I’m coming to you via remote. It’s dark, and as I type this by the light offered up from the beaming headlights of passing cars, I am reminded of stranger times. Back in the primeval age of drunken consciousness when all things seemed do-able and everything was botched. All those years of near-perfect disaster have come rushing back to me as I pull my sleeping bag close around my shoulders and roll down the window to get some air. There isn’t anything more glorious than lying in the back seat of a rented Ford Explorer. Especially when I consider that it’s worth more than what my parents paid to build their house. But in defense of the truck, it does have four-wheel drive. That would have come in handy, I suppose, since Dad built the house on a swamp.

This morning I brushed my teeth and washed up at a gas station. There was a line-up, so I sat there slowly sipping a bad cup of coffee and tried to look somewhat cheerful about the entire affair. This half-ass attempt was, of course, prompted by the fact that I was the only one in line that had a brand new sport-utility vehicle parked ten feet away. But, to my credit, I’m a rock musician and looking like reheated shit was working to my advantage. This made those around me feel at ease and led to numerous conversations about the ever-inflating costs of Aqua Velva, shoe polish, and cooking sherry.

That aside, it was a decent morning altogether. Because there ain’t nothing like hanging out with a bunch of guys that remember what the world was like when man had yet to walk on the moon and those in it weren’t wise to the fun and games of using social erosion as a limitless excuse.

Leonard Cohen may have indirectly summarized such remnants of our beguiling past as beautiful losers. And that really pisses me off. Primarily because I didn’t coin the phrase and, secondarily, because they made me feel as if I’d missed something valuable. It’s one thing to deliberate hopelessness in the pages of some beat poet hard cover collector’s edition. It is entirely something else to witness those who can convince themselves of hopefulness faced with its impossibility. Perhaps, if you’re so inclined, you might buy someone with nothing left to lose a bad cup of coffee and figure out what it is that we’ve been taking for granted all this time.

To hear some of the gas station boys tell it you’d think that we were intended to roam unhindered and unhunted. Maybe that’s why the aboriginal peoples had it so good before we introduced them to liquor and stole their land. I dunno. I can’t really make that kind of a comparison when I’m whipping around in a brand new S.U.V. And even though I often wonder if any of the great spirits know my mind I would never be presumptuous enough to assume that they really give a shit. Not anymore. Not after all this. Back seats are uncomfortable. Reading that back I have just realized that unhunted is not a real word. It damn well should be.

This evening I discovered, to my simultaneous delight and embarrassment, that the back seats fold down and allow you to use the rear cargo area for a variety of things. Sleeping is one of them. A short list of others would include: 1] small fondue get-togethers 2] nothing larger than a threesome 3] mousetrap 4] smoking meats, fish, and other seafoods 5] a blind for hunting water fowl 6] using the vehicle as a getaway device if engaged in rifle hunting anything besides water fowl 7] bullshitting thousands of people on a monthly basis via the internet.

I’ve always dreamed of living in an RV. I can see it all now—satellite, a big screen, bunk beds, and an ever-expanding front and back yard. Willie Nelson’s got it right. He lives in a huge motor home. And all those girls he’s loved before, well, they’ve been inside it.

But that’s not to say that I wouldn’t love to settle down one day and do all those things that one is expected to do around my age. You know, the big equation of life. It looks something like this:

M + Wf + H + S.U.V. + Dt = K + MD + C.A.O.A

Now if you’re wondering what all that means then I’ll run you through it. M stands for MAN or ME (substitute W for M if you’re a female). Wf would stand for “wife� (or husband, though you might want to change that to Hd. For those out there that enjoy fast cars and big diamond thingies you might consider just using a $). H is for HOUSE. S.U.V., as used earlier, stands for SPORT-UTILITY VEHICLE. You’ll need one to look the part.

Minivans will also do. Dt stands for DEBT. Debt is what you get in when you accumulate the first three parts of the equation. Added together, these five factors result in the following: K is obviously for kids (unless you happen to have a thing for collecting rare Kraftwerk vinyl). MD would symbolize MORE DEBT. This is one thing in life that most people can count on. There will always be more debt. The fact that you now have kids just makes it more and more like a landslide. You’ll begin to have dreams about falling off cliffs and balconies and landing on huge spikes. And finally we come to C.A.O.A which stands for COPIUS AMOUNTS OF ADVIL. You can substitute another pain reliever for Advil if you prefer something else. And that, friends, is the equation of life.

But I’m not so sure I’m geared up for it. I’ve always hoped to meet a woman that might plan a bank heist with me and be prepared to do the time if we got caught. After ten or twenty years we could try it again. If we get away with it then we could bum around a country with no extradition treaties until we were forced to return and do it again.

And I’m not talking about some hack job either. I’m talking about a skillfully planned and executed theft that may or may not include hostages, result in causing bodily harm and/or sacrificing a team member. That’s the kind of woman I’m looking for. But women like that don’t exist. Not ones that would do the whole thing wearing a Budweiser bikini and a diving mask. God damn that would be sexy.

So I figure I’ll do the RV thing for a while. I doubt I’ll buy, but I wouldn’t mind whipping around for six months living in various campgrounds. There’s nothing better than the smell of cheap coffee and bacon and eggs when you’re living in the middle of nowhere. In my entire life breakfast has never smelt as good as it does when I’m camping. Not that living in a luxury RV is camping.

Maybe I could use the RV as a mobile command centre and travel around recruiting a team for the bank heist. I could even booby-trap it like Max’s Charger in The Road Warrior.

For now, I’m living in a sort-of-truck (I like that better than sport-utility vehicle) and trying my best to eat at least one green thing a day.
It horrifies my mother to no end. You’d think she could find something better to worry about than me not eating enough vegetables. My brother Chris spends one half of every year submerged under the surface of the ocean. He’s a diver. You’d think that would occupy her. Instead I need to eat beets. Because beets are good for you. I agree, actually. I love beets, just not when my mom’s around.

The other night at dinner she decided to tell my brother that she spent most of the ’70s on Valium. Of course my brother and I were born in ’71 and ’72 (respectively), so it concerned him a little.

You know, she’s still good. She had him going for a good half hour before she started laughing. I walked into the kitchen afterwards and she started laughing again.

“What made you think of Valium anyway?� I said.

“I don’t know, maybe it was all that Valium I took,� she said.

I’m not entirely sure whether or not my mother spent the entire decade on Valium. It seemed to me that she was kidding when she tortured my brother with it, but when she said it to me I began to think there was some truth to it.

My family’s known for being good bullshitters. It’s the ability to con and confuse someone with complete crap to such an extent that they don’t know if you’re telling the truth anymore. The trick is to make sure there’s enough truth mixed in with the bullshit that when you’re spinning it you look like you believe it yourself.

It’s not the story or how it’s told. It’s if your face is telling the same thing as your mouth. And that’s how I became such a smart-ass. It’s in the genes.

Everything you are came from somewhere else. Most of the time it takes people years to come to terms with the fact that a large part of their being is rooted in something undesirable. Take my family for instance. My dad’s side are asses and my mom’s are smart. Put the two together and you can see how I was afflicted with my current condition.

Luckily my old man is the black sheep of his family and an exception to the “Rule Of Goods.� He’s somewhat of a wise man. Next to the shopping-cart guy from Uridian 15 he’s the wisest man I know.

But I digress. My original point is that you inherit certain things that have undesirable origins. I’m a smart ass because of an unlikely genealogical combination. Being a smart-ass is to be dualistic. To be one you must accept both parts. If you’re going to be smart then you’ve got to deal with the fact that you’re an ass as well. Sometimes you discover that you’re more smart than ass. Most of the time it’s the other way around. It took me a long time to realize that. But I finally did. In the back of a rented sort-of-truck no less.

I like outer space. I like it because we don’t know a whole lot about it: a bullshitter’s paradise. I could make up a whole load of crap about outer space right now and half of you would believe it.

So here’s the outer space story then…

There once was a man who had a giant ship made out of cheese. It was cheddar cheese, the kind that’s orange and so hard that it can cut glass. It made him unstoppable. All the other space pilots wanted to be him and all the ladies wanted him. He was a legend in his own time.

Until one day he came upon a huge flying toaster and learned that all things, at a specific temperature relative to their molecular composition, tend to liquify. This principle includes very hard cheeses. So the guy with the orange-cheese ship was no longer the king shit. The toaster ship guy was the king shit. And he was a legend in his own time. Because there’s nothing tougher than a toaster ship. And all the space pilots wanted to be him and all the ladies wanted their muffins heated.

And then one day another guy with a ship that shot ice beams decided to do battle with the toaster guy. There was a huge fight and the ice ship won because every time he fired his ice beams at the toaster ship it would cloud over toaster-boy’s windows and he couldn’t see. Evaporation and condensation can be a bitch like that.

The toaster guy wasn’t defeated because the ice beams were more powerful than his toaster ship. He lost because his windows fogged over and he flew into a huge asteroid and blew up. So the ice guy became a legend in his own time and all the space pilots wanted to be him and all the ladies went out and rented 9 1/2 Weeks, and so on.

Until one day some wise-ass came along with a ship made completely out of vodka and kicked his ass. But instead of becoming a legend in his own time and banging every girl at the space station he just collected up the remnants of the ice man’s ship and spent eternity drinking vodka sevens on the rocks.

The truck goes back to the rental place on Friday morning and then I get on a plane and fly somewhere. Where exactly I’m not sure. It would seem that I rarely know the answer to that question anymore. And that’s beginning to scare me. If you have any idea where it is that I’m going please drop me a line and fill me in. I’d love to know the future. Even if it’s just the past all dressed up to make whatever comes next look good.

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