P u r s u i n g N o t h i n g

Wednesday. May 15^th. 2013.

 Garth shakes a colony of potato bugs off his backpack and shoves it into the tent. We climb our muddy hill, ducking tree limbs and the windows of a house. Do the people inside know that they hosted two vagabonds overnight? Probably not. I think we Americans should adopt that European policy that allows people to walk across- and even camp on- private property as long as they remain a certain distance from houses and such. The world is too small a place for land hoarding.

 Directly across the street stands Culver Stockton College. It’s quiet and empty. The students left for summer vacation just yesterday. We spend half our morning in the library, the other half in a cafe called The Lab, where many big windows look out over Canton.

 At 2:30, we walk down into the neighborhood and knock on Sandy’s door. She invites us in for iced coffee. We also get to use her shower, one wall of which sparkles with a mosaic of mirrors and colorful glass bubbles. Sandy is an artist. She’s also an art teacher. She shows us a photo of one of her favortie paintings. It’s a Viking Queen. She painted it for a boat captain, believing it would live on the water, but the captain’s wife took a liking to it and decided to keep it in the house, which disappointed Sandy, who is a bit of a gypsy herself. She talks about how badly she’d like to sell her house and go out on the road. She’s even considered becoming a Bag Lady and touring the homeless shelters of America. Garth and I, based on our own experiences, assure her it’s a completely realistic and feasible plan.

 “I went down to the police station,” Sandy mentions.

 We’d told her yesterday when we dropped by that a cop had questioned us. A few of the local cops are her former students.

 “I told them that I’d invited you into town to visit me and that they shouldn’t be bothering people who are traveling thru here.”

 They say that if you just be yourself and do what you’re meant to do, you’ll attract people who are like you. Sandy is my new favorite person.

 Garth and I help set up tables and chairs in the back yard garden and a couple of Sandy’s long-time friends come over for dinner. Their names are Bill and Dan and they both have art degrees. Bill is a painter. Dan is an organic farmer. He owns Blue Heron Orchard, the only organic apple orchard in the entire state of Missouri.

Dan, Sarah, Bill and Sandy

Dinner is lovely. It’s one of those summer night dinners where you expect to see lightening bugs and voodoo rituals. It involves venison, coleslaw, salad, spinach dip, wine, beer, a healthy amount of sarcasm and an appearance by the city clerk, who rides in on a bicycle to drop off a wooden oar she wants Sandy to turn into an art project worthy of a birthday present.

 Garth and I throw our huge packs into the back of Dan’s truck. Bill perches on the edge of the open tailgate and we drive very slowly to his house, which is stuffed full of massive and very colorful canvasses. Bill’s style is so jubilant and bright that even a winter landscape full of skulls makes me feel like I’m dancing thru a Dia de Los Muertos parade in Mexico City with a head full of acid.

 We ride to Dan’s farm at the end of the night and fall asleep on a futon in a little guest cabin with lavender walls.

Thursday. May 16^th. 2013.

 We rise at 6am. Rising at 6am is against my nature. It makes me feel like I’ve been run over by a garbage truck while suffering from a tequila hangover. But it’s okay. I will adapt. In Quincy, Garth and I were nocturnal abstract painters. In Canton, we are organic farmers. Farmers get up early.

The guest cabin at Dan’s farm

In Dan’s kitchen, the dishes live on open shelves, not in blocky closed cupboards. This contributes to the airy feel of the house. Doors hang open. Morning breezes whipser thru screens. Dan grinds coffee beans and makes espresso.

 After breakfast, he gives us a tour of the 26-acre farm. There are greenhouses and vegetable gardens and apple trees. There’s a straw and plaster storage house and a processing kitchen where Dan makes apple sauce, apple cider and other products. There’s a tiny lake for swimming. I love swimming.

 Our first task is to sit on a big picnic table under a shady maple tree and squeeze green onions from their plastic trays. It’s probably one of the most fantastic things I’ve ever done. I grew up in the suburbs, where playing with dirt is frowned upon.

 Once the onions are ready, Dan plow rows of dirt down in the garden and Garth pushes a wheel hoe along behind him, making grooves. Crouching in the hot sun with our hands in the dirt and swarms of mosquitoes at our backs, we plant hundreds of little onions. We take a break under the shady maple tree, drinking ice water with mint and lemon, eating organic banana chips and peanuts. We eat lunch on the screened porch of the guest cabin. Dan makes incredible wraps. They have applewood-smoked fire-roasted peppers he made himself. They’re probably the tastiest peppers I’ve ever eaten.

 At the end of the day, I follow the grassy path down past the orchard to the little lake. I peel off my sweaty clothes, wade past the cattails, feet squishing deep into soft mud, and swim into the cool water. When I come back out, I stand on the grass naked and the sunny wind dries me off.

 Dan makes venison, potatoes and salad for dinner. Frogs sing outside the windows while we eat. A few beers and the day’s work make it easy to fall asleep.

 Friday. May 17^th. 2013.

 I can appreciate dawn. I can appreciate the quiet of a half-awake world and the feeling that things are about to happen. Good coffee and French toast with almond butter and maple syrup make dawn a very pleasant thing indeed.

 Garth sticks a pitchfork into the dry dirt, which cracks, loosening radishes from its grip. I pull them up by the leafy handful and stack them in a wheelbarrow. I’ve never noticed the colors of radishes before. Pink, magenta, red, white. They’re so bright. I like radishes. I like dirt. I like the smell of sunblock melting off my sweaty skin. I like seeing Garth on a farm. He seems natural here.

 We wheel our radishes into a kitchen with stainless steel sinks, which we fill with ice cold water. Garth washes them and I rubber band them into bunches of a dozen. I lay the bunches in rows in plastic crates, which Dan covers with plastic sacks and sticks in the fridge.

 Garth and I take a tray of rejects- radishes with splits and other imperfections- out to the picnic table and rip their leaves off. These will be used around the house. The pretty ones will be sold at a farmer’s market in Quincy tomorrow. Golden helicopter seeds spin down all around us as the wind shakes the maple tree.

 “I like what we do,” I say to Garth.

 We stay in beautiful places and eat good food and talk with amazing people, and all we have to do is plant onions and dig up radishes and walk down the side of the road.

 Dan makes wraps for lunch again, this time with salmon salad. Just like yesterday, they’re excellent. We eat them with orange slices and wine on the screened porch with the hot afternoon blowing in. A Starling rustles around in the roof of the guest cabin, trying to build a nest.

 I spend the evening writing and drawing while Garth cuts grass with a monstrously ancient lawnmower. Again, the day ends with an incredible dinner and a few beers. Dan is a wonderful host and a very good cook. He’s also very laid-back and easy to work with. Overall, the atmosphere here at Blue Heron Orchard could be best described as dreamy. It doesn’t seem real that two people who have rejected almost every aspect of traditional society should be allowed to live so well.

 Saturday. May 18^th. 2013.

 Dan drives down the highway at 45 miles per hour with his flashers on so the tomato seedlings in the pcikup bed won’t blow away.

 At the Quincy town square, we set up a tent and a few tables and put the tomatoes and radishes on display. I cover one table with my handmade satchels. Dan picks one out and wears it around, calling it his “Man Purse.” It’s pink and flowery and it matches his salmon-colored polo quite well.

 A group of teenagers sit on a bench with a couple of guitars, singing top 40 pop songs. Just when I think they can’t get anymore annoying, they set up amps and micrphones, put on poodle skirts and bobby socks and start performing “At the Hop.” They sing off key and the awkwardness of their choreographed dance is so profound it’s riveting.

Sarah with her first customer, Sheila.

Dan’s radishes sell at a steady rate. No one can resist the colors. I soon sell my first satchel to a woman named Sheila for $10. The teenagers perform for hours. They dress up like Sonny and Cher and sing “I got you babe.” They dress up like Kevin Bacon and do “Footloose.” Decade by decade, they work their way up to “Can’t Touch This,” for which a short, pudgy white boy dons the famous parachute pants.

 AJ rides up on his bike around lunch time and gives me and Garth and massive hug. We walk around the market with him. It’s small. There are only about a dozen vendors. We meet a 13-year old kid named Nick Collins. He slouches in a green folding camp chair with an amp and mic next to him. At his feet a guitar case holds many dollar bills and a sign that encourages passersby to pick a song for him to sing.

 We pick a Bruno Mars song. Nick’s father selects the track from an Ipod and it comes thru the amp. Nick’s voice is excellent, but he looks a bit bored. He remains sitting while he sings. Despite this, he’s much easier to watch than the group of awkwardly flailing teenagers at the other end of the market.

 By noon, Dan has sold all of his radishes, I’ve sold $30 worth of satchels, and AJ has managed to ply the microphone from the hands of the corny teenagers and take it over with one of his positive punk songs. I knew he wouldn’t be able to resist. Also, a man in a kilt and a bright green skin-tight leotard that covers his whole body, including his head, comes leaping thru the park and over a sign and runs out into traffic.

 It’s early when we arrive back at the farm, so we spend the afternoon laying out irrigation for part of the vegetable garden. We set up a roll of plastic pipe on the driveway and Garth grabs the end and walks 60 feet. I cut it and grab the new end and walk 60 feet. We trade places like we’re squaredancing until we’ve got ten lengths, which we carry down to the garden and lay between rows of lettuce.

 After a swim in the pond and a fantastic dinner, we play scrabble, drink beer out of wine glasses and eat coffee ice cream with homemade apple syrup. It feels so decadent, living on a gorgeous farm in the middle of nowhere, having someone else make all this amazing food for us every day, swimming in a lake every afternoon, drinking beer and wine with every meal. The work we do is as lovely as the rest of it. There’s something about being outside in the sun, handling plants and dirt and living on your own time that makes it all feel like a big invigorating game.

 “It’s not work,” Dan says. “It’s play for adults.”

 Sunday. May 19^th. 2013.

Garth and Sarah laying irrigation pipe in the vegetable garden.

I walk down the center path of the vegetable garden, punching holes in black plastic pipe. Garth sticks connectors in the holes and I come back up the path, attaching a line of hose to each joint. Dan attaches valves at the beginning of the entire circuit of irrigation pipe. When it’s all assembled, he turns the water on and the soil darkens in little spots and the plants rejoice.

 Clouds roll across the sky with stormy looks on their faces. Blustery wind blows maple helicopters everywhere.

 After we shovel manure onto an asparagus patch, Garth and I drive the truck around the farm, picking up piles of golden cut grass with pitchforks and throwing them into the bed. When the bed is full, we drive out to a field and shove it off in a huge pile.

 I like the physicality of farm work. I like hot sun and the flex of muscle. I like using a pitchfork. Using a pitchfork causes life to make sense. Not that life didn’t make sense before, it’s just that it becomes simpler and calms down a bit.

 After lunch, I lie down on the futon with a little round fan aimed at me. Its humming blades puree my afternoon into a pudding-like deep sleep. When I wake up, I wash my laundry in the bathroom sink. The flames from a BBQ on the lawn reach up and lick the sky, lighting the clouds on fire. A big orange orb rolls lazily among them, spilling citrus light over the socks and underwear I’ve hung on the porch chairs.

 Dan’s wife, Cherie, arrives home just in time for dinner. She’s an artist and an art teacher and she’s been out of town doing an exhibition. Her art involves mostly dance and video (see her art here). A storm rolls in while we’re eating BBQ chicken on the screened porch, so we all walk out into the orchard to watch the lightening. The trees whip around in the flashing darkness. The wind is warm. By the time we return to the cabin, rain is thundering down onto its tin roof. It’s an easy soundtrack to sleep to.

 Monday. May 20^th. 2013.

 Dan makes pancakes for breakfast. For toppings, have coffee ice cream, berries from the forest and maple syrup from the tree in the front yard. I’ve never before stayed in a place where my host made such excellent food for every single meal. Our time on Dan’s farm has been so ridiculously pleasant that it makes me wonder what horror lies in store for our near future. The universe does function according to the principle of balance after all.

 Dan’s friend, Jim, lends a hand today. He’s a glass blower. He goes about barefoot in the fields as we lay out rows of heavy metal stakes. Garth drives them in by slamming a heavy red tube down on top of them over and over. We roll out long stretches of wire fence and attach it to the posts with wire ties.

 Once the fence is erected, Dan plows the rows, Garth hoes grooves into the dirt and Jim and I start planting tomatoes. The sky darkens and the wind picks up. We work as fast as we can in order to beat the massive storm Garth saw on the weather radar. I dig my left hand into the soft soil, shove the root ball into the hole with my right and push the dirt over the plant’s stem. It’s hot. The mosquitoes are relentless. I don’t mind.

 Our timing is impeccable. The first rain drops fall just as we’re burying the last tomato, stacking the plastic trays and wheeling the hoe back into its shed.

 “Do you think I’ll get struck by lightening if I go for a swim right now?” I ask Garth.

 I can’t resist. I need to swim because I’m all sweaty, dirty and sticky. But I also just like the idea of swimming in a lake during a thunderstorm. The two of us rush down the grassy lane with our towels, strip our clothes off and pluge into the water. Garth rinses off quick and runs back to the cabin. I float around on my back, looking up at the dark, wind-whipped sky. Raindrops make rings all around me. Lightening flashes. Time ceases to exist and I become a primordial amoeba.

 Around 7pm, Dan, Garth, Cherie, Jim and I pile into Cherie’s little car and we drive to Canton in the rain. We meet Sandy and Bill at Los Nopales, the Mexican restaurant where Garth and I ate on our first night in town. Dan buys everyone dinner to celebrate Cherie’s upcoming birthday and to thank Garth and I for our work on the farm. I will say tho, that the experience of staying here has been payment enough for our work.

 We all drink 99-cent margaritas and laugh and talk while the rain pours down outside. Suddenly, a yellow glow lights up the faces of the buidlings and a full double rainbow springs from one side of town to the other. We all get up and look out the window. A few of us even go outside in the rain to marvel at it.

 We’re finishing up our burritos and poblanos and our chips and salsa when a young woman from the next table brings over a half full pitcher of mango margarita.

 “I’m about to leave,” she says. “And I just cannot finish this. So I want you guys to have it.”

 We find out from the waitress that the young woman and her friend had tried to take their leftover margarita into the bathroom and surreptitiously pour it into to-go cups but were discovered and asked to leave it behind.

 My head floats like a tropical island as we drive home in the torrential rain. Everything is so nice I can’t believe it. This is how life is supposed to be. We walk around the world making new friends and we all help each other out and we all get what we need and we have a good time. It makes so much sense I can barely grasp it.

Sunday. April 28^th. 2013.

“Eggs… eggs… taste so good without their legs!” AJ sings.

Four of them sizzle in a frying pan along with hot dogs. I peel the silver seal off a can and the scent of coffee wafts up. A knife scrapes against toast. The coffee machine gurgles and pops.

“The world’s largest butter sculpture comes to you from Quincy, Illinois!” Garth says. “We’re going to display it next to the world’s largest button!”

Garth talks to himself. Even when there are real live people present. I like Garth.

“Pirates are out, T-Rex is in!” he says.

“What about the Creativity Raptor?” I say.

The Raptor was invented by Jack during the last Creativity Club meeting.

“I’m not sure,” Garth says. “It’ll have to go in front of a panel.”

“You know, that doll that’s getting your hair is going to have your DNA,” I say. “You’re going to have a child. It’s going to be owned by one of those people who buys life-like dolls with names and birth certificates because she can’t have children. Your offspring is going to be featured on an episode of My Strange Addiction.”

He cringes.

“Can I get your honest opinion about this shirt?” AJ asks.

It’s a brown polyester button-down with red and blue dots.

“I have to achieve going to a funeral and being at my art show today,” he says.

“Well, as long as it’s not the kind of funeral where people are really serious about funerals and they get offended by people who wear anything other than somber black suits, it should be fine,” I say.

“It’s at a Unitarian Church and it’s the funeral of Carmen Federowich. A lot of the people there will be artists.”

“I suppose it will be fine then,” I say.

“Well, I feel silly,” AJ says.

At McDonald’s, there’s a small table in a corner where two windows intersect. Garth and I usually sit there to use internet. The table right next to it is about an inch square. Today, a massive woman and her humongous friend decide it’s a good idea to seat themselves, their toddler, their baby and their baby’s SUV there. The toddler throws hamburger buns and fries around and yells while the women coo at the baby.

I don’t understand. Why do people have no concept of space or common decency? Why would a party such as this not sit at the huge open table with eight chairs around it? Why do they have to squeeze in next to me, at a table that’s way too small for their traveling circus and all it’s machinery, and suffocate my entire existence?

AJ pedals up alongside us as we’re walking toward the studio.

“How was the funeral?” Garth asks.

“There was this meditation, and then I got this phrase stuck in my head,” AJ says, swerving toward a patch of daffodils in his buckled boots. “It was in this space, where I am infinite. And then I felt compelled to get up and speak. There were a lot of people that said some really dark stuff, and I guess that was inevitable because she committed suicide and everything… I said this stuff about how everyone is just a different version of yourself that’s there to remind you to live more fully. My heart was pounding. But afterward, some people said it was beautiful.”

Inside the library, plates of veggies and bottles of sparkling water decorate a table. People mill around, looking at the art on display, commenting in muted tones. I notice that people mostly gravitate toward the ballerina drawings and airplane photos.

People prefer to look at what they understand.

The more I observe people, the more I wonder where I came from. I don’t intend to be different. I don’t deliberately prefer the opposite of what most other people prefer. I comes naturally to me. And the older I get, and the more I experience, the more different I seem to become.

I wonder, not out of regret or dissatisfaction  but out of pure amazed curiosity, which tiny twist of fate I would have had to untangle from the thread of my life in order to have ended up like everyone else. Was it always impossible for me to end up like everyone else?

Doom and fate have such negative connotations. I am blessed to have ended up different. The part of the world I experience because of it is much less crowded. It’s not so worn out and hot-tied. It’s still alive.

Monday. April 29^th. 2013.

The day is exquisite. It’s the first warm day of the year here in Quincy, Illinois. The trees are so full of flowers I can smell them from a block away. So what does everyone do? They mow their lawns.

Yes. Yes indeed. I’ve been waiting since September for a sunny day. The winter has dragged itself out like a skid mark, refusing to wash off the sky, rattling my skeleton with cold so relentless I feel like a maraca. So instead of going out and doing something fun, I’m going to mow my lawn. I’m going to get out a huge, loud, awkward, cumbersome machine and push it laboriously along my lumpy, sloped lawn for two hours, getting sweaty and inhaling exhaust fumes.

“It’s like someone flipped a lawn-mowing switch,” Garth says. “Everyone just came out and mowed their lawns all at the same time.”

Four people are mowing on the block we’re currently walking. Two on the one before it.

“They’re mowing down the violets,” I say.

I’ve been admiring those patches of deep velvet purple for a week now. I’ve been literally stopping to smell flowers. But not these people. The switch has been flipped and the violets must be sacrificed to the all-powerful Homeowner’s Association. If Mr. Jones walks by and sees that your lawn is a centimeter longer than those of your neighbors, it’ll be your head under that lawnmower blade.

Oh, excuse me, Mr. Jones doesn’t walk. He’ll be driving.

What is it with people? I mean, is this really what they want to be doing right now? Really?

Late in the afternoon, I walk slowly toward the Art Center in my flip-flops. My foot is healed of its fungus and it is lovely not to be wearing my heavy boots.

The edge of a lawn chokes on huge blobs of purple dryer lint. So does the edge of the next lawn. And the next. And the three after that. Someone’s dryer exploded all over the neighborhood. This is what I get in place of the decapitated violets. And there are dryer sheets too. I can pretend those are cherry blossoms.

Before all the artists arrive, Lana demonstrates some poses for me.

“The first few sessions will be just a couple minutes, so those are good ones for really active poses where you have your arms up in the air and stuff,” she explains. “When you get up above two or three minutes, it starts to get uncomfortable, so you wanna rest your hands on your hips or something like that.”

She hands me a plaid flannel robe and I change in the bathroom. Once everyone’s spread out their huge paper and their pencils and their paint, Lana introduces me and I step onto the wooden platform in the center of the circle wearing just my underwear. I’ve never really had any hang-ups about nudity. I would model totally naked, like I did for the photographer in Berlin, but I’m on my period.

“Okay, this first one will be two minutes,” Lana says, setting the timer on her phone. “So Sarah, if you can do a pose that’s active and expressive…”

Drawings made of me during the live drawing class. The red portrait was done by Lana.

Ballet lessons flow into my veins from the ether of my half-remembered childhood and I assume first position with my feet, lifting my arms above my head in that familiar oval shape. Pastels and charcoal and brushes start swishing and scraping across paper. I fall into a meditative state. My eyes hook onto a set of keys on a table, my mind leaves my body and floats away with the jazz playing in the corner.

At the end of the session, I walk around the room and look at the many drawings flung across the floor like dried leaves. The images aren’t of me in a literal sense. They depict some kind of smoky, glowing essence each artist saw differently. There are lead scribbles, white outlines on brown paper, shadows of shoulder blades and bright red portraits of just the side of my face. They’re gorgeous. A few artists let me pick one of their drawings to take with me.

The best souvenirs are the ones that are made by someone I’ve met, the ones that can’t be duplicated.

Thursday. April 18^th. 2013.

“Kiss us sister,” says a crooked row of poetry magnets.

“You am a big cute honey face,” another group replies.

Refrigerator poetry always sounds like a language twin sisters would make up if they were raised in the Appalachian mountains together and had no contact with civilization.

Garth boogies while he hangs bright, spotted coffee cups on little hooks in Kathy’s cupboards.

“Every toast-eater for themselves,” he says, dropping two slices of bread into the toaster.

I guess I’ll have to make my own.

“Butter can be so troublesome,” he mutters, trying to spread a cold, hard chunk onto browned bread.

We ride to the library with Kathy. Ron and Clara wait for us in their red and brown Suburban. They take us to breakfast at Thyme Square, a little hip cafe downtown. Everything inside is new and deliberately artsy. The Goo Goo Dolls play over the clink of forks and the growl of coffee makers. The biscuits and gravy are tremendous.

Afterward, they park in a gravel lot across from the river and wait while Garth and I run thru the puddles and wet trees toward our abandoned warehouse. We hurriedly pack our bags and carry them out thru the hole in the fence. We’re staying at Kathy’s again tonight.

After some time at the library, we walk to Quincy University to meet AJ. As we pass the downtown shop windows, I notice one mannequin in an evening gown and gas mask, and another in scrubs, operating on a vacuum cleaner which lies on an ambulance stretcher. I’m not sure what it means. After the shops dwindle away, Maine Street becomes a display of aged opulence. A brick sidewalk meanders unevenly beneath the widespread boughs of naked trees. Mansions line the entire street. They all have the cylindrical towers, conical rooftops and intricate trims that make one think of medieval castles. The shingles even have flower patterns.

When Garth and I arrive at Cupertine Hall, the art department office building, AJ isn’t there yet. We wander in and drop our packs. AJ’s paintings and sculptures are everywhere. He has free reign over all 5 rooms because he’s the only art student who does projects other than the ones assigned to him in class. All the others are graphic design students, so they use computers, not studio space. There are multiple rooms, full of couches, tables, easels and paints. His art is abstract. It’s not that cubes and triangles floating in empty space picture I expect to see when someone describes their art as abstract. He actually has his own distinct style.

Every canvass is a thrilling cosmos of circles, scribbles and splashes of color that seems to burst and radiate with the energy of Angelo Joseph’s creative soul. Each one is a picture of how his mind perceives the reality that lies beyond the one we all live in together. Every stroke and splat is pure energy just like the person who threw or glued it there.

When AJ arrives, he gives us a tour. He’s started a group called Creativity Club, which meets here. Each room has a different intention- meditation, kitchen, office, etc.- but they all need a lot of work and clean-up. He has a big vision and needs a lot of help. He talks a lot about goals and a motivational speaker named Bashar, who channels omniscient aliens.

“We have one mouth and two ears,” he says. “We should listen twice as much as we speak!”

“The only thing I know is that I know nothing!”

AJ is seeking enlightenment- ultimate health and potential of body, mind and spirit. He’s found an instructor, a book or a speaker who has just the right formula for him to follow every step of the way, so he’s always quoting someone.

My method is very different from his. Instead of following a set of instructions, I relinquish all control and let my life happen completely at random. But I have very different goals, if you can even define my intentions as such. AJ wants to accomplish very specific, concrete tasks, like making a sculpture bigger than the Statue of Liberty. I want to allow for complete unpredictability, so that anything and everything can happen, and I’ll never know what it will be in advance, and I want to write about it. The contrast between our two paths toward enlightenment makes for an entertaining scenario. I love watching and listening to people who go about things differently than I do.

“We’re phenomenons!” AJ declares.

People like him and I and Garth are the rare ones that people never expect to find in real life. We’re the ones who have massive visions and believe they are actually realistic. The negativity and staleness of our culture do not douse our fire, they only add fuel, and we use it to prove that life can be lived for happiness and fulfillment, not just profit.

As we walk the sidewalks of Quincy and the University campus in a loud, cold wind, AJ points to every blank wall on every building and shouts, “Right there! Bam! Bam! Bam!”

His passion, his one main focus, is to paint massive murals on every blank wall in the world. He wants to begin here in Quincy and be the catalyst for a renaissance. He wants someone to help him get the project rolling. Me and Garth would be perfect. The two of us are basically a mobile catalyst. We go around encountering people like AJ and helping them build the foundations for their world-changing visions. We inspire and encourage them and tell them they’re not nuts, and we do the physical leg-work that no one else wants to help them with. The only thing I want as much as I want to wander and write is to fuel the fires of people like AJ and make the universe explode and evolve into something beautiful.

I love this more than anything- this explosion of energy and vision that happens when people like us three come together. Thru our eyes, everything in the world is a beautiful possibility. Lamp posts and curbs and rolls of toilet paper are God-chants of unimpeachable wisdom. Windows and dumpsters and teeth and radios become endless dimensions of pure X-Ray consciousness. We can say and do anything and it will all make perfect sense. It’s as tho the three of us were born knowing some secret soul-language that no one else understands, and when you find someone that speaks it, the whole universe becomes clear and obvious and comes to live lovingly in the palm of your hand.

Or maybe that’s irrational and impossible. Maybe I should just become a government bean counter.

AJ gets online and shows us some of his YouTube videos. There’s one where he plays a song he wrote over an animation of a unicorn; there’s one where he laughs maniacally for three or four minutes; and there’s one where he lists every singe thing he wants to accomplish in his life. They break right thru the seriousness of every boundary in civilized American society and turn post office lines into conveyor belts made of joyous insanity. .

The front room at Cupertine Hall, the Art Department offices at Quincy University

Garth, AJ and I spend hours cleaning out one of the studio rooms at Cupertine hall. We wash a huge stack of dishes that’s been piling up, sweep under the furniture, clean a puddle of apple cider vinegar off the floor under the rug, and chase away a sinister-smelling apple. When we’re finished, the room feels like a universe built just for us. I’ve found over the course of my travels that the best way to get to know a new place, become comfortable in it and make yourself welcome is to clean it. AJ plays us a song on a guitar he’s decorated with abstract doodles. It’s about elephants and it involves a lot of screaming. Garth and I play “Some Fires Don’t Have any Logs” for him. He loves it.

“I feel like I’ve finally found someone to hang out with on my own frequency!” he says.

I know exactly what he means. Everyone can listen and be interested and, to some degree, picture your vision; but only a few rare people really carry in the highway overpasses of their veins the blood pulse of wild weirdness that allows them to really BE THERE with you so that you don’t have to explain a single thing and you can just keep going and moving and being go-carts on the rings of Saturn without hitting any speed bumps.

We go on an expedition to the attic of one of the university buildings and explore a jungle of old desks, dusty religious paintings and stained glass windows dotted with bat shit. It makes for fantastic photography. AJ also takes us up on the roof. The blasting wind is freezing, but we can see the whole of Quincy, with all its glowing steeples and firefly town lights stretching out into the darkness to be swept away by the muddy Mississippi River.

Next, we go downstairs to a room full of abandoned wood sculptures, old table saws and metal stools being consumed by wire squids. There he tells us each to pick out a piece of wood that appeals to us. We take them upstairs to the studio and place them on easels. AJ turns on music for us and we paint. I’ve been wanting to paint for ages. He makes us tea and a basketball rolls out of a cupboard to play with us.

About the time we’ve filled our canvasses, a fellow named Andrew appears. He’s a graffiti artist and an incredible guitar player. He plays a song called “Sandstorm” and his fingers move like a swarm of glittering locusts. The song sounds like driving a midnight blue 1973 mustang thru the Nevada desert after you just broke up with the devil. I’ve never seen anything like it in person. I don’t understand why the world knows about Lady Gaga instead of this Midwestern kid and his effortless saintly channeling of the ultimate pure energy of xylophones made of stars! Why do these people slip thru the cracks! What is happening here!

This is WHY! This is what we’re doing, what we’re looking for- the answer to all questions ever asked anywhere! Garth and I DO THIS in order to find these angelic people! You can’t GOOGLE angles, you can only stumble upon them by accident, and only if you are open to every possibility and always available to say, “YES! YES! I WANT TO GO WITH YOU INTO YOUR UNIVERSE!” We walk this weird road of roughness in order to trip over diamonds like these and kneel in the dirt and scrape them out of the ground with our chipped fingernails! This is why we do it. This is what we’re looking for. It’s right here, now, in Quincy, Illinois. And the only way we could’ve found it was to walk and let life happen!

This is the energy we need. It does not take from us and drain us. It fills us to the brim as we burst and fling it everywhere. It fuses with ours and we all spin upward in a harmony of laser-sharp helium, pure and weightless and effortlessly correct in ecstatic joy.

Andrew and AJ perform a song together.

“We see beauty so sweet, we’ll travel to the fullest because we have our own two feet, and love abundantly…”