The aroma of stale cigarettes wafts up from the center console, while one is still burning in my left hand. I’m not wearing a seatbelt, all the windows are half down, and it’s 85 degrees. A few pre-rolled joints levitate in the mouth of the deer skull wedged between the windshield and the dashboard. A bag of peanuts is tucked under my leg, and stale coffee sits in the cup holder to my right. The radio is running its automatic function, cycling through FM stations, stopping for three seconds at each, then moving to the next. Cosmically encoded messages fall into my lap as I speed down Highway 80. My stash of bud is tucked in an air-tight jar and shoved inside the rear hatch of my 2004 Subaru Outback. To hide it, I removed the door frame's plastic interior, inserted the jar into the frame, and reattached the plastic interior. You can slam that hatch as hard as you want, and it won’t budge.   

“Go west,” said an old man hunched over his whisky like a dog with its bone. One of the many images that flash in my mind— but I can’t tell if it happened or not.  

‘The sun must know where it’s going,’ I thought. But before I left town, I stopped by Richard’s place, and we paced the driveway, kicking up dust, throwing around platitudes, and whistling mystic jazz. We both knew the trajectory was a long shot, but he believed in solutions—not likelihoods. Phenomena happen every day, and the odds are that we’re really bad at odds, so fuck it. He knew I was testing the limits, and he also knew that’s the only way things would change. One cat goes out on a limb, and to everyone’s surprise, it doesn’t break. Or, it does, and he’s a goner. Either way, something changes, something is learned, something happens. 

Small towns are not for young people in rebellion. Small towns are for retirees, hippies in hiding, white conservatives, and cosmic burn victims. Boredom is often called the devil's playground because the mind starts to wander and lose focus. The lines between law and liberty start to play tricks on the tireless, head-heavy paranoia patrols that are keeping your town neat and free from blackholes. A few select lonely folks with hopeful smokes in the front pocket of their aprons. Then you just have to keep up with the trials of old-timers, who are there to be ignored because the gambit doesn’t get run by listening to the warning signs. Your soul has to lead the way. Thanking everyone to their face and promptly forgetting their drunk, jaded advice. 

Rock and Roll is Sisyphus. Rock and Roll is letting it be. Rock and Roll is trusting your intuition. Rock and Roll is practicing your craft. Most importantly, Rock and Roll transcends right and wrong. Every note is the truth. Censorship is the great evil of creativity, and you just have to be there. That is, be here. ‘There’ is the illusion. This is partly why I never understood those old-timers, the ones claiming they made it to Nirvana and cut a rug with Jimmy. I felt that ‘being here now’ suggested dissociation from the past and future. Nostalgia, then, became an enemy of being present in the moment. So dropping everything, facing west, and going for broke was ideologically sound, in my view. As someone who had always suffered from being ‘too in his head,’ I found I had a knack for wrapping hooliganism up with philosophical elucidation that made it feel like killing myself slowly was a sympathetic reflection of post-industrial capitalism in modern America. “Pull on your finger, then another finger, then cigarette." — the thin white duke 

*

I pulled off the road somewhere between Omaha and Denver and found myself in a dirt-road ranch town. They had a couple of shops, a post office, and a bar. I pulled up at twilight, and the bar was the only thing lit, besides the blinking yellow light hanging across the abnormally wide road. Outside the bar was a horse post, but no horses. Inside, some people stood around high tops, but I only caught a glimpse of their brown cowboy boots and Wranglers from underneath the door. I trotted out my Washburn guitar, sat on the steps of the general store, now in shadow, and played some songs for the dead-quiet street. But when I caught a glimpse of some ghosts through the windows of the shop, I sped up my serenade and boogied. I still wasn’t used to being watched while I played. 

After a couple of days in Denver, where I primarily wandered the streets and searched for occult books in local bookstores and libraries, I decided to move on. But I was curious about the ranch town I had stopped at a few hours back. So I took 76 back to meet 80 and kept my eyes peeled to the left for the exit I had taken. To my surprise, I drove back, nearly to Omaha, and didn’t see it. So I turned around and figured I would find it on my way back through(for the third time). But I never found it. It vanished like Aspidochelone, sinking into an unknown dimension. I began to disassociate as I kept driving west into the Rockies. There were a few times that I was so close to the edge of a cliff or staring at an oncoming truck and thought, ‘If I just flinched…If I just moved my hand six inches while holding this steering wheel… I’d kill myself.’

*

Somewhere in the Nevada desert, I rolled my bones out toward the desolate horizon. Once off the highway, I turned my lights off so potential tails or patrols wouldn't notice me. Out of sight of the road, I crawled into the back of the Subi and lay out in my sleeping bag. The distance from the back of my passenger seat to the back hatch was exactly 6 feet and 1 inch. I know because I could stretch out perfectly, touching my head and the soles of my feet without wiggle room or ballooning. Next to me were my Korg electric piano, the guitar, a duffel bag, and a grocery tote. Above me, the skylight that let me drift into the Milky Way before I was swept into unconsciousness. But the quiet, desolate night was soon disrupted by the slow, sporadically increasing interjections of yips, yaps, and barks. Louder and louder they grew until it was clear that I was their object of inquisition. 

Circling my vehicle, sniffing, scratching, yapping…a pack of coyotes was trying to find any soft spot in the belly of the mechanical beast. At first, I was thankful for the metal cage I was safely wrapped up within, but then I became annoyed by their incessant badgering. So I shone a light out my winders(sic) into their eyes, and they quickly dispersed, having learned that life was still kicking from within. For no good reason, I felt I had bested them. But I also knew that if I had been without a land-ship, I would, at that moment, be in a crazed adrenaline rush, having to fend off some wild ankle-biting dogs. Still, as it was, I was tucked into my sleeping bag, falling in love with Camelopardalis, or the remnants of some long-dead stars. 

When morning came, I slipped out of the back hatch, and my clothes then wandered off into the desert. Not far, still out of sight of the road, but within a stone's throw from my car. I had never been entirely naked on the bare earth and under the open sky until then— something had always been between. “I am Homo-Sapien,” I said. Lanky, limber, smooth, and pale, I felt starkly contrasted against the rough and cracking desert ground. I was willing to do anything to free my mind, even though I barely knew what that would entirely mean. I knew that I couldn’t trust any of my assumptions or associations; I had to strip my mind in the same way I did my body– standing there, naked in the rising desert heat. 

*

Soon, to my misfortune, Las Vegas began calling my name. It was like a cold breeze on the back of my teeth, sending little electric pulses into my cochlea, where it was projected into my synapses like a memory. The dry lands in the southwest are unlike anywhere I have ever been. One felt a hurtful vulnerability radiating from its desolate beauty. But it also felt like there was real space to be had, open skies where you could disguise your disease behind the topographical awe. Then, growing on the horizon, came a dusty grey mass. Somehow more desolate than the desert, Las Vegas felt impenetrable upon first contact. It may have been because I didn’t have money or directions, but there wasn’t so much as a watering hole in sight that could cradle my thirst or give rest to the weary. 

Somehow, I still managed to find the strip. 

I walked and walked, along the way, high noon, and likely 100 degrees. I saw music halls, bars, magicians, Superman cosplayers, Marilyn Monroe drag artists, gift shops, fortune tellers, a preacher, and crackheads; I sloshed my way past each of them until I fell in front of the doors at Oscar’s. The sign said **BEEF - BOOZE - BROADS** I knew I was in the wrong place, so I immediately turned my ass around and headed back down the strip to my car. When swiftly out of the shadow, near the edges of the Nevada sun, a woman approached me. What she looked like doesn’t matter— but her eyes. Her eyes were a dark, browning yellow on the edges, fading into dull black centers. 

She began to shout at me, “You weren’t supposed to make it this far! You don’t belong here!”  

Over and over, she shouted it. As I walked toward her, I was determined that nothing would shake my resolve. I looked into her disturbing black-and-yellow eyes and softly said, “Aw, Honey, I love you too.” 

I sighed in relief as I saw Las Vegas disappear in my rearview mirror, but I couldn’t shake that woman’s words, no matter how much smoke I inhaled or forced out from my car’s exhaust. My body was something to be drug(sic) about while I searched for something real. I hadn’t had a meal in a few days. I spent my money on gas, coffee, cigarettes, peach tea, and peanuts. 

Los Angeles appeared like a holy storm rising from the coast. I didn’t know the roads, and as I said, I didn’t have a map either. I had been loosely following road signs and my intuition; that wasn't about to stop because a metropolis blocked my way to the ocean. I weaved my way through the tangled web of streets like a blood clot, looking for the heart.  

I don’t know where I landed… it was some kind of state park, I assume, but I found a parking lot on the beach, facing the Pacific, and cut the engine; the journey west was complete. 

I sat there, motionless, unable to process what I was feeling. I pulled out my Bowie knife from behind my seat. I took the sheath off and gripped its leather handle in my left hand. I began to weep. Whatever had gotten me to this moment didn’t matter. I became momentarily blind. I was a frenzied, cracking, crumbling pulse of panic. I figured if Elliot Smith could deliver himself three to the heart, I could, too. But as I sat there, in a stinking mess of anxiety and loneliness, I just gripped the knife tighter. Soon I realized that somewhere between the Rockies and the Pacific, or between starvation and exhaustion, I’d lost the nerve.