Already, has the travel writing become rich and overwhelming, crowding out the history and fiction work I am committed to do. The world is too interesting and the passenger too impressionable.

This afternoon I box with Zeer again.

Tonight I meet Matt. I won’t write about that.

Tomorrow I need to wash clothes.

Six concept articles remain to be written out of the text box.

To Missouri I will soon go, the day after tomorrow, to speak with Paul about novels—with a dozen novels shelved in this darkening mind waiting to be written, some fated to die in the womb.

This travel writing is my whoring, not my art. This is the means by which I maintain a readership so that a handful of books might be sold—those books need written. I had respiratory infections at least once a month from November through March—have never been this sick and weak before. Another plague is already underway. Next spring is not promised.

I need to either block out the freshly dawning corners of this increasingly insane world from this withering mind’s eye or work them into fiction or history.

For instance, on Saturday [it is Monday] Zeed and I hiked up Lookout Mountain above Golden Colorado, in a world denying him a mate as those women his age act like men of the 1970s and just use him for sexual service. Various single beauties his age, progressed about us. One pair, a Latina who was a 7 on the International Usement Scale and a blonde built like a Viking goddess, a 9, rounded in all the right places and ways and trailing a coif of lustrous hair brushing her left hip, struggled before us. Zeed thought absently aloud about how the women of his generation seem to have been psychologically reverse engineered into pseudo-masculine social bots unsuited for mating.

I then pointed to the pair ahead, “Two hundred to 40,000 years ago, I’d capture and bind those two and give you the blond to breed on and use the squaw for my needs—and within a week they’d both be fine with it, all valued members of the clan.”

He laughed harshly.

As I move east, into a middle realm that I have not seen and into much that I have escaped. The novelist needs to be released to render such thoughts into fictional deeds, where reality can be explored beyond the straight-jacket of our collective delusion. So, as I decide to end this book nearly a month shy of its pre-concieved destination, that scenery, those wandering souls, this crass mirror, and that young wondering mind will be placed in Ranger?: The Acts of Awes South, A Tale of Elder Earth.

…

The Drug Heads

I have recently fielded numerous requests to get high, which I have declined. I am told by these young souls who have never written a book that I need to get high in order to write at peak performance. When I decline, I am told I am not true, in that I drink and that drink is a drug too.

Setting aside the fact that I have written hundreds of books while avoiding the rampant drug use of American Modernity and that these well-meaning and all anxious and troubled younger souls have never written a book, I will explain one last time the use of alcohol.

I also note that these drug heads lack peace pf mind and must seek constant stimulation and distraction, while I can live in silence for weeks, need no counsel from others and have zero desire to experience an altered state of consciousness.

I drink about thrice a week for the following reasons:

-As an interview tool in which I practice remembering what people with booze-loosened tongues do and say.

-To relax enough to sleep by counteracting the large amount of coffee I have drunk while writing.

-To get drunk after the completion of a book, as the process of writing, which is largely driven by a desire to forget the crowded thoughts plaguing this failing brain fails to erase some or even most of what was written. This is essentially erasing the thumb drive to make way for the next download.

Alcohol does not alter my consciousness, but simply relaxes and tranquilizes my rampant thought process. It is a break, the coffee an accelerator. I must be vigilant not to abuse either or both for they have bad side effects. I guarantee that my mind is already a crazier place than any pot-smoking, psyhcodelic altered mundane brain. I throw away dozens of book ideas that are more creative than any of the books dreamed about by stoners.

The final thing that brings me down on the side of booze over drugs is this: All drunks know that booze is bad for them and that drinking too much and too often is an accomplishment-limiting character flaw. But all of the people who preach drug use to me do so as acolytes in a cult who insist that their smoke and gas and mushrooms and pills are The Stairway to Heaven. I am distrustful of such religious fervor and will not join the teeming Faithful, but will remain alienated in my own limited and unaltered insanity.

A 13-year-old who I play role playing games with was trying to talk me into playing with him and his brother online, and did not understand why I refuse to use this computer for entertainment as most folks do. My answer about this computer could be the same as my answer about my brain to the stoners:

“I can’t print in all caps on a piece of paper and sell that to make my living or have it preserved for readers of the future. My computer is my work tool. If I were a truck driver that owned my own truck, I would not use that truck as a dune buggy on the weekend. My computer is a tool, not a toy, and I refuse to play with it.”

Likewise, my brain is a tool, not a toy or a penis or a clitoris pleasure center. I am sorry, my friends, I must once again decline to enter your eternal paradise and remain in this infernal hell between these ringing ears. The only reason I live is to write. I do nothing for pleasure—nothing. Your desire to animate this dead thing is appreciated, but wasted. Having not a peer in this world, I am immune to peer pressure. Not believing in science, I am immune to your scientific arguments for access to sacred realms through brain chemistry.