While Jeff and I were hitchhiking, he made it a point to school me in the ways. This involved showing me how to obtain free food, free hotels, free herb, and of course free rides. One afternoon in Willits, after I had already spent ten dollars at the health food store on Kombucha and pumpkin bars, Jeff decided we should go on a food excursion to the food bank, to plan for our future. The juicy rumor in town was that the food bank gave out hotel rooms as well as food.

A middle-aged lady with thick makeup ran the food bank. She had a sweet but tense face; too many people had asked her for food. The ‘emergency’ bundle required photo id, social security number, and personal story. After collecting my date of birth, location of birth, home state, and phone number, she reached the essay questions.

“What led you to be in this state of emergency here with me today?”

Holy shit.

What had led me to her? What had led me to entrust myself to a mildly psychotic boy and hitchhike to the redwoods on a quest for his jewelry box? Why was I wearing filthy olive cargo pants and an ancient backpack? Why was I in Willits, where the Dow plant leaked chromium into the groundwater and half the residents had facial ticks?

Why was it already January 2008?

Where were my friends and my plans?

Was I falling apart? Was this, in fact, a true emergency?

Well, Ma’am. One day I turned so ironic that the world suddenly became moving pictures. I no longer cared for a specific picture, just a colorful one. There is color is everywhere, so I shrugged my shoulders and here I am.

Ma’am, I fall in love too easily and read too many big books. Also, I’m lazy and arrogant. These traits just get uglier with time.

I told her we’d had a ride back to San Francisco but the driver had turned out to be insane.

“And how did that make you feel?”

I felt…I didn’t know what I felt.

“And what would you do to avoid this next time?”

Ahh, yes: “I would leave a larger margin of error.”

“A what?”

“Margin—of—error.”

She wrote my words down verbatim, then gave us two bags of bread, peanut butter, jelly, pork and beans, pudding, tuna sandwich, tofu sandwich, and cheese snacks.

~~

I was born a quarter of a century ago in Salt Lake City, Utah. My first vivid memory is of getting a miniature plastic doll hand stuck up my nose. My grandma made me blow it out and ever since then I’ve hated blowing my nose.

My parents moved to Denver and had my brother, moved to Pasco, Washington and had my twin sisters, then moved us all to Idaho Falls, Idaho. Mormons followed us the whole way. We lived out in the country, and there were Mormons, Barbies, horses, and mountains. I was obsessed with dolphins. I had a child-sized ATV which I used to visit my best friend down the road. We would play with Barbies, and every time the story was the same: Ken kidnapped BabyBarbie and tortured it. Barbie saved BabyBarbie, beat up Ken, and cried over Baby. I have no idea what that means for my womanly nature.

My dad moved up in the world and we moved to San Antonio, then El Paso, Texas. I never feared moving away from Idaho, because my parents explained that San Antonio had Sea World and I could pet the dolphins there everyday. Upon arriving to San Antonio, my parents pulled straight into Sea World, where we lived in our camping trailer for a week.

The parents weren’t as ingenious when we moved to El Paso a year later. El Paso had just been announced the murder capital of the country, they told us. My mom described it as a “wasteland.”

I hit puberty the second we arrived. Weight gain, hormones, and having to ride the short bus explain everything about me from 5th grade to 12th grade. Fat, angry, defensive, always in love, I saw no choice but war.

At first, I fought against people. In 5th grade I loved Josh, so I stole his lunchtime Clamato and tried to make him feel stupid. In 6th and 7th grade I loved Rajiv, so I tried to beat him at math competitions. In 8th grade I had my first steamy dream, about Matt Spencer, so I argued with him everyday in English class about special relativity, which neither of us understood.

War became more civilized in high school. Like a good intellectual, I gave up on people (who were tragically imperfect) and moved the battle to ideas. In 9th and 10th grade, I loved Mikey, the charismatic drummer. I didn’t have to hate him, since he didn’t even know me. I would stalk him in the hallways for a daily smile. Instead of the boys, I hated my math teachers.

Love is an opiate, but so is math. At almost every moment back then I felt furious, disgusting, and about to explode, so math was used constantly. Ironically, there was no more vocal barrier to scribbling math in classes than math teachers who wanted me to pay more attention.

But with math, just like with boys, I still never believed I’d make real contact. This began to torture me even more than the first problem! And thus, by 11th grade, without even having read him, I had sealed myself into the classic spiritual trap of Jack Kerouac, where I stayed for eight years.

The Kerouacian Pit is a danger to all aesthetic seekers—lovers, mathematicians, philosophers, Christians. The Pit arises when an impassioned appreciation of the Ideal combines with a secret loathing of self. For example: Divinity and Christian guilt. Or: Human Genius and the secret belief in personal ineptitude. Or: Love and a notion of predestined failure.

In the darkness of the Pit, a furious escalation takes place. Rather than being a salve, the Ideal is misused as a drug. More crack is always necessary, and desperation always deepens. The personal relationship with Bliss is lost. Mortification of the soul intensifies as the Ideal is attenuated into a finer and finer, more and more unattainable goal. Finally, the Ideal shrinks all the way down to Kerouac’s diamond infinitesimal, and the seeker dies of loneliness and nihilism.

Death is not assured of course. People find their way out. My escape involved Friedrich Nietzsche and a Native American medicine man—it was called The Love Epiphany, celebrated immediately afterwards with The Great Soul Explosion 2007.

One day in 2006, before the medicine man but after Nietzsche, about half a year before I made it out, Benjamin Youngstrom and I were sitting in a Mexican restaurant in Haight Ashbury. We were in grad school and bitching about it, just like grad students do. Nietzsche gives the best indictment of what we were bemoaning, but lacking a Nietzsche text, I will use Kierkegaard’s:

Our age is essentially one of understanding and reflection, without passion, momentarily bursting into enthusiasm, and shrewdly lapsing into repose…Its condition is that of a man who has only fallen asleep towards morning: first of all come great dreams, then a feeling of laziness, and finally a witty or clever excuse for remaining in bed.

The criticism applied to myself most of all. But having realized that, I couldn’t stand still! Over the tacos, I decided to drop out of grad school, ex-patriate to South America, have love affairs and be a writer. Benjamin decided to do this too. Together we would be two-thirds of a literary triumvirate, third member still to be found. Our triumvirate would transcend literature and eventually snowball into a social movement—exactly like the Beats. This plan is, basically, still in action.

I left school and began to run things bohemian style. Free food was easy. Free entertainment amounted to learning the guitar. I hired Andrès, who conveniently owned a short bus, to drive me down to South America in August. I went with someone entirely different to Costa Rica and Panama. The Love Epiphany, un-coincidentally, began its birth pangs shortly after, just in time for summer in Berkeley. With Andrès on the backburner, I communed with Allen Ginsburg, learned to sing, went naked camping, mastered barking on didgeridoo, and finally had a damn love affair. Summer camp for hippies.

Then August arrived.

Like a hangover.

(go to Part 2)

Heidegger says:

As something fateful, Being itself is inherently eschatological.

I can’t yet wrap my head around Martin Heidegger. But what I can imagine, just whimsically from an eschatological notion of Being is a prominence, and pervasiveness, of harbingers. Any historical instant is a rich harbinger of all to come. The foreboding I can project into this or that image in my head is a true foreboding, intricately tied to unfolding salvation and destruction.

For this story’s incident, a literal sign I saw a year ago in Costa Rica comes to mind. It was small and wooden, and said in bright colors, “La Vida es Una Ola!” Life is a wave. It was my first exposure to international surfer culture and its tranquility, and I felt the statement to be deceptively brilliant.

The sign was posted by a pristine beach with perfect surf and regular dolphins. Residents of the beach surfed, ate mangoes, had love affairs, and watched the sunset until they grew old and their skin turned to leather. The waves were fleeting but always kept coming. Life dissipates, coalesces, swells, crashes, ad infinitum barring the forces of erosion. It’s an inspirational mantra; potentially nauseating.

I remembered that original beach when I woke up on the Paia beach the morning after sex and adventure. The air was cold and the clouds were pink with sunrise. It was my first night spent on a tropical beach. Silly palm trees flapped in the fresh breeze and a humpback whale breached near the horizon. My New Age Hippie crystal lay buried off to my left, forgotten somewhere in the sand. Ronnie wandered up and down the beach, working up heat. A sequence of bubbles was popping in my head which would lead, a few weeks later, to outright abandonment of the bohemian ethic, new clothes, a car purchase, and job applications. That sunrise, however, I merely pondered how many times in life I would wake up feeling strange and far from home, and how many decades could be spent roaming aimlessly through paradises.

(go to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

The moss was lime green, waves crashed over the rocks, and five sea turtles swam beneath us. On the next point over a quiet hippie man sat strumming his guitar. I wanted to be hanging out with him. But I have noticed lately that young long-haired hippie man on a bluff in the tropics with a guitar is my mirage. In desert lands when I’m very thirsty, there he is. But he always disintegrates in some way or another when I approach.

So I focused on Ronnie and the toothless man.

I control the world if in any town I enter I can find the homebums and a free six-pack. The toothless man scooted next to me batting his eyelashes, leering, and talking big—all at once. It was like watching the twisted mating dance of some jungle bird. I loved it and his free beer and the view, so I just smiled and let him carry on.

Did I know that he was a bona fide badass who could sell anything door to door and escape a Mexican prison? No, I didn’t, tell me more…

Ronnie sat thoughtfully on a rock. He was going to be a fireman. He was supposed to start training the week before, but he got stabbed in the leg. He’d been on Maui his whole life, except once when he hitchhiked through Northern California to Oregon.

One night, near Humboldt, Ronnie failed to get a ride. He decided he had to sleep in the forest. But as he walked to its edge, some Native American boys who had been eyeing him approached.

“What are you doing, brother?”

Ronnie told them he was going to sleep.

“Oh, no, no, no.”

The locals informed him that the forest was full of black bears and he would die! It was dire news. Fortunately for clueless Ronnie, he was still a Maui boy, and as such permanently blessed with the bear-repelling Maui Magic. As he stood pondering his options, pit hardening in stomach, a car pulled up.

Beep beep!

“Are you from Maui?” the driver asked.

Ron was stunned.

“I think I’ve seen you around.”

The man bought him dinner and a hotel, and the two reminisced about Maui all night long.

~~

The toothless man, haven been given time to think, followed Ronnie’s story up with a devious scheme: Ronnie should take his money and go get us all more beer. And take his sweet time getting back.

The toothless man salivated over this plan and repeated it several times to Ronnie. It took time and pressure, but eventually Ronnie was convinced. He finished his drink and walked away.

It was horrifying but I was fatalistic. This was the price I would have to pay for abusing a poor man’s libido for free drinks. I knew it wouldn’t get too terrible, it wasn’t that kind of day.

But the toothless man lost no time. He sidled right up as Ronnie rounded the corner. His eyelashes batted again. “You suuuure are pretty.” he informed me. “Could I have a kiss?”

Instantly he was in my face, his hand positioned on my knee! Quick thinking was required! Math degree go!

My brain reeled to compromise grosstrocity with placation, until, finally, it landed on a brilliant scheme of my own:

“I have an idea.”

(He was all ears.)

“How about I kiss you once and then we just sit here and get to know each other?”

In hindsight, I will never propose that plan again.

He nodded in agreement and attacked me with his tongue. (He was only missing two teeth.) I let him go on for an obligatory split second, then moved away. “Alright! That was that then!” I was hoping that if I enacted my ‘plan’ with enough enthusiasm he would have to follow along. However, the larger truth turns out to be: if you give a mouse a cookie, they will ask for some motherfuckin’ milk.

He begged me for one more kiss. I declined. He begged and begged, literally on his knees, but finally he realized I would not yield. So, logically, he asked if he could see my titties.

Just a peek? A flash? It wouldn’t hurt anybody, nobody else would see.

Of course not. But the more I declined, the more eloquent his begging became.

Just a moment? Just my eyes? No daring means no surprise.

Don’t be holdin’ holdin’ holdin’. You KNOW you like to show ‘em.

Take a chance. Sweet Romance. Once with meeeee.

Finally he realized I would not yield. So, logically, he asked if he could suck on my titties. By this time, he was a genius:

There is only the now, the present moment. We confabulate everything else. And here, in this sunshine, above the sea turtles, the bright moss, sucking on titties sure would be wonderful. Everybody would love it—the sucker, the suckee, the turtles, the hippie man with the guitar. And, ya know, love is a glorious thing. It should be spread at every instant. The instant is the only opening through which we can spread love! Here and now is the only reality.

Eventually that here and now will reach the evening and THEN, my chickadee, you will regret not letting me suck on those young titties of yours. You will think about it all night long. Do you want to live like that? In regret?

One day those won’t even be young titties any longer! How will you feel then about the loss of this moment? This opportunity? A lost chance…can never be recovered.

He was an inspiration to toothless men everywhere! But the answer remained no.

(go to Part 1, Part 2, Part 4)

His Holiness the Dalai Lama is crystal clear on riling up passion: it whets the appetite and perpetuates the cycle of desire and suffering. But His Holiness is not infallible. He tends to be correct; however he can be wrong every few decades.

For my mental health and the future enlightenment of all sentient beings, I put on my black tube top, brushed my teeth, and decided to hitch hike to the beach town with all the hot hippies, Paia. I slipped my crystal into my pocket to remind myself to stop at some point and Think.

My friend dropped me off in a mountain town seven miles above Paia and I went to the cemetery, a perfect hitching point with a good view and a large pullover. I put Umiko on speaker phone to keep me company and stuck out my thumb. It usually takes five minutes to get a ride on Maui but it took almost an hour that day, because the island faeries needed time to enact their witchcraft. Umiko and I commiserated long-distance as the cars zoomed by. Why were we lonely? Why not just impassioned? Everyday? Why did we waste our time like this?

Umiko was in the middle of serious, heartfelt rambling when a truck pulled up and I hung up on her mid-sentence. The driver came out wearing a baseball cap, shorts, and a grin and started raving about how wonderful it was that I was hitch hiking in a wheelchair. He wasn’t sure what he would do with the chair if he stopped, he said, but he figured I had a plan so he’d stopped anyway. (I did have a plan: the back of the truck.) He wasn’t scary at all, so I climbed in.

It’s a straight shot down the mountain to Paia on a road with a view of the whole island. The man raved on. I sure was “inspirational.” And “courageous.” And “adventurous.” And “VERY cute.” Woops. He went back to ‘adventurous.’

Yeah, I really get around. I told him about my defunct hippie school bus plan. Wow. So…did my ‘adventurousness’ apply to boyfriends? Had I ever had…boyfriends?

There was no backtracking from that one, he’d been revealed. But he still wasn’t scary. So I teased. Yup. I had a boyfriend.

And how did you like that?

He was a jerk, I said.

Oh.

But I liked it. Boys are great.

This continued down the road until we got to town. Would you like to go off and have some fun? He asked me, while slowing down to let me out.

Sure, I said, at first thinking he might buy me food. Then—Wait. What kind of fun?

You know…intimate fun.

Awwwwwww. Thank you, I told him, that is so sweet but I don’t think I’m ready for that yet! I hope to progress to having casual sex in five or ten years, but it wouldn’t work for me now. I just started with this sex thing, I wouldn’t be comfortable.

Keep on asking women that though! Love is great! Sometimes they’ll say yes—five to ten years from now I might have said yes.

He grinned shyly at the floor. Aww shucks, he might as well have said. I hope I didn’t freak you out.

Nah. Don’t worry about it.

He sniffed. It would have been nice, though, to let you…play with me.

I know. It’s such a shame.

He got my chair out of the back, helped me out, and shook my hand.

Normally this would never have happened to me. Historically it never had. But everything became different that day, because on February 27, at approximately 1pm, the mischievous Maui hobgoblins turned me into a Hottie. It is not beyond their power. Last weekend they turned my neighbor into a didgeridoo master with over 31 didgeridoos. They’ve gotten me blessed by a Vietnamese nun, found me a Tibetan lama, and obtained me a room by the goats. The room has a vegetable juicer and a grandmother who cooks. The hobgoblins were bound to tackle sex next.

After excitedly calling back Umiko, I started down the sidewalk. I wasn’t sure how to meet someone. Hang around the health food store? Journal in a coffeeshop? Ogle the surfers? But being a Hottie, I no longer had to overwork my brain like this.

Hey there, where are you going? This random guy on the sidewalk asked me.

I’m not going anywhere really. Just looking around.

He introduced himself as Ronnie. Before he could say much, his friend came by. His friend ignored me for a split second, then pulled an honest-to-god double take when he realized—I was a Hottie.

Why helllooo. My name is ____.

_____ was missing a few teeth and had prison tattoos, but seemed otherwise…alright. Would you like to come out to the point and drink these beers with us? He asked, lifting up a six-pack.

Sure. Sure. Why not. _______ told me about the overlook, and the moss and the rocks. He and Ronnie were great guys, he said, I would love hanging out with them.

(go to Part 1, Part 3, Part 4)

I lost my New Age Hippie crystal while fornicating on the beach in Paia. I almost lost my cell phone too, but I remembered to look for it immediately. The crystal slipped my mind until I returned to my bedroom the next day. There was my little setup–a mandala, a bodhi bead, a pivotal rock from the morning of the Great Soul Explosion 2007, and the Dalai Lama. My experiment in iconography.

In a flash I remembered pocketing the crystal in the morning with a plan to pull it out down the road over some coffee and invoke it like a crystal nut should invoke it. Crystals are loaded visual signals suggesting both clarity and a flexible openness to crystal nut insanity. They combine geological time and geometric harmony with cultural lunacy and the magnetism of bright, shiny things. If I had my way, crystals would start growing out of every cream adobe wall in this nation, followed next by mushrooms. I probably won’t get to bring that vision into being. Just as, in a related vein, I dropped my Crystal ‘o Clarity in an excited haze of sex.
~ ~
A month into Maui now, I am faux jaded on the ‘Maui Magic.’ Maui is a magic lamp Genie. Anything I ponder out loud comes true. It’s creepy, but, ya know, I’ve accepted it and my brain has moved on. Wednesday morning I said a couple of big things without thinking.

I had been sad for two days straight, destructively lovesick and lonely. My friend Weronika has been sad for months straight due to the break up of her marriage. She has been persistently moving herself from the depths of despair closer and closer to mental health and, though still stuck, has in the process become extremely insightful on the topic of Sad. She seemed to have made progress that day–her away message had been implying sadness and alienation for awhile but had changed to a more optimistic tone that morning—so I imed her:

Weronika, what is this depression curse, why does it make brains so damn lazy, and what are you doing to combat it now?

To my disappointment, Weronika told me she was making an appointment with a psychologist and considering antidepressants. She told me she’d done some research and psychologists and drugs cured many cases of depression each year. I agreed it would work on her, she was ripe for treatment, but as psychologists and Prozac don’t gel with my opinions in life, I was forced to tell her my dynamical systems theory of depression.

A dynamical systems theory can be spun on anything. They go: The thing in question is a dynamic system; it can settle into a static equilibrium; there can be many non-optimal equilibriums, stable equilibriums, unstable equilibriums, no equilibriums. These theories can be used for many colorful points, like: There is no such thing as Utopia because the social world is a dynamical system and any equilibrium would be subject to decay and eventual disequilibrium. Or: Evolution does not necessarily progress forward because, as a dynamical system, it can get stuck in a non-optimal equilibrium.

For depression it went: With depression, the brain has stabilized into a different (non-optimal) state of equilibrium. The goal of psychologists, drugs, endorphins, life changes, shock therapy is to shake the brain out of that stable point with the hope that it will reform in a higher configuration. This allowed me to propose my more glorious strategy—Sex and Adventure.

12:34 PM me: i don’t think a psychologist is what i need. i need sex and adventure

I said it. Unsaid were a few other potent thoughts:
–Just a little love would go a long way.
–I have a love deficit.
–Love is as crucial as vitamin B!
–I wish some sweet Hawaiian guy would seduce me.
–I wish men liked me.

I continued to Weronika:

me: and more dead german philosophers

12:35 PM me: i think i have to rile up passion, basically

I had uttered the incantation to Maui, I just didn’t know it yet.

(go to Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)