What's Next?

Truckee, CA

Ever seen the movie "Castaway" with Tom Hanks?  Remember the last scene, right after he dropped off that that Fedex box at the welder-lady's house?   He stops his rental car at a dirt crossroads in the middle of nowhere, lays a map on the hood of the Jeep and stares at the map.  I always interpreted that scene as his character saying "Okay.  I've had some freaky shit happen to me.  What's Next?".

Almost exactly two years ago I made a conscious decision to drastically change my lifestyle.  I was sitting in the courtyard of my house in Atlanta, sipping bourbon.  The clear, beautiful night sky was framed by the roof of the house, a house that was way too much for a newly single and newly unemployed guy to call home.  A million thoughts ran through my brain.  The one I can remember is this:  I've got to get out of here.

Thus began the Hobo Dream.  I dreamed of vastly simplifying my life.  Less house.  Fewer possessions.  Less work.  Less shit in my life, in all senses of the word.

I also dreamed of spending time with the most important people in my life, the people that populated the "Favorites" list on my phone.  And I didn't want to visit with them, as happens on vacations - I wanted to live with them, doing the normal, everyday stuff that makes up the vast majority of life.

In retrospect, it all happened pretty quickly.  Within 3 months, my house in Atlanta was leased to the perfect tenants, I had put away or given away all my stuff, I had purchased Marge, and I was settled into the basement at a friend's lake house.  Everything just fit - real Divine Intervention stuff.  The dream had begun and I was downright giddy.

In the last 20 months, I moved my dream around the country, calling 18 different places home.  I truly lived with all the people on my phone's Favorite list.  And I added several new Favorites, reconnecting with family and friends, the best of my past, and meeting new people that I'm sure will be the best of my future.

I've got the rental car packed and I'm trying to decide which way to point it.  Homer and Max act as my "Wilson".  The events of the last couple of weeks have opened a lot of doors for me.  I'm damn lucky to be alive and I have options, lots of them.  So what's next?

What happened: The Joe Friday Version

First off, I want to thank everyone for your support and love.  It's been a weird few days and your words of encouragement have kept me sane.  Thank you.  

I'm still piecing together all that's happened.  I feel the need to write down so many things, just to get them off my mind, to put them somewhere.  Here's my first installment of that process.  It's the "Joe Friday" edition - just the facts.  Future editions will focus on "icky emotions", "what's next", and "just what in the hell is Burning Man and why did you destroy your Airstream to get there?".  

Last Monday, my brother Mick, our friend Farhad, Homer, Max and I set out for Burning Man 2010.  Our trip would take us from Owensboro, KY to Black Rock City, in northern Nevada.  Edna (my faithful Ford Expedition) would lead the way with Marge (my '65 Airstream) bringing up the rear.  As you may know, I've spent the last 20+ months rebuilding Marge from the ground up.  There was still much work to be done on her but she would provide a good home for us, both on our trip west and on the playa at Burning Man.  Here we are, fired up to begin our mission.  

Our trip was uneventful for the first couple of days - a Walmart parking lot in central Missouri the first night and then a sketchy campground on Tuesday night.  We rolled out of St. Joseph, MO Wednesday afternoon, hell-bent to see some old guys carved into a hillside.

We drove all night and arrived at Mt. Rushmore just after dawn.  We did the "Clark Griswold" tour and loaded up into Edna to continue our journey to Black Rock City.  We inhaled a yummy meal at Sonic, Farhad took the wheel, Mick settled into the front passenger seat and I loaded my lazy ass into the back of Edna to take a nap with Homer and Max.

Enter "the dryer".  As I mentioned before, I began to wake up as I felt Edna violently swerving side-to-side.  Tires were screeching and I could hear metal straining to keep Marge and Edna connected.  Then the roof turned into the floor as we flipped over and the true violence began.  Edna landed on her feet - it appears she did one full flip.  Airbags were everywhere.  Marge ended up on her roof, flat as a pancake.

Once the dryer stopped, everything is still kind of a blur for me.  I heard voices asking if I was okay.  Homer and Max were yelping.  Max bolted out the shattered window and ran off into the desert, not sure what had just happened but damn sure he wanted to get the hell away from it.

We spent the next 4-5 hours at this location, baking in the Wyoming sun.  Turns out we were in the Middle of Nowhere, Wyoming, population zero.  We found out that the closest dot on the map (New Castle) was about 45 miles away.  Gillette, the only city of any size nearby, was about 70 miles away.  While several cars stopped to help us, it took about 45 minutes for the police to arrive.

Once The Law showed up, the gears slowly ground into motion.  EMTs, tow trucks, etc were summoned.  Most would be coming from Gillette so it would be a while before they arrived.  We walked around in a daze, processing everything - the events, the scene, the repercussions.

Once the friendly and helpful folks from Manning's Wrecker arrived, the literal heavy lifting began.  First order of the day - disconnect Marge and Edna.  This was not as easy as you might think (Nice work Dan Mark - the safety chains you welded held up).  Next - strap Marge's carcass together so she could be returned to her feet.  Once upright, Marge kinda bounced back to her normal shape, albeit with some gaping wounds.  

The Manning team then dragged Marge and Edna's carcasses onto their flatbeds, we gathered as much of the loose debris as we could and then loaded up in one of the tow trucks for the hour ride to Gillette.  Dwayne, our driver, was very friendly and narrated the trip.  However, we didn't have much to say.  Speaking for myself, I was still wondering "what the fuck just happened?".

I'm gonna stop here as I need to join Farhad and Mick at the junk yard where we'll be finishing up the salvage work on Marge before they head west to the playa.  I will be staying behind to work out the details with my insurance company and coordinate shipping of what we salvage back to Kentucky.  I hope to head to Burning Man as soon as I can get some comfort on these and a few other fronts.  

I'm not looking forward to the salvage work.  I feel like I'm going to harvest organs from a much loved family pet, one that I spent every waking hour with for the last 2 years.  Mick and Farhad have done an amazing job of quietly handling this gruesome work, allowing me to process things more before my "visitation" with the corpse.  It's gonna suck but I feel like I have to go there so I can close this chapter in my life.   For the last 20+ months, Marge has been the first thing I think of when I wake up and the last thing on my mind when I fall asleep.  I'm going to leave part of my soul in that pile of shredded aluminum, steel and wood.

Thanks for all your thoughts, kind words and prayers.  I'm humbled by the support I have received from my family and friends.  I'll be writing more as I find words and time.  My brother is also blogging about our adventure and he truly has a gift for capturing the emotions involved - facing potential death, loss and grieving - http://minglefreely.blogspot.com/

Hugs and kisses to all.

RIP Marge the Airstream

I've lived the majority of my life waking up in a shit-storm. My circadian rhythm issues cause me to wake up well after most people, so I'm used to waking up with things already going to hell in a hand-basket.

But yesterday was a little different.  In short, I woke up in a clothes dryer, with clothes, dogs, and stuff of all kinds flying around me, along with the sounds of breaking glass and twisting metal.  I was being bounced from wall to ceiling to wall and back to the floor, all the while somehow knowing I needed to keep my appendages from falling out the shattered windows that surrounded me.  I vaguely remember some tire screeching and being thrown side to side before the dryer started.  I knew something was REALLY wrong but, since I had just woken up, I didn't know much more than that.  

I'm still digesting all that happened yesterday.  Suffice it to say, Mick, Farhad, Homer, Max and I lived through a horrendously violent car wreck.  Aside from some minor cuts and scrapes, we're okay.  Thanks to Powers that I am only now pondering, we are damn lucky to be alive.  And that's all that really matters.  

It's been over 24 hours since this shit-storm started and I'm just now "waking up" to what comes next.  It's a chance for a fresh start for all of us and we're just starting to understand our options.  

More to come...  

The Joy of having Two Dogs

Like a parent who can't stop talking about how awesome their kids are, I gotta share how great it is to have my second dog, Max, in the family.  He was a "gift of desperation" from my cousin and his family - as I was about to leave their house after spending a month with them late last year, my cousin's wife Wanda said to me "PLEASE take a dog" (she had a litter of 4 puppies and they were... active, to say the least).  So I got Max, a black standard poodle. 

In a rare effort towards brevity, I'll just say this:  you gotta see Homer (my 10 year old stray) and Max play together.  It brings the biggest smile to my face.  The young dog makes the old dog feel and look young.  The old dog shows patience and playfulness that I aspire to at his age.  Wanna see pictures of my babies?? 

Holy Shit!! Fire!!!

Okay, maybe not an actual fire but Marge was filled with smoke.  Electrical fire smoke.

Let's face it - finding smoke in your abode ain't fun.  Finding it in the home you've sunk 18+ months worth of work into makes it even suckier.  Finding electrical fire smoke in something that you wired yourself will make you wanna puke.  So there I was, scared to death that my home was in the process of going up in flames, just like those creepy cars I've seen burning on the side of the road.  From what I've seen of those car fires in the past, once the fire starts, the firemen present have to just watch it burn as there's little they can do about it.  Icky smells, burning metal "PING!!"ing and black, black smoke rising into the air.  This is all I could think about.

I've been in Nashville for the last couple of weeks doing some work on my rental house.  I've been up to my ass renovating the house's kitchen, rebuilding the staircase and generally fixing the wear and tear that 8+ years of renting does to a house.  I spend most of my days inside the house while Marge bakes in the Tennessee heat all day in the driveway.  About noon, I needed something from my toolbox inside Marge so I came out to get it, my mind focused on the tasks at hand inside the house.  When I saw the smoke I pretty much freaked.  Neither Homer nor Max were inside, thankfully.

I frantically ran around inside Marge, mentally reviewing all the electrical work I've done over the last many months - was it the inverter?  The air conditioner?  Some half-assed wiring job I did just to get the lights on one evening?  There was no telling...

Long story short, it was my refrigerator.  I installed it over a year ago and it's done yeoman's duty ever since, keeping my bachelor staples of beer, Dr. Pepper, pickle relish and chicken wings nice and chilly.  Apparently there was a defect in a component that caused a wire to melt its plastic home.  That HAS to be the cause - it couldn't be my shade-tree electrician skills :)   Here's the charred remains:

Sure doesn't look scary now, does it?  Regardless, my pickles, Dr. Pepper and chicken wings are now SOL as the-little-fridge-that-could-be-a-fire-hazard is now taking up residence OUTSIDE Marge.  And for those of you out there wondering, neither Homer nor Max, who were in the backyard about 10 feet away, reacted at all.  Worthless bastards.  Thus, I won't be renaming either one of them "Hero" but I'm considering "Shithead".  

BRAINS!!! MUST EAT BRAINS!!!

As long as I can remember, my mom would get all worked up whenever "brain sandwiches" came up.  I've always been disgusted with the idea.  All I could picture was a white gooey mess squishing out from between a hamburger bun as someone bit into one messy and nasty sandwich.  But to mom, this appeared to be the equivalent of caviar.  She grew up in Evansville, IN where, as I understand it, there are a lot of German folks.  Apparently Deutschlanders are crazy for the brain.

So with all this in mind, I set out for the Hilltop Inn in west Evansville to join my folks, my aunt Sharlot, uncle David and some distant Walton cousins I haven't seen in many years.  The goal - a meal of gray matter.

You know, I've noticed that people rarely tell you what sound a meat made before it was sliced up and put on your plate.  Did it moo?  Did it whinny?  Did it snort (I think that's what pigs do)?   No, they just say "have some ribs!" or even worse just "It's Bar-B-Que!!".  It makes me think of what Jack, John and I experienced way back in 1991 during our Europe adventure - at a street fair somewhere in Belgium, we saw some yummy meat cooking and, when we asked what it was, the nice lady said in her broken English "theees eeez flesh of a pig and theees eeeez flesh of a cow".  No such luck at the Hilltop Inn - the menu just said "Jumbo Brain Sandwich".  So I ordered one.

The verdict - hell, anything fried doesn't suck too much.  But I gotta be honest, that will probably be my last brain sandwich.  I could feel my gag reflex kicking in while I was swilling that grey matter around in my mouth.  Everyone else around me was oohing and ahhing about the fine vittles so I did my best to keep it together and focus my grubbing efforts on my side items.

By the way, it turns out the brain I ate came from a pig.  It, no doubt, compelled it to eat and root in shit.  And I bet he wasn't very charming, definitely not as charming as that Arnold on "Green Acres".  Whodathunked filthy animals had such big brains!

#1 #1

Dateline: New Orleans, LA
Well, it's official.  I've finally peed in Marge.  And not just on the floor like I always do.  I actually peed into the toilet I installed in her.  That's right, friends and neighbors, she's now officially "self-contained", to use the parlance of us camper-type-folks.  I don't really have a way to get the pee out of the pee-holding-tank but that was kinda the point - an exercise in "necessity is the mother of invention".  Put some pee in a tank and you'll DEFINITELY find a way to get it out.

I must admit it was kinda spontaneous though.  A long time ago, my friend Farrel Weil (my host while in NOLA this trip) told me:  "you can do anything you want in New Orleans - just don't mouth off to cops and don't pee in public".  So there I was, after a successful Fat Tuesday mission of catching parade loot and dealing with all the bare breasts, in my trailer, full of yummy street vendor food, needing to pee somewhat urgently.  I was parked across the street from Farrel's place in the Lower Garden District and it was broad daylight.  There was no way I could pull off peeing outside without getting noticed.   So I decided to anoint my fancy-pants terlet with my urine.  And that's the story of my first #1 inside Marge.  Now I just gotta figure out how to get that stuff out of the pee tank :)