Hell is Empty and all the Devils are Here

It always rained on the days I would pack all my earthly belongings into my car and leave my life behind to go somewhere else. A year ago, Lars and I walked out from a girlfriends house on a rainy morning in the Massachusetts valley. I exchanged a much familiar awkward embrace with her before we left, gently tickling her bare feet as she lay in bed looking up at me before I left all my regrets with her. We ate a rainy breakfast with Lars' sister on campus for the last time, then pulled into a department store bathroom with water dripping off of us. We washed up and proceeded to drive eleven hours to Ohio through the gray roads of Conneticut and Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is soggy, boring state. Some states are more annoying than boring, like Nevada, Wyoming and New Mexico. But Pennsylvania and Nebraska are boring. It rained again when we got to Nebraska. That storm had almost killed us.

But now that I was in Eugene, Oregon, rain was expected. Dismal for eight months of the year, the twenty something year olds which seem to run the place are content to stand still in the moving universe. Egotiscally grasping at the straws of its past, Eugene longs for a time which in hindsight seemed better than it actually was. The bare downtown streets are brightly naked during the day, dusty and bleak. Bare of any semblance of evolving life or an economy. Until night falls, and the bars open up. Then the streets would fill with complacent shadows of people who refused to grow up. Purple jackets, blue hair, facial tattoos, leather pants, dreadlocks, drifters, beggars, tweakers, homosexuals, gypsies, buyers and sellers. It was like Neverland. Everyone was a Peter Pan.

I had moved 3 times in the year I lived in Eugene. And the pathetic streets of downtown always remained my true home. My last night in town, the two female bartenders I had befriended my first night a year earlier looked at me with somber eyes. Brimming with tears, they crossed the threshold of the counter and hugged me as I stood to leave. How fitting. Their best customer was leaving.

My friends did the same. My friends-- a collection of people I had gathered in the last twelve months. They were sad to see me go. My brother thought I was a fool for even arriving.

He couldn't believe I had made it a year in Eugene. The town was dying fast, and it would never recover. Even with the university, there was not much life blood rushing through its veins. The economy was absurdly non existent. The roads cracked and uneven. People happily sitting back on their $9/hour jobs. Homeless on the corners. A harsh smell in the air lamenting the advent of a new season. Trees were starting to get that sickly look as they danced with autumnal death. I had experienced the worst luck of my life in the last sixty days. I was homeless. My breakfast waffles were in the shape of Texas. The writing was on the wall.

When your breakfast tells you to do something, you do it. Close your eyes and let the chips fall where they may. So Austin it was. A new place to start a new life. The polarity of Eugene, Austin was hot, big, growing. Positive. And if I could survive in Eugene, I could make it in any American city. This time on the road would be different. For some day, we all shall find our buddhas of love beneath this illusion of life. For the road is life. And it beckons.