pith…

SUNDAY SERMON I

In these godless days of the year 2009, of which a quarter has already been gnawed away by the dredging samsara of day to day, week to week workhorse life and the lust for lifelessness swimming through glass after glass of liquid anesthetic and the drone of satiating conversation and howling guitars while The Blues seeps from morning pores like single-malt perfume and the leaden weight of another handful of crumpled beer cans and dollar bills in my back pocket keeps me holed up in the attic of my own reeling mind.

The Ides of March has slithered by with no trace and ill Irish luck only brings out the wrong kind of green-eyed girls who drink black beer and drool long winded lines of nothingness instead of telling fortunes and reading weathered palm lines with needled gypsy fingers the color of molasses.

Restless Sunday afternoon haze in my church where Jesus’ blood is oily haloed black coffee and his body burns down to a filter with a camel stamped on it, ah’ men. 

John Dick

THE HAUL FROM HELL. NIGHT TERRORS ON HIGHWAY 25 REVISITED. WILD-EYED PLOWING THROUGH THE HELL-FREEZING WHITEOUT. DELIRIUM IN THE DESERT. WELCOME TO TUCSON.

This wheels on fire, rolling down the road.
Best notify my next of kin, this wheel shall explode.
-The Band

A SHORT PREFACE TO MY ROAD, THE PULSING VEIN OF AMERICAN MOVEMENT & EXPANSION.

Sometimes it feels like I’ve spent a trucker’s career behind the wheel of an automobile careening out across desolate highways or winding through terrifying mountain passes. A son of this cracked asphalt generation, I have covered the wild breath of the lower forty-eight in just a chunk of my twenty-four years on this paved earth. For as long as I can remember I have been fueled by restlessness and an unquenchable thirst for careening through the bowels of this vast American landscape in a vehicle stripped to bare essentials yet filled with the necessary commodore that it takes to drive for inhuman numbers of hours and days. From the lobster trap lined harbors of Maine to the blizzard-riddled peaks of the Rockies down to the entirety of the strange California coast, I have traveled far and wide on four wheels.

As we sped out of Billings already pissed off and in the early stages of bodily and mental fatigue we were dead set on burning through the western chest of the states, scaling the entire east side of the rugged Rocky Mountain Range. Fed up with the brutal wintry weather of Canada and Colorado and everywhere in between we set our sights on the mild lowlands of the Southwest, intent on beginning a strong stint of camping in the desert and burrowing deep into the weird earth that stretches out just above Mexico. I had crawled though the underbellies of New Mexico and Arizona before and in the winter months they still upheld a comfortable arid air, even though they generally weren’t the sun-baked sandy plains that they were most of the year. Either way, we were sick of digging snow off of the now cursed Jeep and not being able to feel our fingers anymore. We?d ridden enough powder and taken enough painful high-speed crashes to satisfy our fiendish adrenaline cravings for a good while and we were ready to kick back and do some serious living outdoors and cooking over fire. We also couldn’t afford to live the ski bum life any longer because it’s so goddamn expensive.

I have little recollection of the second drive from Billings and Denver. I remember vividly doing it the first time in a shitty rented white Dodge Stratus because the intense disgust that boiled inside me from the Billings situation resonated so much. It had already been close to twenty hours since I’d picked Max up at the airport in Denver and then raced back up to Billings to pick up the Jeep from that scumbag mechanic Darrin. Memory jolts back to life when the dim lights of Denver reappeared in a foggy dusting of snow around rush hour. I hadn’t slept a wink since I’d seen them last and as I stared through the flurry-caked windshield with wild eyes my will to get out of the blizzard-riddled mountains grew as my nerves began to unravel. Although it’s just over 200 miles to the New Mexico boarder town of Raton the drive took something like eight dreadful hours.

The jeep was chugging along again like it was built to do and a little snow wasn’t about to stop us from getting out of the high country and into tumbleweed and cactus laden plains. I recall the traffic slowing to a debilitated crawl around Denver, where at all times at least two of the lanes were occupied by massive barreling plows, clearing the fresh snow that seemed to fall harder by the minute. Tuning the XM satellite radio to the weather channel only led to ugly predictions of blasting winter weather well through Colorado Springs and indefinitely down Highway 25. As we floated white-knuckled South the snow only fell harder as everything out of headlights reach disappeared along with any reasonably safe traction on the road. It should have been a blatant clue that it was stupid to keep going as we slowly passed hotels in Pueblo with packed parking lots of semis that stretched unmoving down the sides of off and on ramps. The radio was blaring warnings of whiteouts and chain-only vehicles on the road, deterring any further travel unless absolutely necessary. Our heads hummed with a feverish determination of already way too much medicine which was the only thing keeping us wide-awake and still relatively coherent.

At this point it became blindingly apparent that shit was hitting the fan, and it was frozen and white and engulfed everything outside of the ragtop Jeep. Past Pueblo the only hope of actually staying on the road was following a plow or semi close enough to trail behind the dim red blur of their taillights. Whenever we rolled the windows down a few inches to have a smoke a horizontal stream of cold wetness slapped our faces to remind us what insanity we were heading full-steam into. Slowly screwing our way up the last mountain pass that peaked at the New Mexico boarder a dark maelstrom whipped across the road that no longer had any recognizable form or direction. Blind sheer drops lurked on either side of the invisible crash guards and with a mix of mad ambition and strung-out foolishness we powered into the godforsaken blizzard. Terrifying hours peeled by behind the wheel, adrift plowing forward with hardly any sign of progress except the building anxiety and fear inside our vulnerable fortress on four wheels. The disoriented and hysterical zombie trance that one slips into in these kinds of conditions is not something that everyone can control and actually function under. It is impossible to convey the pure horror that is unavoidable when you drive through a veritable tunnel of swirling ice that takes any limited visibility and turns it into a severely disorienting vertigo. As the Jeep lurched onward up a winding road that wouldn?t reveal itself any more than ten feet ahead in the powerless headlights, a big metallic yellow sign appeared like a lighthouse that welcomed us to New Mexico. Even though the storm hadn’t eased up an ounce, we gained a minor sense of victory and maybe even relief since this meant that the road would finally begin to descend, hopefully dropping us out of the apocalyptic clouds we’d been battered by for eight blurry hours.

Raw nerves kept hands clamped on the wheel and eyes peeled open as far as humanly possible and a soundtrack of heavy rock ‘n’ roll covered up the sounds of the hammering squall outside as we ground our teeth and pressed on. Stopping for gas in the desolate little town of Las Vegas, New Mexico we must have seemed idiotic to the old weathered Native American attendant when we filled up the tank and asked for updated weather reports. His grim words and uneasy looks told us that you’d have to be both crazy and stupid to stay on the highway for the rest of the ungodly pre-dawn hours. Trucks have been sliding into the ditches like go-karts on the patches black ice out there. It’s near suicide, just wait until the sun comes up and you can at least see what the hell you’re driving on. Obviously dire predictions, we nodded like we would heed his warnings but after the serious shit-storm that we’d just gotten through over the peak of the boarder pass, it seemed like smooth sailing in our bleary heads. The snow had finally stopped falling and the suffocating darkness was turning slightly lighter shades of hazy grey as we desperately continued to fly South.

As the sun rose somewhere behind the curtain of ashen clouds that filled the morning I remember being behind the wheel as Tom Waits crowed from the stereo and finally vegetation began to break through the snowy crust and the pavement lost it’s icy sheen. Speeding up as the sky began to break apart, shedding some desperately needed light onto the earth that I was beginning to believe would stay frozen and dead until we hit Mexico, we hardly realized how fucking miraculous it was that we’d made it through the night alive. It must have been a fourth or fifth wind that we caught, induced by more medicine, that had finally put the remorseless snows and biting winds behind us. Sipping hot gritty gas station coffee as an Albuquerque that was coming alive like any normal weekday whizzed by, it was hard to even begin to conceive the ridiculous number of hours that we’d been awake. At that point it had been two full days and about 1600 miles since our bloodshot eyes had more than blinked. The stretch down from Albuquerque heading towards Las Cruces felt like family vacation drive compared to what lay behind us. Somewhere before we reached that strange bottomed out town. The Crosses we’d found what looked like an appealing shortcut over to Tucson, where the plan was to hole up in a cheap hotel for a night before we took to the arid mountains to camp for a while. On the map the angled scenic route seemed quicker and more interesting than the ass end of Highway 25, which we’d been stuck on since Northern Wyoming. Indeed, we thought, we were feeling halfway human again somehow so we?d take a little shortcut and smoke a joint along the way and really enjoy the welcoming desert landscape.

One hand naturally clutching the wheel, the other raising the celebratory stick to my lips, I wove back and forth with the two-lane detour as it wound like a scared rattlesnake through the dried rocky terrain. Although it seemed like such a good idea as we rolled it, I remember rethinking smoking it while the thing still rested smoldering in my tingling fingertips. For obvious reasons we laid off the grass for most of the first two days on that far-flung jaunt, and in retrospect we should have kept that philosophy until we finally stopped for a night. It couldn’t have been more than a handful of minutes before it crept into my utterly fatigued bloodstream and began pulsing through my on-edge and jacked-up body. Both hands grafted to the wheel at this point, the Jeep was driving me, somehow leading me down the twisting and dipping road. My head completely detached from my numb body the synapses in the back of my neck began firing in discombobulated and unexplainable sequences. Sagebrush became herds of buffalo stirring on the shoulder of the narrowing road, leafless trees jumped to life like scarecrows flinging themselves at the Jeep in my tainted peripheral vision. There is no way for me to look back and think about how long I was behind the wheel in this delirious stupor. I remember mumbling some vague words of unease to Max, who sat chain-smoking staring out the window with a similar burnt-out gaze, but he didn’t even try to comprehend it. Then it really hit me as I hopelessly tried to focus on the radiating asphalt in front of me, glanced at my dry white knuckles, while I realized that I had become completely detached from my senses. I couldn’t feel the wheel in my clammy hands, my foot no longer pushed down on the gas pedal, I wasn’t driving anymore and the epiphany came like an electric shock up my spine, somehow sparking the last functioning nerve in my brain. Another complete blank fills the spot where I somehow maneuvered the Jeep to the shoulder of the road in one piece. Crawling out of that wretched drivers seat my legs almost gave out but I managed to haul my debilitated body over to a rock where I sat down to hopefully regain any remote sense of physical or mental feeling again. Max sauntered up and handed me a bagel and told me I needed to eat it so I took a few bites and I felt like I was chewing on Styrofoam. The reality of how long we had been wide-awake had finally caught up, there was no way in hell that I could climb back into the driver’s seat and I couldn’t think straight enough to rationalize that Max probably shouldn’t either. Nonetheless, we were off again, Max hunched over the wheel with only about 200 miles to Tucson, nothing compared to the over 1800 behind us. Apparently my body and mind were desperately trying to shut down, but still popping back those magic little capsules I was determined to make it the short last leg, awake but still barely aware of that fact.

Rolling into Tucson Max expressed his relief in the fact that the small Indian children had stopped darting across the desert road as afternoon commuter traffic took their places. Knowing that something doesn’t exist doesn’t make it any less frightening to see due to the ill-advised reasons why it is there in the first place. We?d both been subjected to these strange hallucinations that jumped out of the landscape at us after letting it whiz by us for nearly sixty (60) hours, and realistically it was amazing that we made it through that brutal blizzard in one piece anyway. Completely burnt-out we rolled to a stop at the first obviously cheap motel we saw, which turned out to be more like an abandoned housing project. We paid a seedy guy cash and didn’t get a receipt, and although there were footprints on the walls, dead light bulbs, holes in the sheets and the stench of soggy cigarettes in the air, it was a place to finally lie down for a night.

John Dick

February 2009, almost a year after the Haul

SUPERBOWL XLIII, THE EPITOME OF THE ELECTRIFIED AMERICAN ARENA & THE DEBAUCHED WORLD OF SPORTS TODAY…WHAT ARE MILLION DOLLAR ADS GOOD FOR WHEN NOBODY HAS ANY MONEY?
…WELCOME TO THE GENERATION OF THE UNEMPLOYED & IN DEBT.

Yes, once again Super Sunday has rolled through and left a path of shameless overpriced advertising and a glittering display of the overzealous and exploded state of the National Football League. As expected, but not welcomed in many hopeful circles, the Steelers managed to stomp down the Cardinals with a powerful ground game and a few key field goals. The Steelers’ defense is what really won the battle for them as expected, managing to trump old man Warner when the deal really went down even though Roethlisberger’s stats were as comparably low as the numbers that trickle out of Wall Street lately. So now Pittsburgh has something to boast about with the most Superbowl trophies ever, which could possibly be the greatest claim to fame that the sliding industrial hub on the forgotten side of Pennsylvania holds. Who cares though, the big game and the season are over now, and there are bigger and more pressing things that need to be addressed these days.

Regressing into the omnipresent recession and the vertical battle that Obama has on his hands to pull America out of the murky trench that the last eight years have plunged us into, let’s forget the Superbowl already and put down the fucking remote. It appears that a good chunk of the general public at least watches the news once in a while and possibly even picks up a newspaper judging by the downward plunge of the economy and the sense of uneasy fear that is spreading like Black Death throughout them. There are damn good reasons that even the most densely ignorant and aloof people are counting their piggybanks and cutting back on trips to the drive-thru and Wal-Mart. Apparently the government can’t even print money nearly as fast as they spend it and the dollar is worth less than toilet paper in some countries. Everybody, including your bank, is sliding further into a bottomless pit of debt and the labor force across the board is being slashed and outsourced.

Now obviously I’m nowhere close to an economic expert, or even an avid amateur when it comes to Wall Street and numbers in general, but I can read and am immersed enough as a consumer and bartender/manager to see that money doesn’t stretch far these days. Constant banter about Stimulus plans that will send jolts of life and prosperity into the financial state of the nation sound more like deeper debt to China and a way to fool the stupid into thinking that everything is going to be all right. Our money is getting harder to earn every single day and seems to fly out of our hands and bank accounts faster than it would take to burn it all. Hold onto your billfolds folks. Stimulation is temporary bliss in a cold hard reality and the tides haven’t turned in the right direction yet. The ship is still sinking, learn to swim with the sharks or drown.

John Dick
Beginning of February 2009

BAD NEWS AT THE END OF A DOOMED MISTAKE OF A PRESIDENCY…

ISRAEL IS STILL BURNING, WHAT PALESTINIANS?…GAS UP NOW

…BUSINESS AS USUAL IN CHICAGO…RUSSIA STILL WANTS AMERICA TO CRUMBLE…GOOD LUCK BARACK…

The past year of our absent lord, Two Thousand and Eight, in this sliding American landscape will forever stand as a period of upheaval and an outrageous changing of the guards in my mind and in the written history of the great recorder. For nearly a year now I have been humping a personal crusade in the name of inner plight and restlessness with the ultimate goal that the wild road will lead me to one of those mythical crossroads of self-discovery. Well folks, whether I have reached that utopian sense of purpose and meaning, or not, in this senseless 21^st Century is as obvious as the fact that the American flag will forever be seen as tinder or toilet paper around the world. Except maybe behind the thick walls of Israeli government and military buildings with US embassies next door.

The airwaves are buzzing with news that Israel is putting the hammer down on those pesky native Palestinians that are still hanging around in the ghettos that they have been herded into and raped of their homeland in the name of the Holy soil and the long lasting allowance from the US to methodically dislocate and kill them off. The hub of the US oil wheel is on fire in the Gaza Strip, and waves of terror are rippling through the region while crude oil has already gone up $5 a barrel. Not even president-elect Obama will be able pull our oil splattered flag out of the Middle East before it burns to ashes just like it appears everything else in that implosive corner of the globe will eventually do. Unfortunately the region is tragically doomed and as a Nation we are invested over our heads and there is little room for hope in any sense. How’s that for a ray of sunshine on the last day of this year? Well, there is no sunshine in Portland at the ass end of December anyway…

With Obama on his way into the shit-storm that billows through Washington, Blagojevich is carrying the torch of corrupt Illinois politics by selling off the senate seat left open. Latest word out of the windy city is that they think everyone will forget about it if they slide another African American into his place. It is becoming clear that the long trail for crooked politicians may end in Washington, but it leads back winding to the corners of America and eventually to places like Crawford, Texas and Chicago, Illinois.

From Russia, an ex-KGB analyst and professor is predicting that in less than two (2) years America will fall into a splintering civil war fueled by economic collapse, all-out class war and intervening action by surrounding countries. His eerie predictions include the entire east coast bought out by the European Union, China will take the west, the central and northern plains states will absorb into Canada, Mexico will re-take the south, and Alaska will be conquered by Russia. The stone-faced prophecy gives a terrifying glimpse into a vague and frightening future where nothing is certain or safe in the disintegrating American system.

If that’s the news today, then tomorrow it will undoubtedly be worse, and who knows what the hell will be happening in 21 days when Barack is sworn in as the 44^th President of the United States. Indeed, there is change in the air, but unless Hope smells like burning oil that wafts in clouds from the Middle East and from Wall Street, there sure isn’t much to be optimistic about when the bell tolls midnight.

HAPPY NEW YEAR,

JOHN DICK

THE RANGER TAKES AN UNHOLY TURN …FUCK YOU BILLINGS & MAY TOP-TECH AUTO BURN DOWN INTO THE INBRED SOIL FROM WHICH IT SPROUTED.

A week in an off-the-map ancient ski town, Rossland, B.C., which lies just above the scrawny neck of Idaho, was a great escape from the over-trodden billion dollar-mountains we’d been riding the past few weeks. Parting with the couple who became our skiing, laughing and drinking companions, whose condo generously became our luxurious mountainside home, we raced back towards the American border.

Of course we were stopped, searched and hassled as we rolled back onto our native soil. Profiled…the Jeep packed to the gills with over-stuffed duffle bags, snow and camping gear piled to the canvas roof and two huge steel ammo containers full of spare parts, apparently two road-haggard young men can’t cross the border without raising suspicion anymore. Sure it would have been nice to stash some sweet, cheap B.C. bud back with us, but we weren’t stupid. We had nothing to worry about except the annoyance of a burly woman who couldn’t understand our heavy load, even after we told her we were on the road for an indefinite haul. Finally, after the beastly woman ripped everything out of the Jeep and threw it on the frozen concrete like a bear digging through a dumpster, we were reloaded and burning away from Canada. A stop in Whitefish for a few hours of sleep and a restock of what the border patrol was stiffing for and we were back screaming southeast across the Montana highways towards Colorado.

Starting before sunrise, we’d covered over four hundred miles on the familiar vein of highway 90/94 that cuts across the monstrous state of Montana, cruising carefree through the crisp sunny February day. But then it came down on us, the shit-storm began while I was pushing the Jeep on a straightaway just outside of Billings. There was a knock that came from under the hood like a ball peen hammer had been whipped against a tin shed and then suddenly the oil pressure gauge jumped down to zero. The engine cut out and every warning light on the dash flashed on as I drifted the powerless machine onto the shoulder to a halt. “What the fuck?” was the obvious reaction, the Holy Ranger had been running strong for some three thousand miles of brutal winter driving and then out of the great blue, wham, it drops cold…Dead, the engine won’t turn over yet there is nothing mangled or burning under the hood. AAA gets a tow-truck to us in one painfully long hour of baffled cursing and chain-smoking on the side of the desolate highway. The “mechanic” that the American Automobile Association recommends proves to be one of the biggest testaments to their bullshit reputation, and lands the Jeep in the hands of the most crooked, back-alley repair shop I’ve ever seen or heard of.

Our dealings with Top-Tech Auto start off on the normal level of inconvenience that comes with the backwards nature of car repair. By the time the Jeep gets inside the shop, it’s too late in the day to expect anything to get fixed or even a professional estimate, so we hole up in a cheap hotel on the industrial side of Billings. Filled with nothing but frustration and rage, our communication with Darin, the white-trash epitome of a low-budget “mechanic” degenerates down to weasely lying about his utterly dumbfounded attempts to fix the Jeep. For three nights we drink our disillusioned anger into submission in cheap hotels and even cheaper bars trying to ignore the suffocating desolation of Billings, the last place in the entire country to be stranded.

Three nights, three hotels and over three grand for a blown camshaft, and we’re still forced to rent a car to get down to Colorado so I can meet up with the family in Vail and Max can fly down to Florida for a beach binge. We leave Billings with the worst taste a town can leave in ones mouth, a bitter hatred towards a place all due to the bullshit that continually spews from one man. Darin, the mop-headed mustached dimwit who somehow runs Top-Tech Auto, drives a Cadillac Escalade and throws his failing marriage in our faces whenever we demand answers about the Jeep. We talked constantly about hurling bricks through the large dirty windows of his shop, and probably should have in retrospect to obtain some sense of reckless vandal justice. That bastard wasn’t worth nearly half of the three thousand seven hundred and fifty-two dollars he swindled out of us.

The breakdown of the Holy Ranger proved to be the single biggest downer of our entire three months of pure mobility and madness. Besides the obvious financial blow, the real tragedy was our complete loss of faith in the greasy blue collar American mechanic. Granted, they are a breed of man with questionable integrity, yet they possess keen wit of the ability to breath life into automotive freedom, the most symbolic necessary evil of our times. Without these mechanically educated, beer sweating laborers with no qualms about sticking their heads inside the treacherous steel and oil innards of anything with at least four wheels, life as we know it would rumble to an ugly halt.

July 17, 2008

It was a few days after Las Vegas so our frayed nerves were still raw as we tried to get back to ‘normal’ while we were enjoying the first stint of laid-back camping on the California Coast. Los Osos, the name of a quaint water-edge town what meant the bears, but of course the last trace of wild bears in that area had been hunted down and murdered by rich California power-mongers a century ago. The largest wild mammal we encountered invoked a sad helplessness in all of us, awash on the dry rocks waiting crippled and baking in the sun for a tide that would never come. Obviously we’re no marine biologists, and this animal was severely battered, with a charred-looking rash covering most of its body. We thought it was dead when we first saw it lying on the high end of a rocky sloping inlet, and then it lifted its weary snout, opened its huge glossy black eyes and let out a heart-piercing yelp of suffering. Although it was deflated well below a healthy weight, the poor seal must have still weighed two hundred pounds, and in its sad state who knew if it had some sort of sea-rabies or aquatic dementia. We talked about trying to heave it back into the water, but then we would have had to watch it struggle and get battered by the pounding surf. The entire situation was horrible, a serious cloud of guilt hung over our heads for the rest of the cool sunny afternoon, conversation waned to mumbling about what we could have and should have done to help the doomed seal. With nothing left to do we continued to wander along the coast, scaling sharp rocks to stare into tide pools teeming with microcosms of weirdly harmonious sea life.

Max named the ill-fated seal Pepé, to whom this is dedicated.

July 2, 2008

PORTLAND, OR…PLANTING ROOTS IN A MOSSY NEW STOMPING GROUND

By now most of you, whoever you are, must be thinking that I’m dead, burnt to a crisp in a car crash on a deserted highway or at least a quadriplegic from a cliff diving accident or something, but no, I’m at least still half alive in the Great Northwest where I now call Portland home. It has been five (5) months since the great escapist road-run began and my ability to document and make any real sense out of it all has been pitiful. There is no point drumming a laundry list of excuses out of my ass because, after all, they’re just excuses which are boring and worthless.

Portland, Oregon is a weird flocking ground for eccentric liberals from all over the country who love expensive organic food, strong beer and ride bikes when the sun is actually shining, which is something like a quarter of the year. As luck has it, summer has finally descended on the city like the heat of a hundred-foot tire fire. Hoards of desperately hip “young professionals” seem to drive the progressive city, and then run amok at the thousands of bars and restaurants and strip clubs. Needless to say, I’ve managed to slide unnoticed and successfully into life here like a raven into a flock of crows. The percentage of people who are actually born and raised in this city must be less than the number of underpaid players on the New York Yankees. I can’t even count the number of transplants from Wisconsin alone, which is scary since I thought I was getting away from the people of my own soil, but somewhat comforting at the same time. To get more strangely ironic, the bar I’m sloshing around behind five nights a week is owned by a guy from Madison. Pouring strong drinks in a long dark cabin of a tavern while people eat the coronary clogging Midwestern fair of fried cheese curds and fancy bar food and love every bite. It’s not the worst work though because I make fistfuls of cash and girls/women throw their phone numbers at me like they’re paper airplanes and I’m a substitute teacher.

Life’s rough ain’t it? The real aim here is to inspire a rash of atavistic jealousy within us all, a lust for enlivenment that breathes life back into a plagued and increasingly sedentary culture. Just wait for the barrage of disjointed and fiery SCREEDS that may or may not create any sense of rationality of the past five months on the over-trodden and bastardized symbol that is THE ROAD. I’m holing up in my lofted spacious writing lair, where I can step out on my balcony to have a smoke or take a leak while traffic whizzes by on a highway twenty yards away, and climb up on my roof and see Mt. Hood and St. Helens looming off in the distance with the blurry skyline of Portland in the mighty Willamette River. This is the smoke signal and next comes a barrage of my disjointed yet lucid recollections and sneering objectivism like a hail of flaming arrows.

Sincerely,
John Dick.

The End of June, 2008

(A MISPLACED FLASHBACK FROM WINTRY UGLINESS IN MILWAUKEE)

“I am guilty, Lord, but I am also a lover – and I am one of your best people, as you know; and yea tho I have walked in many strange shadows and acted crazy from time to time and even drooled on many High Priests, I have not been an embarrassment to you…So leave me alone, goddamnit, and send Mr. Screwjack back to me; and if the others have any questions or snide comments about it, tell them to eat shit and die.” – R.D.

Friends, you know this is the truth, just like Raoul Duke and his blood-lusting tomcat, an imagined beastly desire hides somewhere deep within all of us. Not that there is anything natural, at all, about sodomizing an innocent animal, no matter if it has razor-sharp claws and a vice of bone-crushing teeth, but eventually one must get repulsed enough by wallowing with the human race to fantasize, on drugs or not, about the true possibilities of all life. To straighten things out, this is not a decree of bestiality, the pitiful people who fuck with animals should be castrated and stoned by an angry mob right on Main St. of whatever town they live in. The point here, which may or may not apparently lie within this obscure metaphor, is that the limit of sedentary, mundane living infects the human soul and psyche like the plague, and for me personally begs to be shattered like a brand new plate glass window.

As I lube the gears of my mind with slimy fistfuls of crude realism, and pump wild and impure imagination through the thin red walls of my beaten heart faster than raw sewage overflows into Lake Michigan, I grapple with the cold realization of inner plight. Pushing the limit of twenty-three years in this city, long gone past stir crazy, my flight is overdue so now I’m bracing myself and finally ready to get the hell out of Dodge. Naturally, West is the only direction to head, face the wind and burn out across state-long cornfields until the land starts to roll and the trail of rock jutting upward grows into the Rockies. The thin air will do my mind and lungs some much needed good, the snow will thicken my skin and fuel pointed screeds like spitting kerosene on an altar of flickering Virgin candles.

I will be reborn on a moonlit mountaintop in a blizzard dancing naked, except for a grizzly bear tooth necklace hanging around my neck, with a megaphone in one hand and a bottle of bourbon splashing from the other. A two-hundred pound Husky, more wolf than dog with eyes that change color with the seasons will be my only companion, howling strange duets with me into the basting handheld speaker and lapping from the bottle. A catharsis of pure madness will echo over peaks and down canyons into sleepy ski villages where tourists will be ripped from a fat cat dreamland by the unGodly song of beast and man. Livestock will turn wild-eyed and tear through barbwire fences, storming the farmhouses and trampling their owners tucked away in warm beds. The deranged swan song will ring out to resound in deaf ears and make the increasingly illiterate youth peel themselves from television screens and pick up books with yellowed pages that leave paper cuts on their frail little hands. With any luck at all, my words will become shards of broken beer bottles on the painful path to the enlightenment of this darkening Reality.

John Dick
December 2007

WESTWARD HO…THE COLD BACKHANDED SLAP OF REAL WINTER…THIN-SKINNED MIDWESTERNERS WOULDN’T SURVIVE OUT HERE…THE CRYOGENICALLY FROZEN PRESIDENT AND THE SAD STATE OF THE UNION

From the frozen Canadian metropolis of Calgary, Alberta, the time has finally come for an initial assessment of this launch across, around, and out of the great American landscape. Finally breaking out of the lagged Milwaukee mentality, I have embarked on a journey fueled by restlessness, blind ambition, booze and friendship, while armed to the teeth with the true physical and mystical potencies of pith…While back on the shores of a festering Lake Michigan, the early snows of a deranged winter were just beginning to wail on the streets of my hometown, and the usual waves of bitching and unwarranted surprise at the dank cold and slush that covered the city whined through the air and ground my nerves. I whipped out a screed, self-centeredly titled PLATFORM OF MY PITH, but that has seemingly been lost somewhere in the haste of my flight. It involved a strange but undeniable theme of primal mountaintop expression that I can only attribute to the overwhelming stagnancy of day to day life, and with any hope I can dig it up to use as a blatant and bizarre preface to however this saga will unfold.

In the onset of our Westward journey, my cohort being a longtime friend, fellow vandal and punk in our misled adolescence, and also owner of The Holy Ranger, the sturdy Jeep that gives us road warrior wheels, we careened out into the plains of North Dakota. Intent on burning straight through the night and all the way up to Whitefish, Montana in one long strung-out burst, the extreme wickedness of the wind-battered plains snuffed out that notion as fast as our snot froze whenever we stopped for gas. The still air temp was a mere -25 degrees, but with 50-75mph wind gusts that swept horizontally across the barren highway, whipping up blinding clouds of snow, the low temperature was somewhere around a hell-freezing -50 degrees. Violent gusts ripped at the soft-top of the Jeep like a sail, and without a white-knuckle grip on the wheel and a wild-eyed stare on the only 20 feet of iced pavement visible ahead, things would have gotten ugly as hell. One serious huff of wind and even the slightest skid, and we could have been found days later buried in a snowdrift, Jeep upside down, frozen solid with a bottle of bourbon in hand and a pile of half-burned books between our blue bodies.

Stranded in Bismarck, the sprawled out default capital of North Dakota we holed up in a cheap motel to weather the frozen shit-storm out on the Westward highway for a night. Being out in the stinging winds was like having any exposed skin slapped repeatedly with slabs of dry ice, and as we worked our way through a twelve-pack in the dingy room, the icy face of our dumbfounded child president glared from the television in his last, thank fucking god, State of the Union Address. As I watched the Address in a stupor of rage and bewilderment, I could barely restrain myself from hurling a beer bottle at the shit-eating grin on George W’s face as he deliberately tried to pull himself out of the ignorant sunken oil well that he has dragged the country into over the past seven and a half backward years. How could this beady-eyed puppet seriously stand there and try to justify his reign of stupidity, the leader of our “free world” that has dragged the dark clouds of his father’s first Gulf War over our generation? These shameful clouds have gotten thicker and more polluted with every bill, act and right-stripping decision that he and his gang of cowboy tycoons has implemented. It is hard to believe that through the warm smoky confines of a $60 motel, hiding from the brutal Dakota winter that roars outside, that a colder and more demonic chill could radiate from an outdated TV screen, but once again George W. Bush has proved that his idiotic power vacuum epitomizes a deep freeze of American rationality.

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WHITEFISH IS BURIED AND THE HEADS LOVE IT…SEVEN FEET IN SEVEN DAYS…THE BONFIRE THAT SOME SCIENTIST FROM 1974 BUILT

Skidding into the most Northwestern corner of the monstrous state of Montana on a late night, the mountain town was already blanketed heavily in several feet of fresh snow that had been pouring down for days. Whitefish had been and would continue to be buried in unrelenting and record breaking dumps of powder, and the locals couldn’t have loved it anymore. Neither could we for that matter, landing there for the same reason, with the snow lust that comes with getting ripped to the tits on pure clean adrenaline and flying down a mountain at top speed, on skis or a snowboard or whatever vehicle fits. The mix of the population in Whitefish, seasonal and permanent, is a strange brew of old-school mountain ranchers and business owners on one side of the bar, and long haired transient ski bums and fun seeking adrenaline fiends like ourselves on the other side. It is a beautiful thing, and everyone seems to be alright with it, and beery mingling and comradeship create a good vibe. It was the perfect atmosphere for two thirsty good-old Milwaukee boys to roam through and relish in for a while…

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SUPERBOWL XLII SUPER COMMERCIAL…

*Editorial Note: A truly terrible scene was manifested, or created around a backyard bonfire on a crisp starlit Sunday night in the yard of a tucked-away log cabin on the silent outskirts of Whitefish, Montana. What follows is the vague retelling of that demented campfire story, or episode, that was drummed-up from who knows where, by unexplainable forces, none of which the author accepts responsibility for.

For some reason the scene bursts into action as a sharp interruption, cutting flawlessly to a multi-million dollar a minute television commercial during Superbowl XLII. The main event is a frightening homoerotic leg wrestling match, with two burly men wearing crotchless leotards the colors of opposing football teams. As they try desperately to out-muscle each other with their feet, they are surrounded by topless cheerleaders who smear guacamole all over themselves and fling the chunky green slime at the contenders. Hairy nuts slap violently and high-pitched cheers roar from the girls up into the sky where all of the stars are shooting stars. The back-alley smut riddled sporting event is lit up right in front of a 10 foot bonfire. A rabid and mangy golden retriever named Kona trounces laps around the fire in chest deep snow with a chain-smoking monkey wearing a cowboy hat on its back.

Almost human yelps come out of the shadows, and following the warning comes a belligerent Kansan who plows through the massive snowdrifts and appears panting, with a beer in each hand and one more in his jacket pocket. Unintelligible mutterings belch from his mouth while he tries to light a cigarette on the red coals, and in the light of the fire, it becomes disturbingly vivid that he has the feet of a small Chinese girl, in white stockings and tiny leather shoes, he balances in a tight toe touching wedge to keep from slipping on the ice slick that dangerously surrounds the blazing flames. Then, all of a sudden, the late great Reggie White comes leaping through the inferno, from who knows where and flattens the mumbling cross-bred man-girl deep into the snow.

The topless cheerleaders are going completely berserk with ear-piercing shouts while the losing wrestler is hurled into the bonfire by the victor, the golden retriever is rearing up on its hind legs like a bronco while the chain-smoking monkey fires dual pistols into the air, Reggie White is going into a Minister of Defense sermon that ends with the commercial tagline, demanding that everyone watching eat fistfuls of 2C-B.

The fine print of a car commercial quickly rolls across the screen:

While waves of strange vibrations hum through the head vision is a blurred clarity that leads you drifting through a hyper-real wonderland…everything is buried under a seven foot blanket of fresh snow, but underneath it all it’s a hell furnace of intensified altered perceptions that rips you right out of everyday normality and numbs and excites a few of the right places on the brain and body.

Quick cut back to the non-action of the big game…

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FERNIE, BRITISH COLUMBIA…FROM CALGARY, THE ONLY GOOD PLACE TO LIVE IN ALBERTA

The sleepy back-mountain town that’s also buried deep in snow, but has nothing really worthwhile to offer except a badass ski area that’ll set you back 77 Canadian dollars, which is even harder to fork out as an American with a plummeting currency. Flooded with Kiwis and other people from down under somewhere, the beer is overpriced and the women are severely outnumbered and hunted by horny Canadian ski bums.

So now we’ve been hunkered down in the metropolis of Calgary, where there are more good people, blurry nights and days, and a day of overcrowded riding at Sunshine Mountain which was as crowded as Disney World and along with the icy tracked-up snow, the place gave me a stomachache. Enough money burning city dwelling for now though, and back into the easy paced, thirst quenching mountain towns of the upper range of the beastly Rocky Mountains.

Pith, the moral fiber of a plant, conflict or commitment…, the brutal act of severing the spinal cord of farm animals, slashing the lifeline of vegetation, beast or mankind.

Vulnerability tucked away deep into the fleshy core of a breathing vehicle, shielded by the façade of protection, whether it’s leafy green, unprocessed leather or thin naked skin, pith is penetrable. The cellular brains behind the waxy rind, the brittle bone or coarse hide of perseverance create the will of existence, or are crushed like an insect. That is what pith as a noun, a thing, is.

Then there is the action, to pith, the slaughtering of cattle by the cruel method of slashing the taut rope of nerves binding the vertebrae together, detaching the backbone from its futile life. The disconnect of the central artery of the nervous system, a death that undoubtedly leaves the body in a moment of spastic paralysis before the last frantic messages of distress can reach hoofed limbs. In a more flowery sense, to pith a plant is to remove the sticky inner tissue or sweet fruit.

But fuck all that, this is the Twenty-First Century, and it is long past due that pith is modernized, as a noun, as an action, and most importantly, as an unflinching understanding of the current situation that all of us face today. Whether we like it or not, the pith of humanity as we, proud Americans, know it today is so polluted and electrified that it is a far, far cry from any virtuous fiber of morality, be it in plant or man. As a word that hardly exists within a context of understanding for most people, a vague botany term, a description of vigor and an outdated act of butchery, pith is being redefined.

Pith is a forgotten identifier of true grit, a never say die mentality fueled by an inner determination blinded with overcoming the immediate looming obstacle that needs to be conquered. An unavoidable voice of the social and personal raven, pith is the squawking conscience that skeptically perches on the windowsill of the perpetually weaving world-wide-web, and spits down a shower of acid-rain reality and bloodied tears.

And so much for all of that high floating philosophical bullshit, because definitions are useless unless they are conceivable within the easily relatable and boring parameters of what is commonly referred to as “real life.” So, after that roundabout ramble of a possibly meaningless introduction…let us get into our pith.

Johnny Dick, 11.17.07