Hey y'all,
I love being on the road.
As exhausting as it is, I absolutely fucking love being on the road. There's something about throwing oneself in the path of chance...
Not to mention that being on the road is sweet living at its most distilled. All the sour, bitter, and not so tasty parts are culled from the nectar every time I start up the Beast and ride into the sunset.
Even if there is no sunset, I always feel more and more amazing the further and further I get away from that place where not so wonderful things have happened.
Is it also immature?
Of course it is.
But to throw oneself in the path of chance is to be the Eternal Fool at the start of one’s journey in the Tarot, leaving myself open to the domino effect of things as they happen.
After Thanksgiving, I left Eugene to go back to Seattle to the bazaar managed by an eighty year old clown at the former elementary school.
This time it was a waste of time and money, not to mention that Marcia (pronounced Mar-See-Yaa) Moonstar just had to come by my booth to bitch and complain every chance she got.
Even though she had the benefits of my boom box playing music in her booth because I didn't have batteries and that was the only outlet in the room, the energy vampire still had more juju to suck out of me.
Mar-SEE-YA Moonstar was a wannabe High Priestess, while she was truly Upside Down Justice because she was also the one making money.
The unfairness of it all got to me. I had to get out of there. I got in the Chariot of my Beast by 2 in the PM, left the flea market early and drove to Portland.
As soon as I left the city limits of Seattle, I felt lighter and breathed easier. It felt great to cut short the unnecessary suffering of a bad decision and just move on.
The flea market idea wasn't so great after all...
I'd been hearing about craigslist ever since I got down to the lower forty-eight, and I came up with a crazy idea in regards to rideshare.
"Good at sales and need ride to Denver?" so began my ad.
In a nutshell, I made it clear that anybody who sold my books would get a free ride with no gas money.
I thought what the hell? It's free to post an ad on this site, so what did I have to lose? I didn’t even expect anybody to answer since I put it up at the last minute.
What enterprising salesman-types would be looking for rides to anywhere?
Well, somebody did answer my post. I didn’t get an enterprising salesman type, but I did get Sun. Just imagine my surprise when my post was answered by another Fool on her own Journey.
"I'm in Eugene and am ready to leave right now."
Yet another stop in Eugene to meet my prospective saleswoman eager for a ride free of gas money.
Sun, nee Susan, was born and bred in the farming plains of Iowa. She was a robust blonde with slightly cocked blue eyes.
At twenty-four, Sun was as cosmic a hippie as one who had come of age in the late 60’s. She spent at least a year living naked and homeless in the island wilderness of Kauai. Somehow she ended up there after flunking out of college due to her activism in things that matter.
Sun recommended herself with the claim that in her gypsy travels of joblessness, she often went door to door canvassing for the Sierra Club for the going rate of 50 bucks a day whenever she was broke. So she would likely be comfortable approaching strangers to sell my collection of original fairy tales.
She'd been road-tripping around the West Coast for two months, but was really compelled to keep her promise to her folks in Iowa and return for visit by Christmas. I was heading to Denver, which was on the way more or less, and Sun had a cousin there she could stay with.
Knowing Sun made me fully understand why those who are just passing through are looked at sideways by those who have put down roots, paid their dues, and accepted the benefits of staying in one place.
The nomadic don't invest in any one town, therefore how can they be trusted?
Back in Homer at the beginning of this DIY book tour/road trip, Lia, the woman who let me sleep in the Beast on her property had a saying:
“We are all interconnected.”
How true. And there's nothing quite like giving a stranger a ride in good faith a road trip to prove it.
If nothing else, Sun had great stories and was fascinating to talk to.
Our first hours on the road, Sun showed me a picture of her girlfriend, her “baby” as she called her, and told me all about the paradise of living naked in Kauai.
She had been part of a gaggle of transients who moved their encampment from place to place around the wilderness of Kauai to avoid getting busted and kicked off.
She said it was glorious to l to eat mangoes from trees and not need any money until the day some guy showed up who took a dislike to her. He nudged and nudged until she was exiled from the village.
Even Paradise has a dark underbelly.
But as far as our original agreement was concerned, I often had to remind Sun to talk me up whenever we made a pit stop.
"Oh...yeah..." said Sun every time.
Unfortunately, my enterprising saleswoman had the attention span of a two year old.
She didn’t sell one book. But I don’t regret giving her a ride because the risk of giving cosmic hippie Sun a ride to Denver lead to other more wonderful things.
More to come on my Fool’s Journey in the next email.
Peace,
Mana
