I want to live again. This is my reminder.
I saw Alcatraz and the Alamo. I visited what had to be the country’s most beautiful lake (Martin was its name) on the outskirts of Montgomery, Alabama. I drove the California coast, skirting the edge of the Pacific, as Rufus Wainwright lamented a “Vicious World” from the speakers of a dinged-up rental car. I wrinkled my nose at the dual aromas of piss and beer on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. I found God in Miami but lost him on the way to the airport. I fell asleep in the middle of an ice-covered field in a bucolic Pennsylvania town on a wintry Sunday morning, pondering my tenuous future as I faded. I shared falafel with a punk rocker, a vegan skinhead who kept chickens as pets and a man named Mohammed on the streets of New York City at 3 a.m. I had a glass of cabernet amongst the bohemians in San Francisco on a warm fall afternoon -- a Tuesday, I think. I crossed (small) rivers, climbed (small) mountains, scaled (small) canyon walls, traversed (small) deserts and reached into the canopies of (not so small) swaying trees.
I spent a night, sleepless and alone, in my shoes and with the lights on, in a haunted Civil War-era mansion on the Florida-Georgia border. I thought I might die at a “horror hotel” in Kingston, Rhode Island, with no heat, a squeaky bed, stains on the carpet and shitty cable access. I wasted the loneliest night of my life at a La Quinta Inn in Dallas and choked down a bachelor’s dinner at the Denny’s next door. I saw the most brilliant stars, dotting the blackest skies, from the backseat of a Town Car in La Crosse, Wisconsin. I faced the Rio Grande. I slid two-hundred feet down an ice chute in Alberta’s Banff National Park. I skipped stones across the Mississippi. I spent the night (two, actually) watching human ants from a perch in one of the nicest hotels in Manhattan’s Times Square.
I saw my reflection in “The Bean.” I awaited Mothman’s attack from the floor of a van in a cold, dark corner of Delaware. I drove the Trans-Canada Highway and Route 66. I rolled through the small town of Sikeston, Missouri, infamous for its role in a public lynching from the 1940s. I visited Millennium Park, Columbine High School, Okefenokee Swamp, the Great Salt Lake and Louisville’s Chainsaw World. I watched a lightning storm from the 98th floor of the Hancock Building. I saw the most breathtaking view of the Las Vegas Strip, had cigars and brandy at an all-night bar in Montreal, and got snowed out of Buffalo. I skied off the edge of an untouched mountain in western Canada. I had a glass of cheap merlot at a revered (for some reason) hole in the wall in subterranean Chicago, and it tasted great (for some reason).
I got drunk with multimillionaires. I witnessed magic being made first-hand by Wayne Gretzky on the ice and Hulk Hogan in the ring. I bowed before Jake “The Snake” Roberts (that's him in the photo, of course), only to learn years later that drugs already had their hooks in him. I got a foot “massage” from a semifamous black man named Mel. I had my face signed by Glenn Danzig. I crossed paths with Lex Luger at a Flash Foods convenience store in Yulee, Florida. I got tattooed by a toothless man claiming to be a former member of Corrosion of Conformity; he spat on my bare back as he carved the design into my skin. I outran the cops more times than I care to admit. I saw a man collapse from a heart attack at a post-wedding party; the EMTs wheeled him out of the reception hall wrapped in a sheet. I won two (or was it three?) events in a fitness competition at Penn State University. I saw Air Force One take off from a Florida runway as the sun faded on the evening of September 10, 2001, taking a piece of me with it; I’m different now.
I got my name in the newspaper for something other than being born or dying. I had a Vegas tarot-card reader tell me, “Now don’t freak out,” as she conjured the death card when manufacturing my future. I received two six-figure job offers, something I never thought would happen even once in my lifetime, and turned them both down. I shared a microphone -- and the stage -- with punk-rock legends. I got trapped on an eight-inch-wide ledge of a rock wall 60 feet above the ground, hyperventilating as I wondered how I would keep from falling to my death. I watched the original Japanese version of “Godzilla” (“Gojira!”) in a small, crowded theater in downtown Philly; who cares if it happened 50 years after the film’s initial release? I had a catheter for two days too long; I imagine there are much worse things than dreaming you’ve had a catheter removed only to wake up and find its tail dangling from a hole in your hospital gown -- I just don’t want to know what they are. I had a friend tell me, “You have to be nice to me. I have raw sewage on my pants.”
I saw a bear in the woods, rattlesnakes on a mountaintop, alligators in the swamp, and a man with a loaded rifle protecting his riverside property, upon which I had mistakenly trespassed. I touched the scales of a live cobra. I got bitten and squeezed by a pissed-off Burmese python. I stalked spotted salamanders in an isolated marsh … with a dying flashlight ... on an early May night … in a cold rain ... knee-deep in muck … wearing schoolbus-yellow boots … wondering if I had unknowingly wandered into a yet-to-be-filmed episode of “The X-Files.” I snorkeled among barracudas, squids, octopuses and moray eels, ever mindful of what else lurked in the deep blue beyond. I picked up a bullfrog and got peed on. I grabbed a water snake by the tail and let its bowels empty onto my shoes.
Through everything that has happened, regardless of who was with me at the time, I did it all alone. My mind has become a prison -- years and years of solitary confinement. Even so, I still know how it feels to laugh and smile. And I actually do those things every so often.
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