Shameless Panhandling
So, I'm gonna be a homeless bum about a month from now. This will last me till the tail end of July if all goes well. And I am a fan of the eating. I'm willing to take any and all donations in exchange for post cards, pictures, and amusing tales from my cross country nomadic wanderings. Think like Jack Kerrouac in On the Road, except without a
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My spleen and I haven't been on speaking terms lately...
Insanity would be spending the summer in Houston taking a class or two, and spending the rest of the time facilitating the opening of a newer larger version of Late Nite Pie. No solid details are yet available, beyond that it is located somewhere in the Montrose area, and that it will be able to seat 300 folks. Oh, and it may open at noon. In a month. Who needs that headache? Interestingly enough, this new location is also the sight of a former gay bar, though I doubt it was ever a gas station or a tire shop.
I didn’t come up with this road trip on a whim. I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I’ve done my research. I’ve spent the last six months converting Bessie into a decent touring bike. I’ve read the works of well-toured folks such as Down the Road, Ken Kifer, and the incomparable Sheldon Brown.
I’ve plotted my route using maps from Adventure Cycling. Being a 150-pound man I need about 5000 calories a day to move a bicycle 100 miles in a healthy manner. I grew up camping as a form of entertainment. I’ve been working towards this. I’ve gone a thousand miles on that bike in the last four months. I know what I’m doing here.
Excerpt from the preface to Michael Crihton's Travels
Often I feel I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am. There is no mystery about why this should be so. Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of your food your closet full of your clothes-with all this taken away, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you more aware of who it is that is having that experience. That's not always comforting, but it is always invigorating."
I eventually realized that direct experience is the most valuable experience I can have. Western man is so surrounded by ideas, so bombarded with opinions, concepts, and information structures of all sorts, that it becomes difficult to experience anything without the intervening filter of these structures. And the natural world-our traditional source of direct insights-is rapidly disappearing. Modern city-dwellers cannot even see the stars at night. This humbling reminder of man's place in the greater scheme of things, which human beings formerly saw once every twenty-four hours, is denied them. It's no wonder that people lose their bearings, that they lose track of who they really are, and what their lives are really about.
Love,
Walker
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