change my world
I’m on the highway
I pass the windmills
I pass the outlet stores
Soon I’ll find the sacred places
I’ve been searching for
Wild horses
Hawks circling
Gram Parsons, inspiration
Big cactus
Coyotes
Something’s gonna happen
To change my world
When I got there
To the motel
It was different
Than on the website
It was crowded
Mostly seniors
There was a bar band playing “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown”
So I went hiking
It was so barren
And it got too hot, so I turned around 
Went to the main drag
I saw the statue
Of Sonny Bono
And he was smiling
Something’s gonna happen
To change my world
— Jill Solbule, Palm Springs

A dirty bottle washes ashore:

It says “Help me, I’m in over my head.”

Help me, 
Help me, 
Help me get to heaven and back again.

It’s only by a profound fucking act of divine grace or mercy that you haven’t died alone in one of those hospital rooms just like the way you lived your life.

And you got to feel the sun shine on your face a few more times instead of being wheeled out of there under a sheet.

Just like all those other times you never should have made it through the night.

Unless that’s actually happened and the universe simply doesn’t have the heart to let me know that I didn’t make it after all.

Do we just keep forking off into alternate realities where we did and didn’t, until we accept it?

The worst time I had was convulsing in that jail cell.
My eyes were rolling in the back of my head when they fingerprinted me. I’d thought I’d died at some point in an observation cell that morning. But I heard the meeting bell from my home group clanging and it roused me.

Nothing else had worked, but somebody had thought to bring it to me and ring the god damned thing over and over and over again to wake me up.

And you were there, and you were there, and you were there.

Daniel was holding me and crying and saying you dumb fuck, you scared me, don’t ever do that to me again.

But it was just a dream.

I came to in a puddle of snot and tears and puke and an incredible amount of pain. It was still just a cell and they were all gone.

I was incredibly cold and the magistrate was asking if I knew where I was.

I dreamt that I was being pursued down a staircase that went down endlessly in a spiral.

There was no escaping whatever was chasing me.
The staircase was dark.
There was no end in sight.
I ran.
And I ran.
And I ran.

And whatever I was running from was only a few inches away from nipping at my heels.

I gave up. 

I got down on my knees and said the “serenity prayer.”
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.
The courage to change the things I can.
And the wisdom to know the difference.

I heard a voice telling me “Welcome home” just before I woke up safe in bed.

Exhaling a warm and saturated breath
The combination of my air and my breath meets the dew point
I release a cloud of condensation
It’s like standing outside in the winter
But it’s August and it’s 75 degrees in here.
Why can I see my breath?
Breathing in and out, slowly
A criss-cross grid of fine blue lines falls down towards me
Like a trappers net, only like a feather
It hovers about a foot above me
It arches up in a form of the contour of my body
It’s a mirror of me in a cross cross grid of dark blue glowing lines
I extend my hand towards it
It moves away from me
I touch it; It is ice cold
I snap my hand back

A radio is playing Amanda Ghost:
“Welcome to my Filthy Mind”
Suddenly I have the sensation of looking at myself from far above myself
Consciousness is a separate thing from my body.
Well, I’ll be damned.
I’m over here.
And now I’m over here.
With nothing more than a thought wishing it so, I change the location from which I observe my motionless body on the floor below me
Next, I observe myself from the other corner of the ceiling.
Check this out, I’m over here.
And now I am over here.
But I am down there.
The room turns into tiny blocks
(Tiny cubes)
(One inch cubes)
These blocks become smaller
(And smaller)
Until they are now tiny pixels
The pixels and cubes crash into each other
They take on the essence of water
The room is an ocean of cubes
And I am also made of cubes
They are dissolving
I am dissolving
I become one with the ocean
A wave rises up from the floor
The carpet and the furniture ride the wave
Four feet into the air
Now it’s a gentle rolling wave
Rolling towards the wall
Another wave rises up
And I dive into the wave
The wave becomes a sheet of glass
I crash through the glass
(It’s definitely glass)
(It could also be a mirror)
The glass shatters and tinkles
And the shards fall down the chasm with me
Tumbling down like Alice
I hear a tinny sing song voice:
Giggling “oops, shit, fuck me!”
I let out a breath and everything leaves me
None of that mattered
It’s over
None of that mattered
It’s over
None of that mattered
It’s over
I feel immense relief
(None of that mattered)
(It’s over)
(One could weep with relief)

I’m standing on a glowing white floor
Maybe it’s a disco floor
Maybe it’s a server room floor from the IBM commercial
It’s whatever I want it to be
I will a home into existence
Merely with thoughts
Creating with my own volition
Everything looks real
The hardwood floors are made with the wood from dicotyledons
The wood fibers run down the planks like dark brown rivers
I touch the patterns and I admire the grain
This a beautiful floor and the wood is alive
I stare at the rocker switch mounted in a wall receptacle:
Professionally installed;
With only a thought it is there.
It even has little white screws
To imagine something is to create it in this space
I think to myself, if I can will things into creation with a mere thought,
Then surely with a mere thought I could destr-xxxxx

I’m not allowed to finish this thought.
I’m cast into a darkness of groaning souls sitting down and bent at the waist, their heads down to their knees
They moan and groan
I don’t know if they know where they are
There is nothing but darkness and shadows here
Or is there?
I look way way way up
There’s a tiny window with a glowing yellow light
I concentrate on it
I ask it to help me
And it does
Whatever is up there and listening is so merciful it could not possibly deny your request.
Even me?
(Someone like me?)
Yes, you.
And just like that I am gone

Now I’m marching in formation
With shadowy shapes of humans
None of whom are aware they’re in this space
But not me, I see the room we are all in
Where are we?
Where are we going?
I jump up and down like a little hyperactive kid
I see myself from outside of myself
And I go, oh! That is who you are.
Along the wall we are being watched
By three silent observers up in recesses in the wall to our left
They’re looking at us through something that looks like a giant studio camera
The lens is a yellow square
Like the same yellow square I asked for help.
I ask where we are and what is going on
The observer in the middle puts his fingers to his lips and motions me to shhhhhhhh.

The floor begins to open up
It looks like a bright blue glowing map of the earth where the oceans lie
It swirls around in a vortex like a hurricane
It’s maybe a hundred or a thousand feet across
And a giant eye appears in the center
The eye is maybe twenty or two hundred feet across
It stares at me
It blinks
I go “oh no, I am god.”
Then I recognize my own self deceit:
My ego, beholding this beauty and creation
Wants to think that it is me
And that is of me.
I am one with it and I am of it
But I am not it
It is not the one that is from and of me
I am the one that is from and of it.
I am ashamed and I humble myself:
You are not God.

I am taken to a space where we discuss my mission in life
You have to go back.
I am not allowed to remember the content of this discussion
Other than this question:
Where did God come from?
I am told that even if there was a way to communicate that to me,
I do not have the capacity to understand.
I accept that answer.
It makes sense.
I am allowed to remember this question and this answer.
But not the rest, because to be consciously aware of the conversation is to directly influence what I do next.
I have to figure it out on my own.

I’m approaching a bright white light ,
The light is love.
The light is nothing but light.
The light is joy.
The joy is pure
The joy only wants to radiate and reach out and turn everything it encounters into white light and joy as pure as itself:
I become one with the ocean of light
I am me,
I have my own thoughts
But I am one with everything.
We are all in harmony with our creator and creation,
Except that God is still something separate that we can be in communion with, but that we are not.
This is the source,
This is place where your burdens are borne
This is the consciousness that hears your prayers
Heaven knows what you’ve been through
And there is a lot that I still do not understand
The sacrifice was only the beginning
This is the place where all human experience exists
Simultaneously and without contradiction
From the beginning to the end
What is real and true to me,
What is real and true to you,
All reality, all truth
It is happening here
All of your eternity is only the blink of an eye here
Heaven only knows what you’ve been through
This is lovely but it seems like spending eternity here would be rather dull.
Well it’s anything but dull,
If you tune into what’s going on.
I try and the first things I see are my (now ex) partner and my (now ex) roommate.
They are alive, of course.
I was always told you’d see Grandma and dead people
But I only see the living.
I have to go back.
Can I go back?

There is some discussion.
Yes, you can go back.

The space I’m in spins like a tornado
I am caught in a storm
It’s a million miles an hour
I’m slammed back into the wall
I sing and I cry out in tongues

The sequence of the experience of being returned here happens over and over and over again:

I open my eyes and I’m so sick I could vomit. I search the room, I ransack the room looking for something to puke in.

I find an Aldi’s grocery bag and I open it and just as I am about to hurl my guts out into it, the sequence starts all over again:

I open my eyes and I’m so sick I could vomit. I search the room, I ransack the room looking for something to puke in.

I find an Aldi’s grocery bag and I open it and just as I am about to hurl my guts out into it, the sequence starts all over again:

I open my eyes and I’m so sick I could vomit. I search the room, I ransack the room looking for something to puke in.

I find an Aldi’s grocery bag and I open it and just as I am about to hurl my guts out into it, the sequence starts all over again:

I open my eyes and I’m so sick I could vomit. I search the room, I ransack the room looking for something to puke in.

I find an Aldi’s grocery bag and I open it and just as I am about to hurl my guts out into it, the sequence starts all over again.

Over and over and over again.

And then, finally I open my eyes and I am in more pain than I’ve ever been in my life.

I know where the Aldi’s bag is this time.

I open the drawer it is in.

I open the bag.

I hurl my guts out into it.

My next thought perplexed me: “You cheated.”

Renee is in the room with me

Renee is as pale as a ghost.

Renee says “You are incredibly strong.”

Renee never wanted to discuss this again