My Travels
I spent ten years traveling around America. I'd work in a city, see it's sights, meet it's people, work varying jobs, live varying places, read varying books.....
Then hitchhike or hop a freight to the next town when I was bored and start over again. My favorite game, and how I started this was.....
Well, I started by selling all I had, having a big blow out party, then buying a one way bus ticket to LA. I got off the bus with no money, and only the clothes on my back.
I was dining at Spagos three months later in new suit, with a woman I'd known in High School, and paying $200 for this little tiny dinner, and another $75 on the wine. Then we hit those private clubs that don't even advertise.
And I was broke! But I'd done it, rags to riches, and in three months. With a place to stay and a steady job. I left shortly after the Riots.
After that, I'd see how long it took me in each new town to get a secure place and job. One week was the average, once I got into the swing of it. I'm sure it'd take a couple of weeks again now.
This....gives one a lot of experiences, and adds years on to their emotional/spiritual life. I was in conversation with my younger brother who makes three times what I make, as he is an executive at State Farm Insurance, having started work for them just out of High School. He took the "safe" route. Which is fine, such things can be right for some.
He asked me what the point was once, when I was calling to chat from a pay phone on the side of a highway outside of Caspar, Wyoming. I told him this: "When you have wrote your diary entry for January 1, you may then photocopy it another 364 times and be done with it. For you get up, work, go home, rest, sleep and repeat. Me, I can't photocopy my first entry, because today I am here, tomorrow I will be elsewhere, and a year from now will know of a dozen other cities, two dozen other jobs, and three dozen other people I have been friends with."
He understood. Though he found it as distasteful as I find cubicles. And soccer matches. And corporate picnics. And etc.
I argued religion with a dozen ministers, priests and rabbis. I debated and chatted with street people and office workers in LA. And professors and lecturers in Boston. And diplomatic aides in NY. And reformers and politicos in DC.
I read books for a month straight at the Boston Public Library, and lived there, though I was not supposed to, obviously. I toured art galleries and art stores in the largest cities in America, and saw such beauty as to let one die content. I browsed in the stores of the rich where the electronic marvels and wonders would take your breath away, with machines that generate holograms of loved ones full sized and in full color, and gadgets to repel people with a sonic beam at the touch of a button.
I'm not really 36 except chronologically. I've seen so many different things. I know what factory work is like, and executive work, and military work and what living in lean-to's, trailers, mansions, houses, tents, cabins and cars are like. I was a butler in a mansion in Thousand Oaks, California, and a janitor in an apartment in Texas, and a tree trimmer in a trailer in Florida a security officer in a boarding house in Boston and a nanny in a home in Tennessee.
I spent my twenties doing nothing but seeing all the states, not including Hawaii, but including Alaska.
Dean West
Then hitchhike or hop a freight to the next town when I was bored and start over again. My favorite game, and how I started this was.....
Well, I started by selling all I had, having a big blow out party, then buying a one way bus ticket to LA. I got off the bus with no money, and only the clothes on my back.
I was dining at Spagos three months later in new suit, with a woman I'd known in High School, and paying $200 for this little tiny dinner, and another $75 on the wine. Then we hit those private clubs that don't even advertise.
And I was broke! But I'd done it, rags to riches, and in three months. With a place to stay and a steady job. I left shortly after the Riots.
After that, I'd see how long it took me in each new town to get a secure place and job. One week was the average, once I got into the swing of it. I'm sure it'd take a couple of weeks again now.
This....gives one a lot of experiences, and adds years on to their emotional/spiritual life. I was in conversation with my younger brother who makes three times what I make, as he is an executive at State Farm Insurance, having started work for them just out of High School. He took the "safe" route. Which is fine, such things can be right for some.
He asked me what the point was once, when I was calling to chat from a pay phone on the side of a highway outside of Caspar, Wyoming. I told him this: "When you have wrote your diary entry for January 1, you may then photocopy it another 364 times and be done with it. For you get up, work, go home, rest, sleep and repeat. Me, I can't photocopy my first entry, because today I am here, tomorrow I will be elsewhere, and a year from now will know of a dozen other cities, two dozen other jobs, and three dozen other people I have been friends with."
He understood. Though he found it as distasteful as I find cubicles. And soccer matches. And corporate picnics. And etc.
I argued religion with a dozen ministers, priests and rabbis. I debated and chatted with street people and office workers in LA. And professors and lecturers in Boston. And diplomatic aides in NY. And reformers and politicos in DC.
I read books for a month straight at the Boston Public Library, and lived there, though I was not supposed to, obviously. I toured art galleries and art stores in the largest cities in America, and saw such beauty as to let one die content. I browsed in the stores of the rich where the electronic marvels and wonders would take your breath away, with machines that generate holograms of loved ones full sized and in full color, and gadgets to repel people with a sonic beam at the touch of a button.
I'm not really 36 except chronologically. I've seen so many different things. I know what factory work is like, and executive work, and military work and what living in lean-to's, trailers, mansions, houses, tents, cabins and cars are like. I was a butler in a mansion in Thousand Oaks, California, and a janitor in an apartment in Texas, and a tree trimmer in a trailer in Florida a security officer in a boarding house in Boston and a nanny in a home in Tennessee.
I spent my twenties doing nothing but seeing all the states, not including Hawaii, but including Alaska.
Dean West
posted by Dean West @ 1:09 AM
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