Wunderlostletters

Vienna, Austria

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:04:38 -0500

I fear you feel I’ve fled, or perhaps frozen to death. The former is far truer than the latter, though I do find cold in my bones bleeding its way to my heart. I don’t do well in the face of tragedy and trauma and after all seemed to crash and fall, I no longer found solace on city streets or promise in open highways. I sold everything that couldn’t fit in a backpack and bought a plane ticket and a Eurail pass. I’m walking streets apart now, finding full silence where languages are foreign. There’s a freedom in being this truly alone and I feel more at home than I have in what seems like a lifetime of roam and rove. I cannot root myself here, and I’ll keep moving with nothing to rely on but wit and whim.

I’m no longer a tourist, if I ever was. I’ve fallen into the fringes and will move on in a tradition where Travellers are tolerated. Weave a tapestry of these words if you will and hang them on the wall. They will last longer that way, as I, like every Blue before, find myself fading to grey.

California and a Subtle Goodbye: Breathe

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:25:39 -0500

I flew a kite for the first time today. It nearly carried me out to sea and I remember thinking that I wish it would have. Watching the ground disappear from my feet. Watching the buildings shrink and the people turn into flecks of nothingness and emptiness.

Somehow, I feel like you’ve left and moved on, like so many other pieces of my life. Moving is good. It’s how people breathe. Our lungs work like the gills of the shark. We must keep grabbing at the next big dream or take the next big step to keep the balloons in our chest from collapsing and drowning.

I don’t think I have the guts for suicide but I haven’t thought about it in a while. I’m too afraid of fucking it up and spending the rest of my life wishing I had done at least one thing right.

When the sun rises, I’ll be gone. In some other place, dew will soak through my shoes and my toes will numb and I will smile with regret.

Regretting that I can’t give anyone closure. Regretting that everyone will always ask, whether I’m alive or dead, “Whatever happened to Meridian?”

The memories of some will live on.
Memories of some will die.
And only a crow that flies,
will ever truly know
the lasting feeling, of
become weightless.

California: Alone

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 18:11:00 -0500

Being alone has helped.

I can’t say your words helped because it has been so long since I have read them. And they deserve to be read, probably by someone else that isn’t me.

Sometimes, feelings have a way of creeping into someone’s brain and never leaving no matter how much they rub steel wool across the valleys and nooks and crannies.

I’ve rubbed myself raw, over and over, in the shower until the water runs pink along the sides of my feet.

Until I grow new skin, I won’t know just how I feel.

New York, New York

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 23:57:04 -0500

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 28, 2011

I love you. I don’t know if I have any more words for you than that. Words, at a time when it seems you need them most. I got your first letter while I was on the road, and my eyes needed windshield wipers as I drove on, to get to anywhere, which apparently, was here. “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” That’s what’s said about this place, this place that shoves adrenaline cut with rough pavement into your nostril, this place that shoots ambition cut with broken beer bottles into your veins, and makes you hope. Despite it all, ever — hope.

I love you. Our roads are twisted, our lines broken, our words missed and crossed and turned, but they always come back to you. I remember your brother. I mourn the loss of him. His friendly smile, his playful punch. He’ll always be there, though, won’t he? In the fading recesses of memory that can only stop fading with constant recall. I think of all we’ve been through, all we’ve seen, and what madness is this? Our bodies and bones are brittle and easily bent and broken. We must be more than our organic lives, of this I am certain, and of this only — to live within and by living inside to live above and beyond.

I love you. I ache for you, an ache deep in longing and leaning and living and love. I may push and pull here for awhile, may try to make this place the “anywhere” it claims to be. This city has a pulse that pushes me and cannot be ignored. I’m familiar with concrete and cars and careless. My travails seem meaningless in light of your plight, and I’d do anything for you, anything. Anything.

I love you. We find ourselves on separate coasts and they’re putting up the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center on Wednesday and I was going to go, going to see the ceremony, to be there. Mostly to watch the families. To watch the kids’ eyes full of love and expectation, the parents’ eyes misty with nostalgia. But I’d most like to see yours, full of whatever happens to fill them at the moment. Despite everything we’ve seen, everywhere we’ve been, everything we’ve done and been and said, there’s always you.

I love you. I’ve always been afraid to say those words, three words impossible to utter despite writing thousands around them. But I’ll say them now, because you are without words, and I always have words to offer you, but at present, I have only three. Do with them what you will. I’ll wait. I don’t know what it is I’m here for, but I’m here.

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.

~ Lao Tzu

California: Still Life

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 20:00:00 -0500

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 28TH, 2011

Numbers are all around us. They hug us like our parents did when we were young and our knees were skinned and bruised. They kiss us like our first love, under blankets in faraway tents under faraway stars.

A calendar sits in the kitchen, where dates are circled and events are scribbled in different colored markers. When looking at the calendar, everything always felt like a countdown. How many days until we do something. How many days until this happens. How many days until this holiday.

And so on and so on.

She asked, “How many days has it been?”

Thirty-three. But I don’t answer. I just tap her leg and make her count. Thirty-three taps. Thirty-three days. Thirty-three sleepless nights. Thirty-three constant reminders. Thirty-three absent minded walks. Thirty-three crying fits on the front porch.

Thirty-three.

I won’t be counting down anymore. Just up. Until my very last breath I will know how long it’s been. I will know how long I’ve let my actions speak instead of my throat. I will know how much I’ve done because I won’t let careless speech stand in the way of creating chasms between loving hearts.

I didn’t even get to tell him I loved him and it’s been thirty-three days.

California

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 20:04:39 -0500

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2011

Twenty-eight days ago, I called home and was brought to my knees.

Twenty-seven days ago, I helped carry my older brother’s casket 137 steps to the back of a hearse.

It was the longest 137 steps of my entire life.

I watched them lower his casket into the ground and I said my goodbyes. They started slow, like goodbyes usually do, but before long they were frantic and misguided, fueled by guilt and sadness.

Blame found a nest inside my rib cage twenty-eight days ago and it has been there ever since, pecking at the hollow bones guarding my heart. I’ve asked myself so many questions as to why things happen and why the people we feel most responsible for and love the most, leave us first.

The answers have been hiding from me and a stack of questions has been piling themselves high on my nightstand, one for every hour I lay awake at night staring at the ceiling, trying my hardest to etch the image of his face into the white paint so that he will always have a place on earth.

So I’ve been here between the grains of sand that line the beaches to the south. I’ve been inside the trees where the echo of his voice still sits heavy, like fog, like humidity, like blood. I’ve been in the mangled car that held his body before the paramedics took him away. I sat and I cried until my nose bled.

My blood mixed with his, old and new on a dirty steering wheel. I could still feel the warmth of his hands. I could still catch his smile in the rear-view mirror.

His girlfriend found me on the steps of my parent’s house. She didn’t say anything for the longest time. She cried and I put my hand on her shoulder. I remember her slurring through apologies but I only felt as though I was the one that should be apologizing.

I haven’t used my voice in twenty-seven days.

silence and time,
have a way of healing
the deepest of wounds.

no matter
how deep
or how broad.

Asheville, North Carolina

Sat, 29 Oct 2011 01:37:00 -0400

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29TH, 2011.

I was weary and wary of writing you back, because when your words reached me we were at the same place and time, and I was scared, suddenly. I thought I saw you, actually, and I called, and the head turned and was not yours, and I felt relief. Why? I guess you had to be there.

I saw a billboard for here so here I went, intrigued as I was by this place, but this place in another time, a space I hoped to reach the ghost of, yet. The drive is not long, and I grew tired of stay and still. Nashville is both large and small, not a wonder we didn’t wander upon each other, and yet I wonder, still, but that wonder ceases to pass because that place is a coven of communities, small in their largeness, insular in their charm and character, and I am beyond it, because I saw a billboard, and I thought mountains in Fall with the ghost of Fitzgerald was were I should be, and thus, and so, east I drove, to this.

Zelda died here, you know, it’s true, and I don’t know if I identified more with her or with him, but theirs is truly a lost love, and I sought to find it amongst this brown and bronze and orange and gold, this falling foliage signifying everything and signaling nothing and singing silence. I want to remember our own flings and flights faulted in fits and starts, but I find myself drawn to this and here.

But you, and thus, I remain, an unshort pace from your face, to sit on a balcony storied yet unknown. Here. There is a place, The Grove Park Inn, where Fitzgerald stayed while Zelda was kept away, and one night he jumped off the balcony into the pool below and broke his arm. I wish to sit, just there, and there I will, for today and the next or unless and until someone kicks me out, writing with and in my notebook and seeking to commune, and if you show up over my shoulder I’ll sigh and smile, but I’ll send you words either way, these words, these:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.

Nashville, Tennessee

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 10:13:55 -0400

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 23RD, 2011

I came to this place thinking I would finally find you. But it seems I am either too late or a dollar short. I can’t decide which.

I walked on streets that seemed to carry the weight of your shoulders, hoping we’d cross paths and finally be reintroduced to a voice that has eluded our ears for so long. But I didn’t walk the right streets.

I drank whiskey and familiarized myself with the tiny cracks in the walls, thinking I’d hear your footsteps echo in a back alley. But I listened to the wrong cracks.

We’ve been moving for so long that it seems the planet has stopped rotating altogether. I always have to ask someone what day it is and look to the sky to find a sun or a moon.

So I have to ask myself where you have gone from here and how long I must stay put before the soles of our shoes slap against conjoining ground. A week? A month? I can’t decide.

I’d ask you to tell me but I know that the answer eludes you as well.

I’ve never found a place to call home, but at least for a while, Nashville will have to do.

Nashville, Tennessee

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 18:05:50 -0400

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2011

I sat in St. Louis for a decade, it seems, but it was only four days as it turns out. Time passes so achingly slow when you simply sit and let it pass and don’t move with it. I wasn’t going to write you anymore, I had resolved to will myself to stop caring, to be with myself and toss any thoughts of kicking the same gravel with you, to find satisfaction in solitude. My resolve on that resolution rendered another revolution south, drawn by drawl to a place once achingly hot now rendered red and golden and brown, leaves bright and blown in the climax of the phoenix’s season, it seems.

It was a short drive here through forests and fall to find this place, to be pulled here as so many are and have been and will be, drawn by a dream and a song. To dance with muses preserved in stone, to sleep in the shadow of the Parthenon, to trip down alleys alone and drink with heroes sung and unsung but never recognized and seldom known. To stumble down Broadway and jingle coins in an open guitar case at the feet of a busker who came here with nothing and stayed with less. To stand on the banks of the Cumberland and to know that this is a place to dream and to feel, but not to forget. You can never forget, here, you can only misplace moments in your mind until the river or the whiskey or a broken guitar string finds them again and pulls them out and smacks you in the face with them and forces you to look back as you walk forward. To realize that dreams are precisely this: looking back while walking forward, and hoping you don’t walk into a wall or a pole or some other concrete thing.

And I remember December and poetry composed with sleepless nights that drifted to morning and fractured thoughts filtered through fog, and how brave we were in those days. Perhaps we will be, again. It’s possible you still are, and I already am. These things are only ever seen in the bottom of the glass, it seems, in afterthoughts and retrospect too nostalgic to represent reality any more than a caricature drawn at dusk.

I cannot say I don’t long to share the same air with you, to match steps on paths unparted. And I cannot say that mere words bring solace or bridge any amount of distance between souls. These miles file away all that we were and could be and are, and seek to split the difference between thought and process and I can no longer pretend I am flying to you, that you are some lofty goal I’m floating toward, because the wind blows me back and forth and through but never, it seems, to you. And so I must muster the strength to bluster my way over the next hill and around the next bend and remember what it is, and why. You are always there but never here, and perhaps that is as it should be. I’ve stopped questioning this farcical fate. Perhaps some errant breeze will blow us into and towards, and perchance our paths will cross, and there will be no need for letters forming syllables spilled and split by spaces. Perhaps. If so, until then, these words will have to do.

Antlers, Oklahoma

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 14:10:45 -0400

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 16TH, 2011

I wonder where you’ve been and where you’ve gone, leaving me with nothing but questions and a thirst that can only be quenched with a train of thought that only your set of rails can lead me on.

It’s been 7 days. Or 168 hours. Or 10,080 minutes.

I bought a wristwatch at a truck stop just before hitting the Oklahoma border. It has consumed me. Miles have turned into hours and minutes, spinning my eyes around.

We’re all just clocks,
feet in time with
‘ticks’
and
‘tocks’.

I thought it’d be easy,
running from this
or that,
acting
greedy.

But, wallets become thin,
I’ve spent so much
of myself,
for just
a grin.

Brownsville, Texas

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 10:43:56 -0400

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 9TH, 2011

Texas is a barren state. I don’t know why I decided to come back here. I should have learned my lesson.

I guess a part of me wanted to experience the Gulf from a different perspective. I wanted something more from the waves and from the sands. Here seemed like an obvious choice because the people here have nothing more than waves and sand.

I sat between the airport and the border, watching planes land and take off, while turf wars raged just a short distance away. It’s funny how one can get used to the crackle of gunfire. I used to jump with every burst, but now it’s just background noise.

The border police drive trucks through the dunes at night, their spotlights racing along the fences and concrete dividers. What happens between them and the illegals means nothing to me. I want no part of Matamoros.

St. Louis is far. If I leave now, I may be able to intersect with you there or somewhere close. Hopefully close. Dreadfully close.

I’m getting that feeling of hopelessness again. It’s a pit in my stomach. Maybe it’s the gunfire. Maybe I have too much salt in my skin. Maybe it’s the food or the drugs. I can’t be sure.

“Anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strength.”
- Charles Spurgeon

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 17:54:00 -0400

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 4TH, 2011.

I couldn’t stay in Seattle, as I suppose was the same for you, I felt myself sinking into the rocky soil there and I feared slipping in the crash and surf and losing my way for want of shelter, so I turned away from the setting sun in hopes I’d rise in the east with it. But I wearied of treading trails I’d already left in dust and blaze, so 90-East shot me on through Montana and North Dakota and shades and fades of blur and I am finding fall here, gold and crimson in Minneapolis where there are trees and smiles and an exuberant excess of warmth that must be designed to counteract and compromise for the cold that will soon set in. There aren’t enough leaves yet for piling up and jumping in but just enough to crunch under foot at remind and call to mind the brittle beauty of mortality and cycles and we are circling.

I swung on swings at Marcy Playground and dropped in on a block party and danced and drifted in the streets until midnight pretending I was a neighbor and it was a beautiful night to be one. And there were trees, and the waving brave branches sang to me a song I thought I’d forgotten and I only knew half the lyrics, but they were the important ones, the ones that reminded me of you. The water lends a lightness to the crisp air otherwise burnt by the falling. I could just swim in this season, but you are south and I am not sure and I’ve waited to long for purple rain that never came but with effort and that effort produced little, anyway, in the way of soothing this spirit and stalling this soul that spins still, and spins storied and sleepless. And you are not here, and any purple rain that fell would only remind me that once I wanted to see you laughing in it, and perhaps I will, on some brighter day ungray and untilted by metaphors strained to the breaking point, to reach you somehow and see the difference between fraught and fractured things mixed with the merely meddlesome.

Although my soul was set on spending fall in New England your words have me thinking the better plan is to head south, to connect common concrete and barter broken smiles and stolen stories, and so I will plan ahead for once, and aim true and place a pin on the map and point myself towards it. And as I have an artistic appreciation for arches, and the delicate balance they contend and convey, I’ll turn south and there, with St. Louis as a gateway to grander adventures, and a hope that when I reach that spot in roughly a day or so, barring any misfortune unpredicted, you will find me there sitting or standing or sleeping, and you’ll call my name and I’ll remember that it’s mine. In the meantime these words will have to do, these words that flow and falter ahead of my winding and winded whisper.

New Orleans, Louisiana

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 17:26:19 -0400

MONDAY, OCTOBER 3RD, 2011

Seattle still holds so much of my heart. I can’t stand the fact that I left. What I wouldn’t give to look upon those rocky shores once more is obscene. I hope those gentle tides are treating you well, as they treated me.

New Orleans is a strange place. It feels so abstract and surreal, like cellophane wrapped around the image of something familiar or a memory that sits heavy along the lining of the rib cage.

I’ve missed the sun. The clouds that followed me through Texas left me thirsty for warm light.

I’d tell you what I have been doing, but I’m afraid that even I don’t know. Like I said, this place is strange and it has a tendency to leech the time right from my wrist. I went here and there, sampling the native foods like alligator and Cajun cooked medleys-

I drank from local breweries
and fraternized
with men in suits,
that looked like gamblers
and hustlers- I made them laugh
and sang their songs as though
they were my own. I played them
like fiddles and left,
before the sun rose.

Tonight I’ll wander around the French Quarter and wait for some harlots to take me for all I’m worth. Or maybe I’ll steal a boat and head out to sea. I might even find myself a Bayou Priestess and practice voodoo on poor souls that cross our path.

See, I told you this place had an effect on people.

Seattle, Washington

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 02:33:34 -0400

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2011.

I am drifted and dusted. I mused and meandered around the great southwest, details not worth recounting. I grew tired of dry faces and dusty spaces in arid places and turned north and away. I don’t know how much longer I can do this, how much stronger I am than now, but every day proves this and otherwise. I ended up here, and have been here, I sense and determine, because I am silently seeking a short-cut to you. So I shot to Seattle, where you were, once before, because a bit of me wanted something stained and storied, and I wanted to steal your story and soak in the stain of your past tense, and I wanted to see you in a grain of sand and feel you in a drop of rain and know I was walking the same streets and seeing the same sites you did, and that would make us somehow closer. It didn’t, and it doesn’t, but at least I’m in damp instead of dry.

I spent so long, and I’m blue and burnt out but I’m burning still and I tried to forget, to forget everything and just see forward to open and road, and I ended up here. I thought I was chasing you but it wasn’t you at all. Guess you’d have to be there, and you were, but I didn’t feel you in this coastal clime of cursed creation. Humanity exhausts me, the flower and fern of it, and I wanted to get lost, and I did. And I tried to forget, and I did. Both of which were you. I remembered hours and forgot days. Remembered moments but forgot ours. Paths danced across but not touched. Words I cannot ignore, words I cannot help but leave you with.

Odessa, Texas

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 21:23:20 -0400

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 24TH, 2011

quarter slots and
coffee pots,
half full with
lost hopes and dreams
of those who,
wandered here before-

let’s lose all our money
and beg for forgiveness
from our wives
and from our lovers

for we are just wretches
on the road towards,
maniacal behavior
and late nights
breathing smog,
as thick as an ocean

my blood is too thick
for texas

van windows fog
while we sleep-
our ghastly slumber
taking us from real life,
to where, we want to be
slipping across shadows
and into places,
we know we can get ahead

i’ll pray to whoever will listen
to save me from myself

to save me from myself

Ending up in this place was never something I planned on. As I presume, Bakersfield wasn’t necessarily a thumbtack on your atlas.

But here we are. Or rather, here I am.

I’ve always been fond of the name Odessa and I can’t really say why. It was just one of those towns or cities that I had heard of as a young boy and my soul was always drawn here, like the proverbial moth to flame.

But my wings are still intact. I have flown low as I have also flown high, swerving amongst the locals and staying in the gutters with the homeless and the drunks. Where I will go from here, I still don’t know. It’s starting to wear on my heart that we can’t find a common ground or place.

Maybe it’s just one of those things that are never supposed to connect. Our segments in life will always run parallel to one another, never crossing in the middle or even coming close to touching. To say it effects me is something of an understatement. I’d want nothing more than to hear your voice, rather than read your words.

And words are something entirely different. Like this is all supposed to make sense to us, when we write back and forth. When we sit down and find a spare moment in our lives to convey some sort of message. I always feel as though the messages we really want to leave can never seep through our fingers fast enough and they are just caught in between the bones and the blood vessels, forever becoming stagnant and calcifying.

I’ve stopped looking for something important. I’ve stopped wondering what air you breathe and what dirt moves under your feet. I’ve stopped thinking about the places in between that we’ve both seen, because really, it’s nothing more than another thumbtack in a map that just stays folded until we need it.

I’ve stopped unfolding my map because I know that when it stays as such, it’s the closest that I’ll probably ever get to you.

Bakersfield, California

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 23:40:55 -0400

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2011

I’m fighting frustration and a faint but quaint and quiet fear that I’ve ceased merely meandering and since started chasing you, and chasing memories and past and other failed and faded and fallen things. I stayed solid in Salt Lake, waiting for your words, but I got restless and listless and that place holds nothing for me without familiar smiles, so after a few days I headed out, and tried to remind myself I wasn’t traveling to you, that wasn’t my intention in the flaming instant I started out, and it shouldn’t become my intention now, my intention and my motivation and my driving force should remain what it was from the outset, so I set out to continue so, and had this thought in a flash of a moment and pulled off the side of I-15 and read Kerouac again and he spoke to me and he wrote:

“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”

And with that I knew and I know that this is my gravel and spit, and I decided to steer towards Bakersfield because I wanted to walk the streets thereof, and that. I heard the song in a bar, or on a street corner, or in my mind, and it was just a place I felt I should be, and I am, and the song is romanticized, and that’s all I’ll say about that.

I found work in a soup kitchen of sorts in Salt Lake that fed my stomach and soul with food and stories and smiles, and for that I am grateful. These miles of dust and desert have weighed on me and I am weary. Wondering what, and where. It is nice to see the sun set rather than rise for a change, and have there be epicness in that view, with those hues. I should mention when I read your words of your rambles in Vegas, I was there as well. I cannot say I did not seek you out, but friendly faces and smiling spaces are seldom lit by neon. I searched but did not dream of seeing you, merely shoved enough chip and lip to press onward to this place where I pause to toss words in your direction, with hope they and I and you will land in the same place.

Las Vegas, Nevada

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 17:21:32 -0400

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 12TH, 2011

I fear these words will reach you too late, as the desert winds have held my soul for the last two days and I’ve been lost within a bevy of artificial light and neon signs that beg for my hard earned money.

I fear, that our paths will miss each other and that the feathers in which we surf the wind will take us in opposite directions once again. Myself, possibly south and you, possibly further west.

I was able to get some money together by helping Maurice sell some art next to one of the local shops a few days a week. He’s not bad, but then again, my eye for art has never been as keen as my eye for a long stretch of road.

I should have known that staying in one place for too long was going to make my skin crawl. Permanency has its ups and downs and the downs always outweigh the ups when it comes to city lights and the suffocation of concrete and unfamiliar voices.

The road has a voice of its own and it feels so familiar within my bones. It vibrates inside of me, like a blacksmith hitting an orange-hot shard of metal, the tiny waves carving his arms and hands into strong roots and gnarled experience.

I plan on heading further south with my small portion of winnings, putting my thumb at my waist and relying on the kindness of others. Hopefully, I can reach Albuquerque, New Mexico unscathed and maybe by then the words that I’m typing now, the ones that I’ve been repeating to myself over and over again, will find you on some unidentified level, and you will head south as well.

Will our shoes find familiar gravel to push between them? Or will we once again get lost along back country roads and endless double yellows?

“Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.”
- George Bernard Shaw

Fort Collins, Colorado

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 23:14:32 -0400

I’m pushing, and pushed. A thousand miles of flat and same as I shoved forward, leaving salt and surf with a brazen and brutal recognition that cornered my soul and caged my mind and choked my heart. A thousand restless miles and sleepless smiles I’ve burned as I realized despite this grand adventure, in your eyes is the only place I yearn to be.

I blew out of Memphis wishing wings on my car despite the foolish fear I’d choke on feathers, and entire states like Arkansas and Missouri became a blur of sweat and rust and dust. I crossed and uncrossed arbitrary lines conceived but unwritten, lines that divide names of places that are the same on either side and continuous regardless. Iowa and Nebraska and Kansas and temporary road closures that send me grasping to locals who ask where I’m headed and look vexed and perplexed when I can only reply “west.” By some measure of luck and legerdemain I managed to merge onto the proper highway, the road that leads eventually to the Great Salt Lake where we can stop treading water and finally float.

Around and about Cheyenne I discovered exhaustion so I tiptoed south, tired of flat and seeking change of topography and elevation and life, and maybe some beer and some sleep. I’ve found a Starbucks to negate my need for caffeine and connection. I may head up Linden Street and pause at New Belgium Brewing, or I may fall asleep where I sit, an undetermined probability. I’ll rest here, somewhere, then, but I’ve only about 500 miles to go, so stay, and these words will shoot ahead of me but I’ll reach you tomorrow barring any mental, physical, emotional, or mechanical breakdown.

Salt Lake City, Utah

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 19:26:26 -0400

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 2ND, 2011

I have arrived. Whether intact or not, is still the real question. I am broken and weary, needing a warm bed and cold shower. I need to wash myself from my own skin, fearful that I have contracted some sort of virus that is spreading throughout my nervous system, begging me to give up the ghost that is self awareness along roads that have no names.

You seem to be doing well and I have smiled many times thinking of you. To think that our only link is gravel and restless eyes is something that puts my knotted veins at ease.

I sold nearly all of my belongings just to be able to afford the plane ticket that brought me to the vast land of sobriety, a notion that has not settled well with me, but will be something that I have to deal with. Maybe a sober liver will clear my mind, although, I doubt it.

Maurice has been gracious enough to let me stay with him. I may have mentioned him once or twice before but at this current juncture, I am unsure of a lot of things. This city is out of place in my mind because I have been here before, but never under these circumstances. It’s like visiting a house you once lived in but instead of your memories, they have all been replaced with people you’ve never met and furniture you’ve never touched.

I hope you keep finding your way closer to the west. Be safe and be kind for the road will not return the favor. It would rather swallow you whole than watch your back.

Memphis, Tennessee.

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 02:22:00 -0400

TUESDAY, AUGUST 30, 2011.

You begged for west, and west it is. I need furtherance anyway, it seems. The sky merging and fusing into the sea in one melting vision of blue was more than my soul needed. Smiles from strangers are sweet but a friendly face would be nice. I have precious little paper to fling at wings and I doubt pilots are very poetic, though I might be surprised. So roll along I shall and my coming may be slow but I’m hopeful your going will be slower, still, and we’ll meet out there in the middle, somewhere. A comforting coalescence of wing and wheel.

My eyes found focus and my tires found I-40 and westbound and Tennessee. I napped in Nashville and wanted to stay but a night and day was all I could manage. I do find comfort in a town where you can feel at home walking around with the neck of your guitar banging the back of your knees. The air there is stagnant, and sticky, but sweet. It tastes a bit like solace, or at least the aching need for it. Must be so many musicians’ inspiration. I sat a spell at the corner of Broadway and 2nd with a solo guitarist bent on making it there. I requested Me and Bobby McGee and gave him a half-hearted and apologetic accompaniment in harmony and rhythm (on the bars that struck G). He split the rake of bills dropped in his sidewalk case haphazard by tourists, which bought me a beer or two and gas to move on.

As I headed west the pavement changed as if subtly and slowly altering the ground beneath my feet, and the air feels denser and dirtier here. The river doesn’t produce the same dynamic and dramatic calm the ocean did and I feel I must move forward before I find myself mired in the muck. This city is beautiful but the beauty is buried under detritus of dirt, and I’m wary of pausing lest I be corrupted, but I’m called to the Delta and her decadent depression. These blues I feel are sickly cyclical and set in slowly and this is the place for that. But I’m aware of time and bells that toll and so forth, so I’ll move further west, tomorrow being my next today, because time is all we have, this time and these words, which I blow to you as I drive towards new seas of bluster and blister and flat and gold.