Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Step One Underway!

You've all read it before-- I have persuaded myself that my writing ability would greatly benefit from getting out there and garnering real-world experiences, no insult to famous agoraphobic science fiction author Philip K Dick. In that vein I have given notice on my life in Los Angeles and am hitting the road, taming the interstate, lettin' the rubber roll, beginning right after the July 4th holiday.
Where will I go? Where else? North. It's summer after all, and I am indisputably temperate. I will always follow the cool and comfortable climate.
With luck I'll find the cool climate and the WAY cool places situated in close proximity to one another... but if I don't, well, I'll sniff it out, find it and chide it for thinking it could hide from me. Silly Cool!

Where will I stay? I have several irons turning cherry red in the fire. The least wanted way to go would be the hotel/motel route, where I give up all semblance of independence and pay to have a uniformed employee turn down my bed and put a bow around my commode. I'll accede to that choice only when my ripened armpits kill small flying insects at 1o paces or when a particularly moving episode of Hell's Kitchen is on.
A far more preferred homestead would be the earned bed, where I use any one of my unique talents in exchange for a night's rest (or a night of passion, but I'm just saying...) and a warm breakfast in a new friend's home. That scenario will occur with alarming scarcity, I'm afraid. At least until I drop that extra 25 I've been lugging around on my ass.
Until they get too pebbly I plan to spend a number of days on a number of beaches, digging a number of my special holes.
You may know the ones of which I speak, if you have fallen into one of them. If it's an unpatrolled beach then that is a fantastic setting for sleep.
I'm taking a tent and air mattress along (but no pump... I wanna have to earn that soft night's rest) and I can imagine regularly pulling off the roadside and 30 feet into the woods for a few quick sawstrokes. That, plus the old standby of crashing in my station wagon at some desolate rest stop will quite possibly make up the bulk of my sleeping arrangements.
The point is, it doesn't matter. That's the beauty of homelessness-- I can't get lost. Just pitch a tent and voila! Honey, I'm home!

Why would I drop the life I'm living and do such a thing? I have asked myself that very question, friends, and my answer is simple: for the first time in my adult life, I have no major responsibilities. My daughter is grown and on her own, I am unmarried and unattached, and my business can travel with me. I own no property and have sold off most of my possessions.

Holy fuck. Dare I say part of me is petrified about this impending change?

I know I have fallen into a familiar routine. One could almost call it a rut. A rut yes, but a deceptively nice one. I have my soft bed and comfortable chairs; my television and computer; my regular parade of friends. I fear if I don't shake things up I will be doomed to atrophy and boorishness-- two conditions which, if possible, scare me more than dropping everything I know and love and taking off to 'find myself'.

So off I go.

Right now I've made no provisions to access the Internet from the road, so I may not be writing online for awhile. But never fear, I will still be writing... the old-fashioned way, with a pen into a notebook. Hopefully when it comes time to transcribe I won't be shocked to discover I can no longer read my own handwriting. Looking at recent shopping lists and notes to friends describing my current whereabouts I fear this may be a real problem-- I recently picked up '10 pounds of potatoes' at the store when what I wrote was 'lose 10 pounds at Pilates'.

There's always videologging. I'll have my requisite Flip camera by my side, though without a way to empty the filled hard drive I'll be limited to 60 minutes of chat for the whole saga. A problem, because I can fill the damn thing up with descriptions of the gear I pack before I ever hit the road. Ahh, well. Guess I'll just have to edit myself, though if you've read any of this blog you'll know I'm not very good at editing in any form. In fact, after my first read-through on a rough piece of mine I'm likely to add words, not subtract them. So yes, my math skills suffer as well. A good enough reason in itself to go on walkabout... or in my case, driveabout.

It's not the first time I've taken to the open road, but I must admit, it's the very first time I have planned the trip without an associate, a travel buddy, a compadre by my side. So if I screw it up I have nobody to blame but me. Knowing that, it's very likely that I will pack too much and have to abandon things along the way. Like the La-Z-Boy.

Okay, you know I'm not bringing a La-Z-Boy. Or the turkey deep fryer. Or even the portable bathroom. But in the beginning of this concept I did rassle with the idea of buying a motorhome and doing the trip from the comfort of my own highly cramped house on wheels. "It'll save on motels" I reasoned with myself. And it would. But in doing the math, I found I couldn't negotiate the 'Gallons per Mile' figure into a long distance trip. No, not miles per gallon... those suckers burn up the fuel like a space shuttle launch. A fill-up on a Winnebago is roughly the same as the annual budget of Nesdrovia. Ooh, I got a joke for you:

An idiot enters a coffee shop which is holding a prize drawing-- on the bottom of every cup of coffee is a ticket. She finishes her beverage, looks at the prize and screams, "I won a motorhome! I won a motorhome!"
The waitress sidles over, a bit confused because she knows all the prizes are drinks and foodstuffs and looks at the prize. "I'm sorry, miss, but you didn't win a motorhome," and shows the next patron the ticket.
It said, WIN A BAGEL.

Ugh.

Egad.

I do hate-slash-love puns. Love to tell 'em, hate to hear 'em. But that one's stuck with me. Notice how I use the term 'idiot' instead of how I heard the joke originally told, which used the word 'blonde'? My flaxen ex-girlfriend trained me away from those, and now all of my jokes are as politically correct as possible. Even my one racist joke. I'm not a racist, but I love a good play on words, especially the ones which make you cringe. Tell me how racist I am after you read this one...

Why do African Americans wear shorts?
Because their knee grows.

I'll give you a minute. I'm sorry I'm not physically there right now so you can smack me one. Stupid, yes... racist, no. Right? Okay, back to the post.

So, no motorhome. I can't afford a $200 gasoline payment between LA and San Francisco. But maybe, if I decide to settle in a particular community, I can get one at that time and then just live in it, like they do here in LA. Really, they do! With unemployment crossing swords with foreclosure, buying an RV and living from curb to curb has become a new money-saving solution. It's happening so often that it has become a problem. There are so many RV's parked on the city streets in LA they've had to raise the street signs (no they haven't). In my last neighborhood the city changed parking regulations to prevent this occurrence, by making it illegal to park between 2 and 5 am (they did). The 'boat people's' solution? Sleep in the daytime and move around at night! The next morning it was still the same problem, only with entirely new RV's parked in front of my house. It's like the whole city is now playing a cruel game of musical chairs. God bless America.

I also briefly contemplated the idea of going the other route and getting a motorcycle. That would lighten the gasoline load considerably. But then I'd have to put all of my gear in a space the size of a fanny pack, not to mention drive for thousands of miles with, in effect, a vibrator between my legs. My bladder nixed the idea. I pondered getting a sidecar for the motorcycle in which to put all my stuff, but I just wasn't ready to say goodbye to my Fonzarelli-like coolness. So I decided to stick with my cool station wagon.

You say the cool train just left the station? Don't I know it. Well... I'll be kicky fly on the inside, okay?

Next: The packing lottery.