This is a good thing, as I am becoming less and less “digital” every day anyway. I thank everyone for following along and feel free to stay tuned to the RSS feed as one day we may again be in a position to share the journey. That day simply isn’t this one, or any foreseeable ones in the coming future.

Seriously, sinceriously in fact, thanks for all of your comments, input and reading. It’s more fun to share but sometimes disappearing is an act you just have to follow.

We slept in the car the night we arrived, Texas still a warm still of a night kind of place and Tristan was already asleep when we got there, so why bother with the hassle of waking him up only to sleep in a similarly uncomfortable cheap motel bed. My eyes closed somewhere just before midnight.

6am, Texas time. I wasn’t trying to adjust to the time zone, my old time zone but somehow Texas didn’t feel like home at all anymore. I thought of the brief moments, maybe only days or maybe a month or so, when I thought I’d be a Texan. Austin maybe, or Marathon, complete opposite sides of the big state and completely different lifestyles but the desert, the hill country, it was all so pleasing to me. Finding myself pleased, I laughed, was probably my downfall in that whole situation. Comfort is comfortable, sure, but complacency is dangerous and I’ve worked too hard to dodge it to allow it to suck me up into it’s too easy to do belly at this point.

We saw Olivia, the wonderful woman still filling what was once all of our old RV. She’d decorated it up to suit her exactly, ribbons and bells and post it notes reminding her to drink water and everything about it was dripping with who she was, both who she’d always been, even if it had been on hold while we were all together, and who she was becoming. She came walking across the Marathon Motel and RV Park dirt lot wearing a short skirt and high boots, looking like a desert child. Tristan beamed and the two of them walked around the sleepy, miniature version of what modern America would consider a small town, this more of a wide spot on Highway 90. I tried to fit our old life into as few boxes as possible, the KIA had great trunk space but whatever I took would eventually need to be slimmed down again, and probably again, Goodwilling the excess. But I wanted to complete the task, get a few minutes of Marathon in for myself, and get back to Colorado.

Prior to buying our bus, I had never had a real desire to get to Colorado before. It’s one of the most gorgeous, lavish states but I always saw it as a drive through on my way to other destinations. Under that beating, suntanning desert sun though, it was the only place I wanted to be.

My scooter, Stella, had blown over in a wind storm but was more or less fine, save for a busted reflector on the front tire well. I started her up and the one mile ride into town was over in only a minute. Marathon was awfully sleepy for noontime, only a few locals were wandering the streets and barely any of them the more socially open types I’d come to find as more friends than acquaintances. A good friend who makes tacos at the only coffee shop in town was in Austin sorting out some new venture, but the shops owner, a woman with many names of which I prefer “Boots” the best, came out to chat and fixed us up breakfast like I certainly couldn’t complain about. She offered to let me park Stella at her place for a couple of months until I could sort out what I’d do with the old blue girl.

And then it was over. Tristan and I were back in the KIA, 90mph back up empty West Texas roads, through Balmorhea’s lush green hills with black pitch night rock cliffs peaking out, my favorite drive perhaps in all of America, through the Pecos, New Mexico’s long endless desert stretch (something about New Mexico just doesn’t sit right with me…). A $25 motel room, a few hours sleep. A phone call from my lady in Colorado assuring me that everything was grand, good and going as planned. Wake up, drive some more. A phone call reveals that my laptop, a MacBook Pro which serves as the bread winner in our little bus living, was too broken to fix at the Mac Shack, a local Apple IT type fix it shop, and would need to be sent in to Apple proper to get the repairs done. Five to seven days around the holidays means I won’t see my computer, or a paid work hour, until 2010. I panicked for a moment, stopped in at the first Apple Store I could find on my way home–Colorado Springs in a massive, busy-as-the-holidays mandate strip mall–and applied for credit. Denied. Damn medical bills and my inability or lack of inclination to pay them.

No big deal, though, I thought. In an hour we’ll be back in Loveland, back at the bus. In four hours we’ll be up the mountains and Tristan, myself and our lady friend sitting around a pot belly stove of a fire sipping Stone IPAs and smoking cigarettes over detailing the every minutes of the last three days of our lives spent apart.

So I mustered up the gumption to just go and register the vehicle in Colorado, though I think I had wanted to ride Texas plates, it wasn’t going to happen. I had been living in the Rocky Mountain State (that’s really what it should be called, “Centennial State”, wtf?) for three months and three days, so I met residency requirements. $250 later and Tristan and I are now Coloradoans (a word that hurts my fingers just to type, so awkward and round and vowely) now, legally anyway.

Of course, we’ll always be Pennsylvanians, Tristan a true blooded Pittsburgher and myself a Nanty Glo boy, at heart. The Steeler Nation doesn’t care what your license plate says as long as your blood bleeds black and gold.

That was only partially serious…

His math sheets are nearly flawless, his pictures drawn with realistic fantasy, his reading quick and the words each understood all through his brain. He’s merely 8 years old but what wisdom and understanding, what culture and vision he has is enough to overflow the gray matter cups of many whole families. He’ll be more than I am at my age, more than I’ll ever be by his death.

Still though, he’s a child now and while I’d love to see a companion in him for travels and tribulation, he craves his fellow children, wishes for playgrounds and a dog for a best friend and routine. I am not aware of the appeal of routine, personally, but if we are alive and conscious, and consciousness is the ability to determine right from wrong through self-awareness and the realization that others exist in the same manner, then my pursuits as a parent are the struggle triangular between teaching through example, minimizing tears in his biggest blue eyes, and not trading one life for another.

So is the metaphor of our lives, friends. We are young, we are unencumbered by the trapdoor fixtures of debt and compromise. Fresh as the fruit we fill our stomachs with, green as the smoke this Colorado countryside has colored legal, flirting danger safe as the quarter inch of metal between the dry winter heat of a propane powered gift and all of zero degrees Dr. Fahrenheit outside do we exist. Money is heavy rich in bank accounts and then money is $27 thin one day as we choose between chance and lottery what our today will mean for our tomorrow. Fortune is in our favor, but fate is nothing without plans and action; those three sisters spinning

A woman with a kind smile and long gray hair is working the natural foods store around the corner from Main Street, a white house transformed into everything organic, good and wholesome. Locals gather in the coffee shop down the street from our motel to discuss the trappings of the day: the legalities of marijuana, jump starting cars, and how one man’s girlfriend wound the windows down to smoke last night, leaving the dome light on and a pile of snow in the backseat that morning. Dale’s Pale Ale is brewed in the bar across the street from where we’re staying, that craft batch brew of beer that comes in a can or keg only. School children are playing in the yard behind us, two girls kick their legs in desperation on swingsets, both seemingly alone and neither deciding to join the other and communion their solitary recess ways. Lights blink Christmas on every street post, random tree and house front porch. When night comes, the pinball arcade opens and 30-something adult men wander in with pockets full of quarters to play decades old games of paddle and ball.

The morning sounds of Mexican workers laughing in spoken Spanish, few cars on the street as life is slow here in Lyons, Colorado. An orange, a croissant and a cup of some pecan flavored coffee help me get everything up and going. Tristan complains over doing dishes and I head into the parking lot of our home for the week to fire up the bus. She’s fresh out of a two week mission into the garage–while the lady and I wandered to Florida, the boy and I to Pittsburgh, all only to reconvene here in this two bed little motel who’s sign reads The Aspen Leaf Antique Shop & Motel–where new brakes, a fixed horn, a tightened clutch, a new CV joint and freshly redone dash lights hold the promise of sending the little bus on the road so merrily. She fires right up even though I apparently left the radio on for the past two days, and I smoke a cigarette while she unthaws the various cranks, wheels and spitting pistons that I can tell are only as happy as the three of us to get out of this cold, to experience some desert life.

Our sweet Lady goes off to early morning work scenes and the boy and I leave our little room, the kitchenette still smelling of coffee and last night’s festivities, the beds half-heartedly made, the shower steaming with morning cleanse. Snow covers each and every inch of the ground as we navigate the maze of construction sidewalks and one way streets our feet lead us through on our way to the day’s activities. Tonight, perhaps, we’ll drive around and look at Christmas lights or play more pinball, having parties on our beds with music and good locals beers and talking about whatever future, past or present plans we’ll all partake of together. It’s a final week in Colorado, at least for the year, the Winter season, and Ioving every minute of it.

There is nothing wrong with living a life where you pursue happiness at all costs. As a greater society, as a species, it seems we have been developing this idea that whatever the norm is, so shall that be the reflection of what is right. If you are doing something that makes you happy, you seem selfish, self-serving, a person of foolish decisions. But if the norm is the look I see on the faces of every commuting 9 to 5er, of every Walmart “Associate”, of all you Church pew filling Saved, well my friends, I believe it is time to reevaluate what the norm should be. It was once normal to own, rape and kill slaves. At one point, the norm was to be tried without a jury, imprisoned without a cause, and you had to worship whatever God some lucky bastard born into a throne deemed you should. When those pilgrims took up ship and headed for America, they knew the danger, they knew the risk, and they knew the reward: happiness. There is no certainty as to what will happen when our hearts stop beating, and to waste one second of this life compromising happiness or the chance of it for doing what’s right simply because it is the most normal life is a sin in my eyes as sickening as suicide.

Living in a vehicle the size of a VW Bus is not wrong and nor is it extreme. Analogies…well, in a flower bed, we see the plants which are the most able to spread and take over the bed as weeds, even in the case of dandelions which are nearly identical to the daisy in appearance, we recognize that plants who want to expand and expand until they squelch out the resources of all others in the garden to be weeds. So could one liken the ever increasing appetites of Western consumerism, land grabbing, garbage dumps with more wealth in them than entire African villages, to weeds in a world full of gardens. Of course, no one would like to believe themselves the dandelion and not the rose. Additionally, I believe that the size of our homes is directly proportional to the disconnection of our people as a culture. As our personal abodes get larger and larger we physically and emotionally get further and further apart. Where a family of 13 living in a three bedroom house in the 60’s and 70’s ate dinner together every night, now a family of 4 takes their fast food into their own various rooms and eats separately every night. Again, it is fast becoming normal for people to have homes with more bedrooms than people. That is fine for those of you who choose to live that way, and though I am happy to be free to express my opinions on this website, you are equally able to not digest them here. However, please realize that this mode of living–with 10 foot ceilings, three bathrooms, two car garages–is a very, very new one. I’d set its current age at maybe 30. Go back further than three decades and I believe you’ll find that only lords and kings, only the rich had such amenities that we’ve all grown so used to so quickly. Homesteaders, even with their acres of land, lived in much smaller houses. Indians lived in teepees made of material more vulnerable than that of any Volkswagen and I can guarantee you they were a better race of people than we. They lived here for some 12,000 years without screwing up this most beautiful land. We’ve largely done it in 500. So my point, living in a bus in not extreme, is valid for most of human existence unless you compare it to the extreme that is living in a modern day mansion for the every man.

Having possessions is the root of America’s downfall. “You are not what you own.” A FUGAZI song. I believe the meaning behind the lyrics there is something akin to, simply because you have everything does not mean you are everything. Possession leads to bills, bills lead to work, work takes time and time, for everyone, leads to death. Please don’t ever think that because someone has less stuff, they are living less of a life. Indeed, related to the previous paragraph, even having less space in your home leads to more life, because it forces you to explore the redwoods you’re living under, the desert you’re living in, the world you’re living on. There’s a current campaign called “Play60″ that I think the government is putting on, with ads everywhere encouraging children to play for at least 60 minutes a day. Barring any tragic disability that prevents them from doing so, if your children are having a hard time playing–I mean hard ass, running around, out of breath playing–for only one hour a day, well, your children suck at being kids. Far be it from me to say what any particular child should do, but I will, because it’s obvious: wake up, play like crazy until you’re so tired you fall asleep in your lunch bowl, wake up, do it again, repeat until bed time.

Christianity is a farce, not because the ideas are unsound, but because the practitioners are all too often full of shit. I considered not adding this one because I’m over the whole “I don’t believe in God rebellion” that I was dealing with throughout my 20’s, but for something that was brought to my attention recently I think I should mention this. If you look at a street person and think they are dangerous simply because they are dirty; if you wouldn’t pick up a hitchhiker pulling their jacket tight walking through the belting night rain; if you feel that living a completely safe life can be accomplished by shutting out those in the world who are less fortunate, well I really think you’re missing the entire point of that book of yours. To be in it for the Heaven, for the big payoff, is wrong. Jesus wasn’t tell you “be a good person or else you’ll go to Hell,” though his Dad didn’t seem to have much else to say. Jesus was saying “be a good person because it’s the right thing to do, because it’ll make this world a better place, because when everyone is good and kind to one another, everyone can be happy.” Instead of holding out a helping hand, you’ve given us the Crusades, gay bashing and George Bush. You know, the “good work.”

I largely try and avoid writing about things like this here in favor of attempting to accurately describe how beautiful a pile of leaves on a car hood is, I realize, and I won’t make a habit of it, but I thought they were items that needed to be said. So I have, and now, I am done.

It slightly saddens me that anytime I find an article online about a “hippie community” or people talk about these folks in general they lead straight into “Man, Whereversville is such a cool hippie spot. There are just mad drugs everywhere.” I don’t have anything particularly against drugs, though I think the term is an obscurely broad one–how can you place heroin and marijuana and alcohol all under the same label as aspirin?–which can’t easily be turned into a list with “good” and “bad” marked by each item, either. I would hope, given the absolute necessity of making a choice, my children decided to smoke pot long before they decided it was okay to pop prescription pills every day of their life for the next 80 years just because some doctor told them it was essential to normal living. In fact, I would prefer my offspring smoke pot to eat at McDonalds. But I digress.

While I was not there and am no expert, I suspect the whole hippie movement thing was only partially about acid trips and unlikely much at all about being strung out on meth. I believe it was more about rejecting commercialism, about making your own clothes and food, about sharing, about looking out for your fellow man. I believe it was more about sitting in drum circles than passing around joints and I believe that it was something that changed this country for the better, even if it wasn’t the only thing that changed this country during that time and even if it wasn’t the only direction this country changed toward. I believe it influenced punk rockers in 1979 and my own generation of “alternative music” type kids (do we even have a name?) in the 90’s, because both of those movements were about coming together and rejecting the facade that is overindulgence in consumer goods.

I feel that this constant stereotyping of hippies as tripped out Cheech & Chong types is dangerous because, as the Beats before them, these are a meaningful group of people who affected our country for the better and if we diminish them to red-eyed pot smoking voices then we risk forgetting the lesson that it all taught us. If they weren’t the only reason for it, they were definitely a giant contribution to the tearing down of much prejudice, opening the world of freedom of music and expression up to a country that was largely afraid of anything of the sort at the time, and paving the way for mine and my children’s generations to not have to work so hard at being themselves.

Pennsylvania is rolling green hills all summerlong. It’s dazzling bright and burning leaves in the Autumntime. It’s long, long, all too long winters but the first snow, when it’s so fresh the plows haven’t been out to push it aside into clumps of muddy salted muck, only white and pillowy and covering every tree limb and yard and hiding the ugliness of the cattle farm-like car lot expanses that are this tiny plot of suburbia. It’s too beautiful.

I drive my mother to work so that I can use her car if I need to during the day. Public transportation is non-existent and there isn’t a bicycle with my name on it for 1,785 miles. On the way home I take backroads through neighborhoods with more memories I’ve forgotten–fights I’ve managed my way through and those I’ve been less lucky with, first girlfriends or skateboarding everyday afternoons, school bus stops and all the houses and shacks I’ve lived in over the years–than I care to even begin to remember, though nostalgia is thick as the snow begins to slightly melt under the tire tread of her Mitsubishi Eclipse. A new Alice in Chains song comes on, though the original singer is dead, they’ve apparently found his vocal equivalent and begun anew. Soundgarden follows. Van Halen and ACDC follow. It’s a rock’n'roll kind of morning and “Dude Looks like a Lady” takes me the whole way to the small house who’s owners have transformed into a Steeler Country store and I buy myself a few stickers for the bus. It needs something on it to let people know that though I won’t be back any more often than a time or two a year, I’m a Pittsburgher and proud of it.

Later in the day, waiting for phone calls from whomever might be interested enough to brave the cold to come and see me for lunch or meet for drinks later, I watch Tristan bundled in a charcoal gray snowsuit dive through the powder to tackle a girl a good head and a half taller than him. He’s been playing–sled riding, snowballing, snow angeling–for a good hour now and though there are two other older girls out in the thick of frost with him, he’s only focusing his tackle effects on one. I laugh at how he’s probably in some version of 8 year old crushing on the girl and she seems to be having none of it, attempting to get away but she doesn’t seem upset. Probably flattered smattered with a touch of annoyance. It’s grand to be a kid, I think, and particularly this young boy, whom no one ever really seems to pick on all that much. He’ll be a “cool” kid, I allow myself to rest assured. Not that I would care if he was or wasn’t. The dorks, the nerds, they all end up more satisfied and successful in life, I know, the pressure and difficulties of not being automatically popular in high school force a young person to work on themselves, their personalities, so much that by the time they’re adults it’s largely smooth sailing. Still, if he can avoid the pantsings, hazings, solitary lunch room disasters, I’ll be all the happier for him.

Well into the afternoon and the snow still hasn’t stopped. I drop outside for a cigarette and the chocolate lab, Trooper, who lives here follows me out to lick the snow and paint it yellow. I’m bored of Ebensburg already, after only a few days, but it’s nice to be home. There’s a fresh homemade pumpkin pie or jar of cookies made every day and my mom and sister are two of the easiest people to be around. I miss the bus, though, the mountains, the west, and every beautiful thing that they hold. Life is still on pause, as it has been since October, since this transition from tumbling wagons to moseying homes has begun, but now the play button is ready, fingers on the trigger and in only a few short weeks an entirely new chapter of my life, what I will be able to call “our” life, in so many ways, will begin. It’s a chapter I’ve wanted written for nearly a decade now and I can’t help but think the universe is, once again, lining everything up just for me, just for us.

When you take a train, that slow and methodical ticking of tracks against train wheels provides the opportunity to see all of the in between from where you are and where you’re going, affords the ability to meet all of the pious priests and radical Republicans, fellow travelers on different paths, distributing the hippies and the stock brokers evenly among the seats of the lounge car. When you roadtrip in a car, you experience the thrill of radio across the nation (all too quickly becoming all too homogeneous), watching the countryside evolve from desert to snow peak to forest to coastline as you go. When you walk to your destination you’re gifted the sounds of the city surrounding your progression, you can try and force a smile from passersby or hang your head in the clouds to dream as you discard the obligations of life outside of your several block walk. The slower the method of travel, the more a trip is like a handwritten letter. It will take longer to get from drying ink to the recipients hands, there will be more chance of losing it in the mail, akin to the troubles possible when time is added to any equation, but there is no substitute for seeing the personalization of a letter: the handwriting of the person who sent it, the folds in the paper so deliberate, accidental bending and creasing of the corners and, if you’re lucky, the scent of the writer still lingering in the envelope.

But the airplane is as close to an email as modern day travel provides. You do it, it’s done. Airplanes take a coast to coast trip and, yes, you will be out of the snow of a Pennsylvania winter and into the shine of a SoCal shoreline in less time than it takes to bake a Thanksgiving turkey, but you will miss the golden bridges of Pittsburgh, the arch over St. Louis as its skyline is spectacular in the evening, the ribbony flow of Nebraskan fields, the climb over all that purple God chose to stuff in the Rockies and the cowboy-at-attention awe of seeing your first Arizona cacti forest. Airplanes, more than any other form of transportation, put us all closer together but create the least hospitable environment for meeting your fellow bon voyagers.

Perhaps worst of all, airplanes can take something you love and so quickly–stuffed first behind security gates that separate us an hour premature and then whisking away two, three, four hundred miles per hour–move it far, far away. Give me a thumb in the air on a two lane through the all too hot desert, give me the uncomfortable sleep and inability to smoke on an Amtrak for the holidays, give me a canoe down the Mississippi mud, but give me the time of my life, good or bad, I’ll take it any day over the rushing through of modern expedience.

The entire event is slow and easy and the woman sharing it with me turns to look at me, her head blocking that great life giving star of our Mother Earth’s content circling and the silhouette of her hair–all wild, chocolate and tree branches–is enough to pull the tide in on its own. We smoke cigarettes, put the fire and smoke out into the freckled sand beside us, and fall asleep in the morning air. I am instant in the moment, content in the eternity that this morning will prove to be and even though I’m all too completely aware of what impending separation airplanes will be as they float her back to those Rocky Mountain tops and myself into the belly of Pennsylvania, there is nothing here but the calming sound of air in our lungs, sleep in our eyes and young in our love.