2003-10-06

Hi again! I am traveling around the US and writing about it, and there seems to be no end in sight.

I am looking for nice, fun people who can put me up for a few nights and feed me and pay my way (since I am broke) and show me a good time (since I like good times). If you think it might be fun to host me for a day or two or three, email me at justingrace AT mac DOT com. Please make sure to include your address and phone number. I am especially looking for places to stay in the southeast USA and the East Coast.

I will be traveling all over the USA, though, so email me no matter what! Here are the places I will be in the next few weeks that I am still looking for a place to stay at:

� Texas: Between Austin, TX and Louisiana
� Louisiana
� Mississippi
� Alabama
� Florida
� Tennessee
� North/South Carolina
� Georgia

I am in Austin. It is both rad and cool. Please contact me ASAP if you are in or around Austin and want to hang out!

Thanks in advance for your help! And now, more of my banter...

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US Tour Day 20: Senses of Cars

Leaving. It sucks. But, we do it every day in some way—leaving this moment, taking a dangerous leap of faith towards the next moment. Today I left Las Cruces, beginning the very long drive through El Paso and across the vast, empty expanse known as West Texas. Destination: Austin, crazy capitol city of the most crazy state in the union.

My intuition has been acting up again—telling me things, talking in twisty ways I don't yet understand. It speaks in a strange language, a language without complete sentences, a language of fragments at best, but most often only single words. And many times there are no words at all, merely a feeling of attention to a theme or a shift of focus to some person, place, action, or undercurrent.

I get these cryptic messages, like house or car stopped in road. They don't make sense at the time. But, they always turn out to be accurate, true, and real in some very tangible way.

Recently I had this sense of me being hit by a car in a crosswalk. It was very strong, but, I didn't know what to make of it. Now, I've often thought I would die in a car–related death. And, I thought that maybe this was some hint that it would be under the tires of some car as I experimented with the dangerous life of pedestrianism. Not knowing what to do with this strange sense, I went about my day the same as I always did.

I had to be at Dave Marr's house by 7 PM, so I grabbed my things and left my house on Ocean Beach on foot to catch the train. It was a wrinkly old raisin of a woman whose car almost crushed me in the crosswalk a block from my house. She looked ancient—someone who has lived as many years as her could teach god a thing or two. So long as it wasn't about being a safe driver, that is. She had shrunk with age to a fraction of a person and could barely see over the steering wheel. Not that a clear view would have helped her—mega multifocals a mile thick stood like huge barrier walls between what was left of her eyesight and a world of fleshy, fragile pedestrians. She didn't see me. She clearly didn't see the stop sign, either.

So, she barreled through the intersection. Well, barreled isn't actually the best word. She was traveling at speeds inappropriately slow for motor vehicles—as glacial geriatrics tend to do. It still would've been fast enough to have killed me, though. I was painfully aware of the mere centimeter between her automotive killing machine and my hand, I felt the wind brush the hairs of my hand.

I wasn't startled about my near–death experience. I felt very calm about it. I was more stunned at the fruition of my intuition—now it made sense. Funny how I couldn't have known what it meant until it happened.

Many of my intuitions have to do with cars—my car, cars of family and friends, cars belonging to some unrevealed entity like Old Lady Crosswalk. I've had lots of car intuitions, and plenty of them on my trip around the USA. They tell me things like oil or failing electrical system or police car around corner. For a few weeks I've had this reoccurring one that just says tire, blown tire. The problem is that I don't always know when the thing will take place—in fact, I almost never do. So, I just wait.

Today I didn't have to wait any longer, though. I wasn't even more than five minutes east of Las Cruces on I-10 when my tire blew out. There was no way I could have known that today was the day, as I usually only get the what but not the when and where. Is that better than nothing? Hard to say. I still haven't quite made up my mind yet about it all.

And, why is it that I am so in touch with automobiles and their witchy ways and not more important things like the health and welfare of my family or natural disasters or which stocks or cards or horses to bet on to make myself rich forever?

I don't know. All I know is that I don't quite understand yet. I do have the sense that it will all make a little more sense very soon, though—whatever that means. In the meantime, I think the best I can do keep living, keep listening, and keep walking in crosswalks.


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