Not that anybody reads this shit...

It's therapeutic, you know, like working out all day and stretching in the eve, or eating free Indian buffet all day with incredibly nice Hare Krishna volunteers before going home to defecate promptly and several times in a bathroom shared by a dozen or so people.

Writing that is.

Not in the hopes of winding an elaborate or interesting tale, or creating a whole imaginary world with wizards and fucking quiddich to validate your previous lifestyle choice as a crack whore- or even worse to make money- but for the sheer and simple process of recounting the days or weeks events, phrasing them as eloquently as you believe to be within your grasp and calming an overwhelming amount of feeling this writer seems to have these days.

So after six days and nights of travel we have arrived in Austin Texas.
Sam is asleep in a bed we will share, in a house which is shared by friends who seem altogether exactly the type of folk I would hope to meet in a town which has yet to manifest into everything everybody tells me it is (although the mexican food we ate for dinner was cheap and promising of things to come).


Yes Austin, home of Lance Armstrong, Sandra Bullock, a fuckload of sprawly highways and apparantly some cool artists and bike enthusiasts.

One girl who lives in this house with her boyfriend (appearing to be the foundation of this household) told us of her trip by bike to Mexico with 31 other people.
Part of a program called "bikes over boarders", which makes Toronto DIY efforts seem almost silly by comparison.
It's pretty simple really:
step 1: find a trashed bike
step 2: build
step 3: ride your bike over the boarder with an insane amount of other retarded individuals to really dangerous parts of Mexico and give your bikes away once you get there.


She (I forget her name and I'm staying in her house, I'm a fucker) also works a program she created called "bread by bikes" or someshit like that.
Again, simple: bake bread, deliver it by bikes, don't worry, be happy.

And on that note!


We have lost our Amtrak tickets taking us from here to El Paso, TX, and Amtrak refuses to refund us although if we buy them again, and mail in our stubs, I am told I will get a voucher for $150.00 for travel on Amtrak anywhere in USA.
Further more, the destination (El Paso) is currently irrelevant!
Our plan of biking north from El Paso, through New Mexico to Albuquerque before heading across the top of Arizona into Flagstaff to see the grand canyon, has been mutually abandoned. 

Instead a train to LA seems in order, a decision I own a tumult of emotions over.
What and who lies in LA? Do I even want to be in such a superficial wasteland of concrete avoiding even further contact with those I love to, what, spend Christmas alone, see the ocean?
It all just seems so ridiculous, really.


Sam and I have different ideas of what will happen when we get there and I believe we will bike up the coast independently.
San Fran, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver? Home?
I am broke and  lonely (despite Sam's inherently good natured company) , and fixed in the cadence of my own momentum, unable (or unwilling) to dismount.


I have encountered great moments of personal triumph, and overcome surprising obstacles, yet, it is the deeper I go, the more humans I meet, the further I feel isolated.

This is not exciting, it is happening.
This is not an adventure, it's a ritual, it's fucking religion.
It's not rewarding, it's humbling.
It does not give, it displays...
and takes, so much.

At the end of the day this, what some might consider despair, is what this journey is all about.
Not the bringing of joy and happiness, n'or the removal of it, but the fucking momentum.




So not that anybody reads this shit, but that's what happened today.