(See what I am saying?)

Atlanta Georgia; Epilouge.

In Atlanta, there are a set of 4 chrome rims on sale for every citizen of the city. There is also the ability there to compress whole sentences, even entire conversations, into one drawn out syllable.

At Mammy's Cafe, Faye, our waitress spoke soft and slow like the blood in my veins after eating her smoked ham and eggs. The guy with gold teeth and a Michael Vick jersey bussing the counter barked about his sister to the dishwashers. Neither of which i had any real idea of what they were saying.

And at the Majestic Diner two days or nights earlier, Perez, Molly and I sat on red vinyl barstools, full of bourbon from the Features Show (I still haven't got a t-shirt) at the Earl. It was there, while i was stacking empty plates like firewood on the countertop, i realized:

1.) there a lot of people in this world, and i compare them all to my friends.

2.) it is my friends, and the fun we have, that could kill me.

3.) without my friends, i might be dead anyways.

The sun was rising and falling like the bouncing ball on the karaoke screen at the Claremont Inn. Somewhere between the Butter Beans and grits, and Pabst Blue Ribbons and saggy tits, the varsity burgers and the East Side Lounge, we sat in a Pizza Parlor swapping stories like sports cards. Johnny Cash was Playing on the JukeBox. The pitcher was full. I was laughing. The bells in my head were ringing as loud as a New Orleans evacuation. They were echoing through the tiger's lair at the Grant Park Zoo, through graffiti train tunnels in Cabbage town. There were waking up the bums in front of the liquor store on Moreland Ave. and shaking the leaves from the trees lining the streets in Virginia Highlands. And there, spinning like a set of 24" rims I sat in Atlanta Georgia, and remembered -
truly,
happily,
and painfully, -what friends are for.

Atlanta Georgia; #3.

Atlanta Georgia; #2.

Atlanta Georgia; #1.

Channel 12 over Katrina

I plugged the headphones the stewardess gave me into the armrest.

I looked outside. The cirrus clouds floated like fiberglass insulation in the attic of the north american continent. They stretched across the sunrise casting shadows in patterns shaped like woodgrain veneer in the clear morning. I was moving 542 mph towards the Florida Panhandle in prime hurricane season. Below us i struggled to make out the jagged coastline of alabama and mississippi through the flat cloud layer that laid like a down blanket over the gulf of mexico.

I couldn't wake up, but i was never asleep. The sun was rising. the light in the sky laid like oil at the bottom a black sea of darkness that rose up and wrapped around the airplane. I couldn't fall asleep, but i wasn't awake. The horizon laid as straight and as far as the tracks under my train of thought.

I changed the inflight station to channel 12. I stared out in the red light seeping into the bottom of the black sky. Ben Folds was talking, saying he was playing some of his favorite songs for me. My peanut bag was empty. the Saffir-Simpson scale was rising. i was in an emergency exit row, and my seat wouldn't recline. Ben Folds began to sing a song called Landed. i sat up straight and closed my eyes and let the music play as we headed through the clouds for Fort Lauderdale.

[Listen. Landed. (iTunes)]

Read: Lyrics.

The metaphor found in long distance running; antebellum

I slowly fell to the sand.

I came to rest like i was a cannonball that finally lost all inertia. like i had been shot from a cold iron barrel with a mighty blast on some explosive battlefield and had sailed through the fight and the smoke and the action, but never hit my mark. I felt like i instead soared through it all and landed in some grassy field and slowly rolled to a stop in some lonely and quiet pasture in the hazy afternoon sun near the Mason-Dixon line. I laid there, heart pounding through my neck. I laid there, like a cannonball all out of motion. I laid there like a forgotten detail, edited out of someone's history book, an out of date war relic that never served it's purpose.

I looked straight up at the sky until i lost east from west, top from bottom, love from hate. The battle was over. I wondered what i had accomplished. I wondered what was won, what was lost. I wondered how much energy i had burned to create so much momentum, to go such a distance, and who came to end up lying like a cannonball that neither hurt nor helped either side in a civil war.

Throwing my hands in the air

"Life is like a roller coaster." I said to him. "And right now, i am going down a real big hill."

"Well.... at least go down it with your hands up in the air." prescott replied.

The varying results of killing yourself (Or: Blood on the Tracks)

Hunter S. Tompson's wishes were made true last night. He took his life at his typewriter earlier this year, and last night his cremated remains were shot from a canon in his hometown of aspen colorado with a carnival procession of fireworks and spectators.

And today, right about while we were eating beef barbecue sandwiches for lunch, another man went his in own way, in our backyard.

I owed Zach a lunch. when we returned, the aluminum from the Amtrak Coaster sat still and shone in the sun like a replaceable backdrop to our house as if it were set on a stage. Sometimes, i think it is.

The refrigerator fan from the diner car was humming and the dust was settling directly over the backyard fence. Zach and i sat on the fence and surveyed the scene. 40 yards down the track the engine sat still. Halfway between us and the engine, the conductor was covering up the body with blue blankets.

It took two blankets. They were about 3 feet apart.

Across the top row of train windows the passengers sat still and looking blankly out at us as they ate their hot dogs and pizza. Patient mothers and impatient children sat unknowingly at the tables chewed their food and looked out at us with puzzled faces. Below the windows just down the track, the coroners were photographing the body as it lay on the rocks under separate blankets.

A woman opened he diner car door window and looked down at the police gathering around the blue blankets. She looked back at me and shouted over the fans.

"Where are we?" she asked as she pointed to the set on the stage.

"Ventura." I replied.

"It will take a while for them to pick everything up", she said.

She sat there for a few more minuets, the she closed the window again.

Later this evening, as i rode my back back from the ocean, i cut through the fields and past the dark spot on the tracks where the blue blankets had been earlier.

I stopped and looked down the wet rocks and red rails. The blankets were gone. all but the very smallest pieces were picked up. the lady in the diner car door, and the people looking blankly out there windows were all gone too.

The sun was shining and the dusty evening wind was blowing across the strawberry fields. I stood there alone, exactly where someone was earlier. All that was left of them had ran down between the rocks and was drying in the sun.

I guess we all like to think that when we go it will be something like a big blast of light echoing from the boom of cannon on the mountain. And everyone will take notice. Everyone will watch. Everyone will remember.

But sometimes, the remains just get put in plastic bags by men in yellow coats who work the weekend shift, and what is left just soaks into the dirt. Sometimes, it is just a slight delay in the timetable, some odd stop in some arbitrary town, or a forgettable pause in the scenery scrolling by outside the window at lunch.

Also read: What else the railroad has taught me.

Proof that fact is stranger than fiction:

The phone rings.

I pick it up.

"Hey dude." Woody says to me. "We're up on Cape Cod and Andrea is in the tent at the campground and has one of those ear wax candles in her ear. It's got about 3 inches left to burn. when it is done, how do we see how much wax was melted out of her ear?"

"Let it burn to about two inches then blow it out and cut down one side of the hollow tube and open it like a taco." I replied.

"Okay, gotta go." said woody, then ended the call.

Life and Death Metal

Ventura sits along the coast of North America less the 50 miles south of point conception, the western most point in the continential United States. It was there, in the Sans Souci Bar at 2:00 on a monday morning when the bartender leaned his head out the door and barked at us all to leave. I looked across and saw Josh leaning back in the chair, looking up into the dark, with a women's purse, a cell phone and a pack of menthols sitting on the wrought iron table beside him.

It was 2:00 on a monday morning. the crowd was leaving the bar, walking past us like a parade of the late night scene of lowcut jeans, lower back tatoos, girls making out with each other, and guys trying to get inbetween them.

A few hours ago, before he made his way to the chair, josh played a show at The Livery Theater in downtown Ventura CA. I was late to the show and as i rounded the corner onto Palm St., I slalomed my way through a long line of death metal fans wearing his band's t-shirt. Inside a soon thereafter, i bore witness to 25 minutes a bowel-shaking, molar-ratteling great black wall of sound.

And there on the stage were they guys who eat fast food hot dogs on our couch, stirring the long-haired and merchandise-wearing kids into a boiling cauldron of fists and shoulders.

California is pinnacle of the american dream. It is, in every definition, the farthest egde of the western world. So far in fact, it starts to turn itself inside out, like the skin of the snake winding it's way up the back of the girl who served me a drink. It is where i can watch a jaguar drive past my front yard and stop to take a coffee table from a pile of scraped furniture in my neighbors trash and tie it to it's roof. It is where i can pick up dog crap in my front yard with a victoria's secret sack. It's where i can watch 100 people with health care to welfare get up from their folding chair and whip their hair to the music made from my roomate whose rent it 3 days late. It's where i can sit in a bar at 2:00 on a monday morning and watch the bare backs and pierced tounges, the jet blacks and bleach blondes, the flip phones, the rhinestones, and the silicon;while sitting beside the bass player in a death metal band.