I thought I would, but I wont. Finding a computer with an internet connection is a rarity, and when it occurs I have too many things to look up to write.

Also – it’s a bit costly, and I feel like that makes the writing rushed and clumsy.

Maybe if I become a bit more settled (say, in Darahmsala, which I have train tickets to on the 12th) and have a reliable, regular internet connection I’ll try again.

Until then, I’m journaling in my notebook and taking lots of pictures.

Yep.

All are welcome to visit and/or send mail to

Aside from job hunting, I’m kept home most of the time by my complete brokeness. If anyone knows anything about a job opening in PDX, for the love of god please share it with me.

Hanging up the blog now . . .

A crowd of sorority girls wearing black shirts and orange sashes that said “alpha gamma delta” split in half as I walked through. They were all giggling and they all had nice teeth and they all looked identical. I guess that was the intended effect, but why?

Speaking of sore thumbs; I began hitching again yesterday. I started on a windy rural highway in western Virginia. It was only twenty minutes before I was picked up by a country boy headed to Blacksburg. The kid produced a metal pipe made out of carburetor parts and packed a bowl with one hand while wrestling the steering wheel with the other. I saw bison and we rode along and over little streams and brooks and the evening sun came through the tree branches just right like an Alfonso Cuarón movie – except the soundtrack was Primus.

Today I stick to those same backroads as I make my way to Charlotte, NC. I have a flight to Portland booked that leaves Tuesday morning.

It’s my homecoming too.

“Hey! Are you falling back asleep? How can you sleep through this?”

Onemississippi twomississip-CRACK! The sky is split in half and the room shakes. It’s a cliche, but the sound thunder makes really is rolling. It doesn’t even begin to fade before more light comes through the windows.

She stirs, but doesn’t open her eyes. “Hmm. It helps you sleep. . .”

The thunder storms in the south are louder and longer and brighter than any I’ve ever seen before. It’s five in the morning and I couldn’t think of sleeping. A crack of thunder comes simultaneous with lightning, right over our heads. The feeling of such an all encompassing noise is almost indescribable. It shakes my bones. My heart rate is up and my eyes are fixed on the patch of sky I can see through the window, waiting for the next fork to burn it’s image onto the blackness.

The thunder dies down but I can still feel a vibration in my chest. It’s not from the thunder storm – she’s actually snoring. I give her another little shake.

“Hey.” I tell her. “You’re a weirdo.”

Flash! Crack! More lightning. More thunder.

“Hmmm. ‘M-not. Nu-huh. . .” Her rebuttal is barely audible not because of the thunder, but because she’s mumbling it from her sleep.

I’m wide awake. In order to get the last word I wait for another thunder clap so my response is drowned out.

CRACK! BOOM!

“. . . yes you are.”

It started when I fished out the cash sock from my backpack. The billfold inside has become scary thin. Looks like there’s a few things I’m not going to be able to get to. Buying a $300 dingy and floating down the Mississippi from Memphis to New Orleans is at the very top of a list of pipe dreams. If I’m going to move to a city and sustain myself until I get a job, plus pay first months rent and a deposit, I’m going to have to stop travelling. Like, two weeks ago.

Where am I going to move to? Why all the travelling? I’m not going to be able to swing it this time. I’m going to run out of money. I’ve been an idiot with my money. Moving to Atlanta is a bad idea. This girl . . .

. . . and so on. I was driving myself crazy.

I went into a rundown grocery store on a Cherokee Indian reservation and found cheap gaudy white thick-framed made-in-Taiwan sunglasses, covered in a half inch of dust. $1.99. They made me happy. I never took them off. They took the edge off.

The Australian girl and I, travelling in her van now for eight or nine days, we’re camping in the Great Smokey Mountains. She has a tent and a gas cooker and we’re eating well and there’s much less mosquitos to bite here than in South Carolina. We rent inner tubes and ride down the river that runs through the campground. It’s beautiful and fun and I’m laughing the whole way. A three foot waterfall dumps me head-over-heels (or “ass-over-tits”, which is apparently the far superior Australian equivalent). My new sunglasses are washed away into oblivion. I should have taken them off. I go back to being despondent Dean.

The next morning I wake up early-ish. I resolve to kick my blues. The woods are gorgeous and peaceful and I grab my towel and head upstream for a swim before breakfast. Maybe I’ll even catch sight of my sunglasses hung up in some reeds like Baby Moses.

From the riverbank I hear mewling. It’s little kitteny mewling in the river. I jump down into the bank and I see a little white sausage of a baby puppy, eyes still closed, trailing an umbilical cord and flailing around in the leaves. There’s another one with it’s head stuck between two rocks, submerged to the neck in the quickly moving river. Both are making a lot of noise.

I move the rock and snatch the puppy. The other one, too.

What to do with some dickhead’s half-assed attempt at a cliche puppy drowning? I stare blankly at them, writhing and just-born and mewling in my hands. My mood darkens.

Along the riverbank there’s an alcove made by some tree roots. I look inside and see a pure-bred beagle looking back up at me, shaking and scared. Under her tail, half of a pink squirming puppy is pushing it’s way out of her body. I don’t believe in anthropomorphism, but her eyes look up at me in that sad beagle way and clearly say; “Fuck.”

Since she started the dialogue, I answer back.

“You need to take better care of your shit. Do you have any idea where I found these?” The babies get tossed back in. They dial in on her and stop making racket. My mood improves.

I go further upstream and find the deep pool I was looking for and I swim in the frigid water. It’s fresh and clean and crisp and it wakes me up. My mood improves.

I get out of the water and find a small parasite in my crotch gorging itself on my blood. I pop it and it leaves behind a purple welt that has yet to go away. My mood darkens.

I gather my things and my hands are numb from the water and I drop my camera. It slides down the smooth river rock and into the water. Plop! There will now be no more pictures from my trip. My mood darkens.

Before leaving the campground we inform the rangers of the puppies. We spend the rest of the day hiking to a viewpoint along the Appalachian Trail.

My mood continues to go up and down.

It’s par for the course.

“Hey! Heyo! Let me ax you somthin!”

Nothing bad happens, but I’m surprised to notice I’m much more wary than I used to be of areas like this. I used to live in places just as bad when I was in Seattle and Washington D.C.. I’ve always felt, if not comfortable, at least capable in bad neighborhoods. But now I’m a little jumpy, a little on edge. I can think of several reasons why this might be. My eyes dart around too fast. It bugs me to see myself acting this way, and it’s also dangerous.

I find a hotel downtown. I have to take a smoking room because all the others are booked. Atlanta’s busy this weekend. Both Black Gay Pride and Dragon Con fill the city, each dressed to the extremes of their respective demographics. In front of me in the hotel lobby is a skinny black man with over-sized sunglasses and a pink belly shirt that reads “ass: the other vagina!”. In front of him is a more literal fairy, with pointy latex ears and strapped on wings. The effect is a bit surreal.

Sarah’s in town this weekend, looking at apartments for her upcoming move from Tallahassee (that’s Sarah with a southern accent, not Sara with rocks in her head.) She comes over to the hotel and we wander the city, ending up at the Hyatt, where a major Dragon Con event has apparently just ended, spilling the Pirates and Obi Wans and Griffindors and Japanese Schoolgirls out onto the sidewalk. It’s people watching on steroids. And LSD.

We spent the weekend exploring the city. I ate soulfood like butterpeas and fried okra and sweet tea. It’s just like regular tea except it makes your teeth hurt.

Last week I was in Tallahassee. I arrived there from Destin by what may be my final hitchhiking trip. I just don’t have the heart for it anymore. The heat was unbearable, the mosquitoes were thirsty, and my patients just wasn’t there anymore. Also – hitching on this side of the country is twice as difficult as it is in the west. Over here it’s more roads, more towns, more congestion. It’s unlikely that anyone traveling a state highway is going more that a few miles, because the towns are so close together. Conversely, if someone picks me up outside Reno going eastbound, there’s a very good chance they’re going all the way to Salt Lake, because there’s absolutely no civilization in between those two cities.

So I don’t know what this means as far as my traveling goes. I’ve been to all the lower 48 states now (except maybe South Carolina, I can’t seem to remember going there) and I feel as if I’ve accomplished what I meant to. I know I could still have fun adventures and see new things if I kept on, but I just feel . . . done. With this country, anyhow.

I’m ready to stay in one spot for awhile. Whether or not I can (or will) remains to be seen.

For now I found someone on couchsurfing.com who’s traveling the country in her car. Tomorrow I’m riding with her to Savannah, afterwards we may or may not travel together for a bit. She’s Australian, so don’t be surprised if the next time you talk to me, I have an Aussie accent. Mates.

- “vancouver bc hookers”

- “apartments in shell beach, california”

- “hooker punch”

- “it had been a lame fuckaround”

end of digression

About my new home life, I can say that it is working out in Florida in many ways. I’m making excellent money. I have job security in a large restaurant/bar/club that is within walking distance of my sizable (and empty, save the contents of my backpack and a newly bought air mattress) apartment. I have no television to distract from the books I’ve been devouring (just finished A River Sutra by Gita Mehta – just started Cormac McCarthy’s The Road). I’m going to join a yacht club this Sunday, buy a boat in the near future, and I’m going to live on it.

In many other ways I want to be as far from this place and lifestyle as possible. I’ve gathered that the deep south has the potential for personal exploration, meaningful human connections, and new (to me) cultural experiences. Unfortunately, in an attempt to make as much money as quickly as possible, I landed in a beachy tourist trap locally dubbed the “Redneck Riviera”. At the Gulf Coast a mile from my house you can spot dolphins in the clear teal waters, eating fish in the gentle warm surf. Then turn around and beyond the snow white sand is a golf course, and a water slide park, and a go-cart track, then another golf course, then an endless parking lot, soaking in the daily nuclear blast from the sun for later dispersion. The paved earth is +2 armor for the Florida heat.

That’s all I really want to say. I didn’t even want to say that much. I don’t want to go out on a negative, so two things that are awesome follow:

1) The Florida lizards are marching the sidewalks daily like hoards of scaly warriors. They continue to speak in scratchy haiku’s and continue to tempt me away from my goals with promises of scampering and bug eating and detachable tales.

2) I have a southern accent now. Everybody says it sounds fake, but fuck that. Madonna is a faker. I’ve had a majestic dialect laying dormant in me for 24 years. I now fix to do things and I greet all the tables I wait on with ‘yall’.

I don’t know who reads this blog. Or who read it when it started, stopped reading when I didn’t keep it up. Or who checks it so infrequently that this will be obsolete when they finally come across it. So to whom it may concern: for the moment I have an address where I can receive letters. This may interest the many people who have been receiving letters from me over the last few months (Alison, Brandon, Catey, Des, Em, the Fir House – to alphabetically name a few.)

310 Vinnings Way Blvd
Apt #8-103
Destin, FL 32541

Take care. I miss everyone. Fixin to get a few letters in the mail, I am.