Apologies to my subscribers, especially my paying subscribers, for the gap in posting. This summer I’ve been on an antidepressant and antianxiety regimen which has, amazingly, succeeded somewhat, but with the not-entirely-unpleasant side effect of caring a lot less about many things overall, writing and the non-tactile Internet world of cultural production specifically. But those of you paying me money, agh, I’ve been thinking about you lot, guiltily—I know that when I pay others money for podcasts and posts, I want to get what I paid for. Consistency and a steady volume of publishable product are important for a writer, or whatever you call people now, “cultural producers.” I often find myself admiring the consistency of others, how they just make sausage steadily, year in and year out, reliably, without gaps. It is something that has never come easy to me as I prefer to do my little writing stuff and obsessively revise it in private over and over and hide in my little hidey-hole. Like Gollum. My Precious. This is bad.
At the same time, I don’t understand why so many others seem to genuinely feel like their “art” or “journalism” or whatever it is in the ethereal realm of creativity and intellect, matters. That these are things that need to be constantly put out into the world. Shamelessly. They clearly have some bedrock belief in the non-tactile realm of art and ideas as something important and meaningful. Where this belief comes from, I don’t know. Maybe they were inculcated at a young age to believe it all matters or they have convinced themselves through repeated exposure that it matters, but I will never not find it slightly alien. I’m sure these people also do laundry and sweep floors and fix the hinges and clean out storage sheds, but I get the impression they do their art or whatever “intellectual work” first, because it’s more important than the cleaning out sheds and sweeping floors, and this is what I don’t exactly understand. Why?
When I was young and full of love for the world and had a sweet little boy-ass and a boundless naive belief in the decency of everyone, especially strangers, it was very easy to hitchhike. The awkward and closeted truckers would screech their rigs to a halt on the shoulder of I-40 or I-85 or I-95, and then screech to a halt again fifteen miles down the road when I turned down their sexual requests (Dear mamma, if you’re reading this, don’t worry, I never whored myself out to any truckers for a ride).
And then there were creepy old perverts, the ones that all seem to live in the backwoods between Rocky Mount and Alexandria, Virginia, that rolled up in old Buicks with a piece of ripped out porno mag tits taped to the dash, they stopped too, gave me a ride, stroking the steering wheel, “you bi or gay?”. And the drunks and friendly gangsters—drunks always gave a ride because they were lonely and cheery and wanted company, and the friendly drug guys or gangsters or whatever you want to call them, all packed into a car, they weren’t scared of an extra rider because they had numerical advantage.
This makes it sound very bad, but there were also so many good-hearted people who shared what they had, shared their lives and food, old mothers and widows who didn’t want you stuck out there in the dark, fun subcultural types who always picked up hitchhikers, kindly paranoid-schizophrenics who were gentle and decent even though they flinched every-time they saw an unmarked white van, “look, there’s another one, they’re following me, gotta keep moving.”
The best, of course, was to hitchhike with a female friend, because the rides were near immediate; but then you had to worry and fret about them, had to monitor the driver’s demeanor and vibe, had to stay alert. I was lucky enough to usually be hitching with a woman who knew the tried and true tactic to ward off all comers: start asking all the details about his children, his daughters (weren’t we about his daughters age at this time?)
We also had a surprising amount of luck doing a kind of duplicitous thing where the girl would stand on the onramp with her thumb out and when a car finally stopped, Bam, hello, I’d pop out of the bushes to join, yeah, you’re taking two now, is that a problem (and usually it wasn’t a problem or people were just too polite/ashamed to say “no I only anticipated on taking the girl” or god knows what)
Yes, to have a girl along was best for quick pick-up, but better than that was when they’d just let you to ride in the truck bed, this was wonderful, this way you didn’t have to talk to them. The truth is talking to them was sometimes enlivening, sometimes pleasant, but mostly exhausting, I still can’t believe the day that a big group of us, maybe 4 of my best friends, we were waiting around hitching at the edge of town in Boone, in the mountains, and some lovely soul gave us a ride 2 1/2 hours east to Greensboro, all of us smiling at each other because it was too loud to talk, wind blowing in our hair and faces like happy tongue-out doggies the entire way down 421 to I-40. Wow, what a ride, wow, just an amazing guy, I say a little prayer for him now 15 or so years later, I hope you are well guy, I am thinking of you and sending all my love to you.
The worst was the police who’d immediately treat you like a drug addict or something and rifle through your backpack with your own toothbrush, sure they would find a needle or a gun, and then would just leave you there, unable to hitchhike but with nowhere else to go.
The most embarassing was when I was hitchhiking with my friend Rita on the outskirts of Winston-Salem and who comes rolling down the on-ramp in an Oldsmobile, my dad and my uncle, they’d just had lunch and played some golf, complete shock on their faces. They gave a little strange wave and said, “hey, how you doing” and kept driving, not picking us up, leaving us stranded and me ashamed, poor old dad, God rest his soul, I think he was really embarrassed and horrified, and probably in his heart scared to death.
I always remember how the burly train-hopper guys I knew, the ones with the dirt-colored Carhartt overalls and hand and face tattoos, they hated hitchhiking, loathed it, dreaded it. They looked sketchy and smelt like they shit their pants and they knew they could be out there on the side of the road waiting for days, we’ll just camp in the woods and wait for the slow trains if we don’t get a ride, they said. Now that I’m older, fatter, and generally more suspicious of all people after recognizing the often-duplicitous nature of people, I completely understand it. This might sound a bit woo-woo, but you really do have to have some kind of light, positive, hopeful mindset (the drivers can smell it a mile away) or you’re never ever going to get picked up. I would much rather hide back in some woods, away from the eyes of people for days, be in the back of someone’s car or on a bus, anything, any private-ish form of transportation, anything other than standing out on the side of the highway for eight hours in the blazing sun with that big happy smile on.
The hitchhiking, it probably started from all the zines and pamphlets and people around us that taught us that traveling free and living free out of a dumpster was freedom.
I remember in high school before we were hitchhiking, there was this major news story—a girl somewhere, maybe in California or Idaho had been expelled from her school for wearing an Anarchy t-shirt and had ran away from home. The message of the story that as a society we were becoming Draconian and free expression was dying. Anyway we were all driving around town aimlessly in someone’s car like we did and we came upon a girl by the side of the highway on the edge of our little town, and we offered to give her a ride. It turned out that she was the girl from the news story! We were starstruck, a real live person who was in the news was getting a ride from us. She had run off and was hitching around the country. We were all terribly jealous, it just seemed so exciting. At the same time, as a person, she was kind of unbearable, seemed very full of herself and pretentious, very California, I wonder what happened to her. Anyway, we drove her across town, to some other on-ramp and never saw and rarely thought about her again.