Dreams

I am awake. The sun isn't up yet. I had fitful sleep, and vivid dreams. I dreamt of sleeping with an ex-girlfriend Emily, I dreamt of snakes eating things too large for them to eat. I dreamt of strangers looking to burglarize what I had already burgled. I can't remember them all but they all woke me up. Each time I went out to see if there was something beautiful on cable and there wasn't. I returned to bed as boats went up the mekong delta in search of Pol Pot's boys. For some reason I'm not afraid of anything. Nothing that I know of scares me. Not getting shot, not cancer, not lupus, none of that. Death is a joke. It always has been. I'd be a good soldier except I can't kill for something I don't believe.

Someday I love to think that I will have a child to teach all the things I've learned about this world, but I can't see that child's mother. I survived childhood, and if I can do it surely a child of mine can. American broadcast journalism nauseates me, and BBC is only on a few times a day. This is one of those times. Coffee, cigarette, BBC. All that's missing is a woman who understands me.

I can't drink, because I can't drink well. Sometimes I take clonazepam for my nerves and motor tics, and I'm given a half a day of relief. When it was prescribed to me, I took more than prescribed so my girlfriend made me call my doctor and tell him I was abusing them. I wanted her to be happy so I did. I also had to call the pharmacy. All of it very embarrassing. I don't want a lover that gives me ultimatums to embarrass myself, but a woman who knows that I can find a solution.

I don't want to go to Uganda. I don't want to see much of Africa. Morocco and Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt are magical and lovely lands, but I don't have any compulsion in my heart to go to those places. I promised myself I'd go to Argentina. I've told people about my dream. It is real. It came from my heart, and I want to get there by motorcycle. Not rushing, slowly and taking my time. I expect to encounter challenges, but that's the stuff life is made of. If it were easy, every trust fund hippie would be doing it. It's not like going to burning man, it's like being Hemmingway on a motorcycle. I'm 31 and soon I will be too old to get away with such dangerous enterprises. Then I will have to have children and give up my sleep to allow my woman some peace.

This is my dream. I want to see what America ignores at best, and meddles with at worst. People are people. There may be ones that hate me, there certainly are those here. Gary Robinson decided when I was 14 and had run away from home to the University that he would call the police and tell them where I was. He told a few of his friends and they would be spectators. The problem was that I wasn't there. Didn't come there that day and wasn't around. I did learn about this and I challenged him to a duel. I punched him in the face and he punched me in mine and we left it at that. A year or two later I read in the paper he was shot in the head while robbing a kid of his LSD and money. His co-robber had pistol whipped the victim and acidentally fired a round into Gary's head. I think from that I learned that people who do wrong dig their own graves. My dream is one of childish wonder and innocence and for all the wrong I've done it can me amended.

People will have their opinions, people will tell me I'll die. People will say a lot of things, but no one will ride with me. A friend, a true friend of mine, would ride with me, not try to stop me.