Whenever I travel I take several people with me via email. Below is a continuation of some excerpts from travelogs I sent to them during my most recent visit to the USA.
These are observations, experiences and opinions. I hope they provide you, the reader, with a look into what I see going on in the world as I travel through it.
If these words give you pause to think, good. I've done my job.
Hi,
Not sure where it started. Maybe up in the Tenderloin District when I went for curry the other night."There was a cockroach in my curry. I bit into it. It was sweet. When I asked the cook if there were anymore, she nearly had a heart attack. Curried tenderloin cockroach. I highly recommend it."
Maybe it was the drummers in Golden Gate Park near Haight Ashbury where I sat on Hippy Hill having visions of Janis Joplin floating from group to group trading cigarettes and swigs of Southern Comfort for songs.
Perhaps it was the night in Union Square where I turned my back on the Macy's Cristmas lights to discover why the gays love this place and most of the people seem horny all the time. It's because the whole city is just a collection of erect phallic symbols, from the Westin Hotel with its florescant elevators running up and down the outside of the building like little tongues, to the neon sign which shimmies up and explodes in a white cascade just below the Starlight Room, where the mirror balls turn against the night sky, to the simple unlit towers of the fifties which ultimately culminate in rounded dome tops, to the Christmas tree situated next to the 150-foot pillar with a lady holding a pitchfork and a club atop it.
Or was it today out in Ocean Beach climbing through the caves at land's end and having the surf rip up and flood the cave moments after I was able to jump up on some rocks, then half an hour later having my breath taken away as I rounded a bend and came upon the Golden Gate Bridge, shining in sunset from the west.
Maybe it was after the reading in the original Fillmore, where I heard a 14-year-old kid blow everyone off the stage with his forceful but optimistic folk songs and the owner came up after,asked me for my address, and thanked me for blessing his place.
It could have been this evening when, after a reading in North Beach, I wandered into some cafe and wrote this:
"my kind were here 40 years ago when the place was a dilapitated run down rat infested cheap hooker slum with a reputation for shit kicking Italian boys and drunken poets who choked back whiskey weak Mexican pot and cuban cigarettes searching the streets for pennies that business men would one day smelter and peddle to university students who now flock here as yuppies to pretend to debauch and catch the aroma of a life that is beneath them
but every once in a while one gets swept up by the pungent stink of spilled booze and stale smoke and back alley urine and slips only to emerge sometime later smelling like smoke and sweat and ink and crumpled paper and is left scanning the street for pennies
pennies to weight their trash filled pockets and provide them something to take home besides the taste of real life and a thirst to thwart their modern day boredom and for a fortnight experience what it took my kind years to recover from
they all whored here, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso, Bukowski, whored for pennies
they are my kind because now in this moment I whore here too for pennies watching every pair of eyes looking deep into the wickedness at the edge of every smile peering up the rank alleyway minds of every mindless fool who dares look into my mirror
i crawl the opium night smoking hand rolled cigarettes and straining through the neon for pennies, simple pennies. . .
my kind were here long before anyone else wanted to be"Maybe it happened a few minutes ago when I wandered into the street to smoke a cigarette and found myself in a strange foggy world of smokey neon and realized, for the first time in a whole week, the sky is not clear, it is foggy.
Maybe it was just the moment when I made the decision, but somewhere in the past two days, I started to have a heck of a lot of fun.
Hope you're all having fun too,
Will
Well,
The sun is shining, the city is screaming and my bags are packed beside me. I can't wait to get back to a place where, if you say hi to people, they say hi back, and if you ask directions they don't treat you like a terrorist, just another fool tourist.That's tourist not terrorist, buddy!
Anyway, I spent my last day in SF hanging out in Golden Gate park listening to the drummers. Later on I caught some jazz at the original Filmore then took the cable car to North Beach for one last look around.
I slept well and plan to eat this mornning at my favorite Mexican place, owned by a Japanese woman and her daughter, down in the middle of Chinatown. This afternoon the pallid dog pulls out and should deposit me in Seattle sometime tommorow morning. From there I'll hop the border and spend a night in the small newly-reclaimed socialist burg of Vancouver before heading back into those mountains, and that little lonesome town where all my crud is, hopefully with a keener appreciation for the place.
Don't know that I'll ever venture down into these parts again, or even if it will be here to venture down into, and I do mean down. Talking to the desk clerks this morning they are all quite concious to the fear that governs this place. They almost seem apologetic for it. America, under its current regime, has become the land of the fearful and the home of the paranoid. I'm glad I saw it again but I'm even more glad to be finally getting out.
The other day a fellow at a reading got upset with what he called my anti- American sentiments. "If you don't like it then why the hell don't you get out." I am getting out, I told him, but if you don't want cats like me coming down here and telling you what's up then maybe you should get your fat buns and bs out of every other country in the world.
Anyway, it is not all bad. The last few days here I've seen a lot of hope among people. I believe they are quite capable of making this the winter of love, not the winter when world war three got going full tilt. They just need to get more of them into it.
Anyway, it's been fun travelling with y'all. I'll likely send y'all one more message in this collection, once I'm home and landed with the cat and the view and the peace and quiet.
Talk to y'all soon,
Will
Good Morning from the chilly hills of the West Kootenays,
To start off I want to express a special thanks to all of you who have kept in touch during my trip and for all the kind and warm words you have expressed about my travelogues. I've enjoyed sharing my journey with you.I arrived home, or the nearest place I have to a home, yesterday with a thick and nasty head cold and not an unweary bone in my body. My final night in the belly of the Canadian pallid dog not nearly so rough as the last night I passed in the belly of the American pallid dog.
Coming up from San Francisco was pure hell. I'd contracted some sort of sneezing, wheezing, head aching, brain crushing cold my last morning in San Francisco and was in no condition to be boarding a bus, but it was time to go and go I did.
Worse than the headache was the calibre of my fellow bus riders. It seemed like each and every one of them had a head cold of their own to deal with, and their methods of dealing with it were to be cantankerous and cold and mean. What's more, the busses were loaded to the gunwales and the drivers just as cranky as their passengers.
I won't go into the dark details but suffice to say that throughout the entire 24 hour trip to Seattle there were scuffles between passengers and a general feeling of ill will. Myself, I sat me down in the only seat available to me, beside a 50-something Hispanic woman who seemed to resent my presence and kept elbowing my arm off the arm rest and pretending she knew no English.
I was finally able to escape her some hours into the trip when a couple in seats behind us disembarked, only to be set upon by some large neandrothol who thought he could get me to vacate my new nest by flexing his muscles and talking shit. Fortunately no one had provided him with a manual on how to deal with a cantankerous 48-year-old Canuck with a bad head cold and a nasty vocabulary of his own. The guy shurked off pretty quick when I stood up to his macho display, he went to so far as to get off the bus and demand to be placed on another bus, but was told by the new, motherly-type, bus driver to either get back on the bus and shut up or he'd be left alone in the crisp night air of Redding California.
The next morning as we approached Seattle the Hispanic woman, who I'd earlier sat beside, revealed her extensive English vocabulary when another passenger decided to sit behind her and asked her to raise her seat. The two of them went at it in both English and Spanish for about a half hour until the driver pullled over on the freeway and threatened to drop them both off without their bags.
Yes folks, it was the bus ride from hell, but it gave me a keen appreciation for the quality of the final leg over the border. At Seattle I was loaded onto the milk run to Vancouver with a mere half dozen others going to places like Olympia, Everett and Mt. Vernon. It was a guffaw of Greyhound that my ticket put me on the milk run instead of the "Express" which contained most of the folks I'd ridden up from California with. At the depot the driver offered to let me go on the Express, but looking at who was boarding that bus, I opted to take the slow boat instead.
This finally allowed me to catch a little shut eye and I slept pretty much until we made the border, by which time there was only myself and another Canadian, a poet as it turned out, aboard. We cleared customs in a matter of minutes and were proceeding down the road when the driver asked if either of us knew how to get to Vancouver! This gave me the opportunity to play navigator, which I thoroughly enjoy doing, and lifted my spirits as I was able to guide the fellow in an expeditious manner to the depot.
Once in the tiny burg of Vancouver, it used to be a big city to me but now it is more akin to a quaint little village, I wandered up to the Commercial Drive area where I droppped in on an old chum and made ready to attend a poetry reading at Bukowskis cafe. However, after an hour or so in my friend's company, I realized the condition I was in was no condition to be in and definitely no condition to be reading poetry in, so I gave the reading idea up and found my way to the nearest hostel where my condition was immediately identified and I was fed some Neo Citron hot lemon tea, given an extra blanket and told to go to bed, which I did, for nearly 12 hours.
The next day I was back at a barely functioning level and took myself back to the Drive where I again hung out with my old chum and did a little casual coffee bar hopping until the time came to go back to the pallid dog cage and board another bus.
While waiting for the bus, in a short line that did not in anyway resemble an American bus line up (people were chatting and laughing and joking with one another), I overheard a fellow in a brown felt hat with a mustache telling a Taiwanese couple that "Muslims are murdering North Americans and Christians."
The Taiwanese couple seemed a little perplexed and were trying to back away from this bigot but he seemed intent on pushing his little hate message on them, getting louder and louder until other people were actually backing away, so they wouldn't have to listen, I guess. I could see the perplexion in the Taiwanese couple's eyes, so I once again stepped up to the plate and told the guy to back off.
He insisted what he was saying was true so I told him he was a bigot, that for all he knew the people he was talking to could be Muslims, and that I myself could be a Muslim, and that he should shut the fuck up. He kept going at it, so I warned him that if he said another word along these lines I would go to the bus depot manager and lodge a complaint. To my surprise he abruptly stopped arguing and held his peace, putting away some sort of brochure he'd been quoting from. Later on I found out why my threat to lodge a complaint with the depot manager worked, the guy was a bus driver, a Greyhound Bus driver, on his way to pick up a bus in Kelowna.
Before I left the station I came across a young couple from Britian, Frazer and Cara. This same young couple I first met in Austin earlier in my trip, I'd apparently missed them by one day in Arizona, and had linked up with them again in San Francisco.
I gave them some friendly tourist advice about Vancouver, namely - go see Stanley Park, then put them onto the hostel where I'd been so well cared for the night before.
I thought it quite syncronistic that I should, at the end of my journey, come into contact with people I'd encountered at the begining and the middle. It sort of reaffirmed to me that there was something special about my latest excursion and that despite the ups and downs of the trip, there was a strong thread of destiny in it.
It was something I was meant to do for some reason unknown to me at this point. This was no get-away or vacation. This was no holiday. This was a mission of some sort, wherein seeds have been planted for a mysterious harvest that is coming sometime in the future.
When I sat down to write this letter this morning I wanted to provide you all with a synopisis of my trip. Unfortunately, my condition, which remains congested and uncomfortable, limits my ability to be as clear and concise as I would prefer to be. However, I have these thoughts.
When I came across my British travelling companions in the Vancouver bus depot they remarked to me, even though they'd only been in Canada an hour or so, how much friendlier and freer the place seemed. They seemed relieved they could actually talk to people, and that when they approached people, people responded in kind, instead of with the cold that all of us had become accustomed to in the US. Everyone I met travelling through the border shared these same sentiments. It was like a large burden of stress was lifted from our shoulders when we crossed the 49th paralell.
In the five years I have been travelling to the US I have witnessed a serious deterioration in the American psyche. During my early trips I was greeted with much friendliness and openess. In the last two, since the tragedy of 911, I have seen a rapid change.
There is a distrust, a paranoia and a hardness that is developing at an alarming rate. During this trip I have encountered a downright coldness. As one of my fellow bus passengers (an American from Wyoming) put it, "we've become numb." I have witnessed a people so inundated with messages of fear that they are escaping it by not thinking about it. This translates into an insensitivity to their own actions.
In America today people are not looking at the root of their problems. Rather, they are looking at how to avoid thinking about it. One poet in Austin Texas gave me hell for "being depressing". It seems he wanted me to also avoid what was really going on and talk only about beauty.
And I would like to talk about beauty, the beauty of the American people when they take on the real tyrant, the one that has instilled this fear in them, the one that has inundated their lives with so many negative messages that, even in their poetry, they are seeking escapism rather than healing and resolution.
To my American friends I say this: Do not wait until the next election to make your dissent known. If you do, it will be too late. The greatest evil in the world today, to quote a phrase from your president, is your own fear to stand up and be counted as dissenters. You must act now or resign yourself to living the rest of your lives in fear and subjugation to a reign of tyranny by the wealthy on the poor. If you do not get out in the steets, right bloody now, then you may as well go on down to Washington and burn your constitution because it isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
To those of you in America who say that I should butt out of your business, I'll make a deal, you get your country to butt out of everybody elses business and I'll butt out of yours.
But most of all, there is one thing you can do right now to make things better. That is, go down to the street and say hello to the people you meet, ask how they are, shake their hands, get to know them. Phone that freind you haven't called in a while, get to know your neighbors, find out what their hobbies and interests are, invite them over for tea, get friendly, get a community.
The tyranny of your present administration can only succeed if you remain divided and isolated. If you become a community, you will stop the real terror that is killing you, the fear and mistrust of each other.
To the Canadians on my mailing list: If you think for a moment that policies of lower taxes, secondary health care systems, retraction of the social safety net, privatization of health and environmental services and free trade, are going to make Canada a better place then buy yourself a Greyhound ticket and go down to America and walk those streets and see those sights. I guarantee you will return with a changed mind. Sure we pay a little more tax, but the life we live here in Canada is worth a lot more tax.
To those of you in Europe and other places abroad, keep up the pressure. Talk at America, Remind them what war did to your country, to your parents, to your life. Keep marching for peace, keep yelling and screaming, and getting in the faces of every American you meet. Somehow the message has to get to them and their media is not delivering it. It is up to you and me because we cannot count on the powers that be.
So, in conlusion, I'm bloody glad to be home, even in the sick and decrepit condition I'm in. My head aches, my sinuses are full of snot, every muscle and joint in my body is screaming arthritic, but I want to dance on the ceiling, and give the cat a huge bear hug, and cheer at the mountains, and laugh at the grey sky, because I am alive and happy and free.
So much for now, thanks for coming along,
Will